Peter Jones

In the audience-free world of TV, where ‘acting’ and visuals have become of far greater importance than the actual words, it is no surprise that mumbling has become the fashion. Any ancient Greek actor engaging in such self-indulgent behaviour would quickly learn all about it. Tragedies and comedies were performed by masked actors, required both to speak and sing, and for the ‘choral’ parts to dance and sing to music, with a script that could veer linguistically from sublime limpidity to the most intense complexity. As a result, the highest premium was placed on voice training and the correctness, clarity and euphony of the actor’s delivery.

Many are still questioning the enthusiasm with which newspapers have implicated Archbishop Justin Welby, as a young man, in the abusive activities of a Christian camp leader for whom he was working. This line from the Daily Telegraph is typical: ‘Archbishop Welby is said to have gained much of his early grounding in Christian doctrine from the Iwerne holiday camps, where boys were recruited for John Smyth’s sadomasochistic cult.’ The Roman historian Tacitus (d. c.

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, raises his growth forecasts and suddenly everyone believes the ‘expert’. So is it wrong to say that people ‘have had enough of experts’? Yes, totally wrong. Expertise exists: the question is, with what scope? Socrates dissected the problem. In debates in Athens’ democratic Assembly, he pointed out, topics such as building or ship construction were taken to be the business of builders and shipwrights, and anyone who, though no expert, attempted to give advice in those areas was jeered off the platform.

Ex-chancellor George Osborne is planning a book to be titled The Age of Unreason. He says that ‘it will be my attempt to understand why populist nationalism is on the rise in our western democracies’. An Athenian would have been most surprised by that title’s implications. If the ancient Greeks are famous for anything, it is for the invention of western ‘philosophy’. By that is usually meant the attempt to explain the world in humanly intelligible terms, i.e. by the exclusive use of reason and evidence, without calling in aid the supernatural. This sort of thinking, begun by eastern Greeks in the 7th century BC, reached something of an apogee (at least in the eyes of most later generations) in 5th- to 4th-century BC Athens with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

What is a ‘kudo’? According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, it is a mark of honour, many of which should be given to the Commons’ British Infrastructure Group, for demanding the scrapping of Air Passenger Duty. The Alliance clearly thinks that ‘kudo’ is the singular of our ‘kudos’. It is not. Kudos is singular already: it has been brought into English from ancient Greek κυδος (‘glory, honour’). But is it ‘wrong’? ‘Kudo’ is what is known as a back formation, generated by removing a word’s prefixes or suffixes to create a brand new one. Such back formations are rampant in English. Take the Latin pisum, ‘pea’.

As self-important comics fantasise about unseating Donald Trump with their wit, they should remember the great Aristophanes. In 424 BC, he presented a comedy about the controversial politician Cleon. He was (apparently) the son of a tanner (ugh!), and was seen by contemporaries, including the historian Thucydides, as a ‘brutal’, ‘insolent’ but ‘very persuasive’ braggart — and all too successful. The play opens with two slaves driven out of their house after a beating by their new master Paphlagon (Cleon); he has risen to power by fawning on and flattering the gullible and senile Demos (‘the people’) and telling outrageous lies about his political rivals. So far, so Trump.

In the eyes of the bien-pensants, the election of Donald Trump and the vote on Brexit have brought democracy to an end, and a good thing too since the people are clearly incapable of appreciating what the bien-pensant has to offer. In this they are bang up to date with their rather mieux-pensants and certainly more literate peers from the 16th century onwards. They too were pondering the best political system, and looked aghast at the Athenian democratic model.

Doctors are being urged not to tell patients what is best for them but to lay out the options and tell them to get on with it. Hippocrates (5th century BC) would have had his doubts. A key duty of the ancient doctor was, he said, ‘to help, or at least not to harm’. In this it was standard practice to involve the co-operation of the patient. As Hippocrates said, there were three components to the medical art: ‘the disease, the patient and the doctor. The doctor’s job is to serve the technical side; the patient’s is to co-operate with the doctor in combating the disease.’ Trust between doctor and patient was a key to that co-operation. Without it, patients ‘will not take medicine they dislike… and sometimes die as a result.

As the UK prepares for Brexit into the big wide world outside, it has been pointed out that the Foreign Office is sadly lacking in people with hard experience of that world, and even more lacking in people from that world. But if the Romans can do it, surely we can too. Whatever else the Romans were, they were not hung up about race. That did not mean they admired all foreigners. The satirist Juvenal was cynical about the Greeks, who would happily turn into anything you wanted them to at the drop of a hat; and doctors observed that different environments produced not only different physical make-ups but also different mentalities — often unattractive ones. But Romans seemed to think that none of that mattered as long as Johnny Foreigner learned the Roman way.

The hopelessness of the EU is well demonstrated by the current rhetoric issuing from its inner chambers: that Britain must be punished for the ‘crime’ of leaving it. What sort of message does that send out to the world, let alone other EU members, about the value that the EU places on liberality and freedom? In his funeral speech in 430 BC over those killed in the war against Sparta, Pericles hymned not so much the dead as the city of Athens itself, describing ‘the way of life that enables us to pursue our objectives, and the political institutions and national character that made our great achievements possible’.