Peter Jones

If the continuing rows over the expenses and lifestyles of certain MPs cast all of them in a bad light, it is a mystery why decent members do not take action to hasten the exit of their more shameless colleagues. If they do not, then the press will continue to hound them — but not half as hard as ancient Greeks hounded their officials, and not just officials either. Plato’s ideal republic was ruled by ideal guardians, but as he admitted, man’s nature ensured he would have to settle for second best: decree and law.

According to a top TV scientist, in the beginning there was ‘empty space’ and ‘energy’. After a big bang, the universe started out as a ‘featureless void’. But emerging particles ‘organised themselves into the universe we see today’ by ‘clumping together’ because of ‘deviation’ from perfect smoothness in ‘warped’ space. Meanwhile, cosmic light particles are zooming along in straight lines and still going strong, creating billions of other universes. This ‘astonishing idea’ is the ‘cornerstone of modern cosmology’. Ancient, too.

Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction and drills under the guidance of a good teacher, which might be hard work but was satisfying and good for pupil self-esteem. Romans would have seconded that. In ad 403 St Jerome wrote a letter to Laeta, telling her how to teach her daughter Paula to read and write: make ivory or wooden letters; teach Paula a song to learn them and their sounds and their correct order, but also mix them up and encourage Paula to recognise them without such artificial aid; guide her first writing by hand, or outline letters for her to follow; and so on.

Since apologising has recently been all the rage, refusing to apologise, as Harriet Harman has done over the NCCL’s connection with the Paedophile Information Exchange, comes as a very pleasant surprise. Ancient Greeks would have understood exactly what she was doing. Socrates’ Apology (written by Plato) had nothing to do with apologising. Quite the opposite, in fact: apologia in ancient Greek meant ‘defence speech’, and Socrates’ apologia was Plato’s account — there were many others — of Socrates’ defence of his life and conduct against the charge of corrupting the young and introducing strange new gods.

Tyrants never learn, do they? From Caligula through Gadaffi to the ex-Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, they rule not to serve the people but themselves — and all in virtually identical ways. The emperor Tiberius populated Capri with palaces and grottos where lovers entwined themselves for the pleasure of his guests, like Yanukovych’s gardens dotted with love-seats and colonnades. Caligula had built a vast barge in the form of a floating palace on a lake, complete with marble, mosaics, and a hot and cold bath system; Yanukovych had a floating restaurant designed as a galleon.

Since the Somerset Levels are a flood plain, nature will flood it. Romans had no problems with that. Much of Rome was low-lying and pretty marshy. The main drain — the cloaca maxima, only incidentally a sewer as well — was constructed early in Rome’s history to make the forum inhabitable. The 250-mile-long Tiber flooded every four or five years, with a big one every 25 years or so, not helped if water backed up from the sea. Flood plains like the Campus Martius were often deep in water. Julius Caesar would have diverted the Tiber away from Rome, behind the Vatican. After a nasty inundation of the city in ad 15, the emperor Tiberius established a quango to consider the matter. It suggested diverting lakes and rivers upstream.

What a song and dance about a tax rise affecting a minuscule proportion of the richest in society! Greeks would have been baffled. Classical Greeks did not have the automatic admiration for self-made millionaires that we do. They felt that only the very lucky or the very wicked could aspire to wealth. ‘No one gets rich quickly by being honest,’ says one character in a play, articulating that sense of the injustice of the good poor man and the evil plutocrat. Riches could also produce bad citizens because it was easy for a man to become ‘enslaved’ by his money (a common image). By contrast, Socrates, rejecting payment for his teaching, preferred ‘looking after his freedom’.

There is, apparently, an ‘obesity epidemic’ in the UK, such that two million people could benefit from weight-loss surgery. Ancient Greeks would have argued that they would benefit much more from a dose of self-control. The ancients associated fatness with a lazy lifestyle. No change there, then. The doctor Hippocrates, well aware that sudden death was associated with obesity, knew that ‘dieting which causes excessive loss of weight, as well as the feeding-up of the emaciated, is beset with difficulties’. The Roman doctor Celsus (1st C ad) advised thin men to put on weight through rest, constipation and big meals, and the fat to take it off through late nights, worry and exercise.

A ‘meme’ is ‘an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture, often by mimicry’. If selfies, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, tweets and all the other means of drawing attention to oneself are anything to go by, rampant narcissism (derived from the mythical figure Narcissus) is the current, dominant meme. The Roman poet Ovid’s version of the Narcissus story captures the dark consequences. Narcissus is a beautiful baby, and his mother Liriope asks the prophet Teiresias if he will enjoy a long life. ‘Only if he never knows himself’, comes the paradoxical reply — for such ignorance is usually disastrous (cf. Oedipus).

The ancients were an inquisitive lot, a characteristic shown to best effect in works like Aristotle’s Problems (‘Why do sex-maniacs’ eyelashes fall out?’) and Plutarch’s Greek and Roman Questions. Among much else, Plutarch asked, ‘Why do Romans adopt the month of January as the beginning of the new year?’ He began by doing the maths: July used to be called Quintilis, ‘Fifth’ (subsequently named after Julius Caesar) and August Sextilis, ‘Sixth’ (named after Augustus), while September to December covered the Roman numerals seven to ten. So, since the year contained only ten months, March must have been the first. He concluded that, to stay roughly in synch with the solar year, each month must have been lengthened.

‘And lo, there were shepherds in the fields, watching over their flocks by night...’   Reading recently that it was the 25th anniversary of the invention of the world wide web, I reflected (yet again) on the difficulty of creating in any of our minds that sense of the world as experienced by the Greeks and Romans. So the ancients did not have Xboxes, Y-fronts, or a ‘knowledge’ economy? Or a civil service, a banking industry, or any industry? Or any institutions like universities, the BBC or the FA? Well, well. In his Works and Days (c. 680 bc), the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod gives us some sense of the unrelenting peasant life which was the lot of most ancients — that daily wrestling with nature for simple survival.

To watch the Revd Paul Flowers being grilled by the Treasury Select Committee on his role in the demise of the Co-op Bank is to watch a master charlatan at work: dignified, polite and supremely self-assured, even as he is stripped to the bone by Andrew Tyrie. The ancient world boasted plenty of such, and they all exhibit identical characteristics. Take one Peregrinus, whose story is told by the Greek satirist Lucian (ad 115–180). He was exiled for killing his father, but saw there was advantage to be gained through the new religion on the block, and became ‘Christian’.

The grim tales of ‘modern slavery’ that are currently emerging across the UK make one wonder whether ancient Roman slavery was preferable. The fact that it was institutionalised means that it could, if you were lucky, be endurable. There was nothing secretive about slavery in Rome. It was felt to be part of the natural order of things — some people were ‘born’ to be slaves — and that was that. As ‘property’, without any legal status, a slave could be treated in any way his or her master liked: tortured, whipped or executed. Over time, however, some degree of legal protection was permitted.