Peter Jones

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.

Prime Minister Cameron has rejected the proposal that the age of sexual consent be reduced from 16 to 15, arguing that it was needed to ‘protect children’. In the ancient world, there was no such notion. Girls were to be protected from rape and seduction, but that was because they were destined for marriage, whose purpose was the production of legitimate children. It was fertility that was important, not age. For ancient Greeks, women were reckoned to become fertile at 14. The theory was that in a woman blood and fertility were linked and, by that age, a woman had collected enough blood in her body to have children. If that did not evidence itself in menstruation, sexual activity would bring about the desired result.

On 21 November The Spectator is hosting a discussion about addiction — disease or choice? — and how we should best treat it. This neatly coincides with ‘Live like a Stoic’ week (25 November–1 December), which culminates in academics and doctors discussing how far problems of everyday life can be solved by the Stoic practice of thinking rationally about them — in modern parlance ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ — rather than by expensive medical intervention. Stoicism was invented by Zeno, a Greek from Citium in Cyprus. In about 301 bc, he began teaching in one of Athens’ covered walkways (a stoa, whence ‘stoicism’). His work was to influence two thinkers in particular: Epictetus (c.

‘Democracy has bad taste’, declared potter Grayson Perry in his Reith Lectures on the BBC about art. Tell that to the inventors of democracy. Ancient Greeks would have been appalled at the reverence accorded the views of potters, artists, chefs and other riff-raff about their work, let alone anything else. The satirist Lucian says of the would-be sculptor: ‘You will be nothing but a workman, doing hard physical labour and investing the entire hope of your livelihood in it. You will be obscure, earning a meagre and ignoble wage, a man of low esteem... a workman and one of the common mob...

A new book about Colonel Gaddafi goes into shocking detail about his monstrous sexual appetites. He used rape as a political weapon and instrument of blackmail. Viagra was on constant supply for himself and his soldiers. His harem travelled with him under the guise of ‘delegations’ or ‘journalists’ (‘Hi, girls,’ Tony Blair greeted them). It was ever thus with tyrants. Herodotus (5th century bc) reports a conversation about the best form of rule between three Persians plotting to overthrow the government. Otanes attacks the single ruler, arguing that, being subject to no institutional control, he can indulge his wishes as he sees fit and this makes temptation irresistible.

Party conferences always provide the most agreeable spectacle of politicians desperately trying to appeal to both the diehards among the party faithful and the soft underbelly of the general public. Aristotle (384-322 bc) lived at a time when democratic and oligarchic groupings within any polis (city-state) were regularly in conflict to impose their system of government, and was all too aware of the problem. In his Politics, Aristotle began by reflecting on the advantages that these two different systems of government offered to citizens within a polis. Democracy, he concluded, appeals to the many poor, because it gives them a say in the assembly, but oligarchy to the rich few, who use their birth, wealth and influence to run the show.

Momentarily banish thoughts of policemen on duty at the House of Commons, and picture a Roman pleb. You will probably visualise a toothless peasant howling for ‘bread and circuses’ (i.e. chariot races), and rioting if refused. But if you were then told that the Roman statesman Cicero and Caesar’s rival Pompey the Great were both plebs, you might reconsider; even more so if you were to discover that the plebs were involved in shaping some of the most dramatic events in the ancient world. For Romans, the term ‘plebeian’ took them right back to the foundation of Rome in, as they calculated, 753 bc. Rome was an agricultural society.

As a result of Russian laws against propagating homosexuality, there are calls to boycott the 2013 Winter Olympics in Sochi and 2018 Fifa World Cup due to be held there. The West’s first historian Herodotus (5th century bc) would not have sympathised. Herodotus’ magnificent Histories of the wars fought between the Persians and the Greeks (491-479 bc) regularly digress into lengthy discussions of the culture and customs of the peoples with whom the expanding Persian empire came into contact. The subject thrills him. He is amazed at the discrepancies beween different cultures. Sex and marriage are of especial interest. Babylonians, for example, gather all girls of marriageable age in the square and sell off the beauties to the highest bidder.

So the USA must launch its onslaught against Syria without the Brits. Well, if Obama will make public announcements of what he is going to do, more fool him. The Roman military tactician Vegetius (c. AD 400) would be shaking his head in despair. Vegetius was writing after Rome had suffered a devastating defeat against the Goths at Adrianople (AD 378), a foretaste of things to come in the western empire. Consequently, he regularly counsels caution in attacking an enemy unless you can be sure you will achieve your ends. Fabius Maximus, nick-named Cunctator (‘delayer’), provided the archetypal example.

Personal privacy in the modern sense became a cause in the USA in the late 19th century, with the massive expansion of newsprint and the development of cameras and professional snappers. Prince Harry clearly has not quite caught up yet. Even the Romans knew what the problem was: privacy was very hard to come by. The reason then was that every top Roman had, as a mark of his status, an army of slaves with him most of the time, ready to do his every bidding. Crassus had 800. Horace composed a poem announcing that he was accustomed to walking alone, but in a few lines it appears he had his slave with him.