Peter Jones

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.

Whatever problems Greeks and Romans faced, a politicised priesthood was not one of them. They might have made three observations on Egypt’s current plight. First, though Roman emperors were autocrats, the plebs regularly expressed their displeasure at them, sometimes in street riots, over matters like food shortages. But they did so fully expecting the emperor to respond. Only very rarely did he fail to do so. He was not that stupid: for all his power, he knew he had to keep the plebs onside. This basic insight seems to have escaped the fanatic ex-president Morsi. Second, the most important consequence of the Athenian invention of democracy was to generate a politics in which decisions were reached not by force but by public persuasion.

Richard Dawkins has been confusing his categories again, comparing Trinity College, Cambridge, with Islam. His attack on religion does precisely the same, as if the pre-scientific Biblical account of the world somehow disproves the whole religious phenomenon. The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 100–55 BC) had argued in this way long before Dawkins. In his great poem On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius built on earlier Greek thought to argue that the whole universe — mind and matter, body and soul, god and man, earth, sky, sun, moon and stars — was made up of atomic particles, below the level of perception, and to explain how it all worked. Further, the gods, made up of self-regenerating atoms, were serenely uninterested in us and our worries.

One definition of addiction is repetition of a behaviour despite adverse consequences. Twitter users will know all about it, especially those on the end of abusive or illegal threats. All communication systems are, of course, liable to such misuse, but presumably technology will fix this problem. Meanwhile, Epictetus (AD 35–135), a freed slave, would advise the abused to (wo)man up. Aristotle defined a decision as ‘a deliberate desire to do something within the agent’s immediate range of alternatives’. Building on this definition, Epictetus argues that our range of alternatives is restricted to our rational faculty, what goes on in our heads: ‘our opinions, impulses, desires, aversions’ and the actions that result from them.

The NHS 111 line, designed to deal with problems that do not count as emergencies, is in financial and organisational trouble yet again, but the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 490-c. 425 BC) may be able to help. In his travels he came across a ‘most ingenious’ public medical service. Many ancient cultures made important observations about the workings of the body and cures for illness, but it was ancient Greeks who tried to rationalise the process. Hippocrates, the father of rational medicine (5th-century bc), laid down the key principle as follows: ‘What escapes our vision we must grasp by mental sight, and the doctor, being unable to see the nature of the disease nor to be told of it, must have recourse to reasoning from the symptoms with which he is presented.

A woman is invited to join the Today programme, and the chatteratae are immediately a-twitter on the subject of female equality. Unlikely as it seems, Plato was all in favour of it, as he argued in his Republic, and for a hysterically incorrect reason, too. Women in the ancient world had, in fact, far more important things to do than chair Footsie companies or hold down tightly scripted TV chat shows. The very existence of the state depended on them, for one simple reason: the biological imperative. Any state that did not maintain a viable population level did not survive. So since life was short and survival at birth precarious for both baby and mother, women had to start on the production line as soon as they were fertile.

No one seems to know, or is willing to say, whether the Egyptian army’s intervention in Egyptian democracy was legal or not. Presumably that means it was illegal. But who defines the term ‘(il)legal’? The Athenians, inventors of democracy, decided the dêmos (citizens in Assembly) was sovereign: it made the law, enacted it and revoked it. A famous incident made them realise how dangerous such power could be. In 406 BC, the Athenians defeated Sparta in a sea-battle. But a storm prevented the sailors picking up their dead. Delight turned to fury, and the eight admirals in charge were brought to trial (two fled).

Lord Hennessy has been arguing that, as a result of TV debates between party leaders prior to elections, ‘the plausible tart bit will play too powerfully in [parties’] choice of leader and therefore rule out the decent but non-tarty people.’ It is good to see the modern world finally catching up with Socrates on the question of rhetoric and persuasion. Socrates is in conversation with Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, about what he thinks he is teaching. The skill of persuasive speech, Gorgias replies, whose purpose is to produce conviction. But, Socrates asks, conviction about what? Right, or wrong? Right, obviously, says Gorgias, which the orator will be able to teach. Socrates demurs: why should an orator, simply by being an orator, know the difference?

One assumes that it will eventually dawn on those so deeply committed to slaughtering each other in Syria that, whatever interest they represent, diplomacy is the only way they will ever reach some sort of settlement that will allow some sort of normality to return. Ancients knew all about treaties, and ancient Greeks had a particularly interesting condition which they always imposed. The Latin for ‘peace’ is pax, which derives from a verb meaning ‘agree to a price, reach a settlement, make an arrangement’ and even ‘engage oneself to marry’. The Latin for ‘treaty’ is foedus (cf. our ‘federation’), associated with a word meaning ‘trust, good faith’. In the end it is all about one’s word.

David Cameron wants the international community to do something about big business avoiding paying tax. If only it were as simple as that. Ancient philosophers, beginning with Aristotle (4th C BC), made a distinction between man-made law, which was peculiar to a state that made it and derived its validity simply from its adoption by that state, and natural law, which was universally valid. One could say that the former was right because it was law, the latter was law because it was right. Cicero (1st C BC) called this universal ‘world’ law ius naturale, identified it with divine reason and associated it with another concept, that of the ‘law of nations’, ius gentium. Fine for philosophers.

Syrians continue to slaughter each other, and seem eager to draw others into the conflict. Thucydides, the great Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), would strongly resist. Thucydides starts by saying that he began his history because he expected the war would be ‘great and very well worth recording’. After assessing previous conflicts, he concludes that it was indeed ‘greater than all others’, but qualifies what he means by that: ‘there was suffering unparalleled on such a timescale... never before were so many cities captured and laid waste, never before were there such numbers of refugees nor so much slaughter, both in the war itself and as a result of civil strife.