Peter Jones

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.

Sir Alex Ferguson is going to be in big trouble in retirement: how will he control or defuse his famous rages, now that they have no outlet? Ancients took a mixed view of the emotion. ‘Anger’ is the first word of Western literature — the anger of Achilles, with which Homer’s Iliad starts. Even though it results in the death of his dearest friend Patroclus, Achilles admits that there is pleasure in it, ‘sweeter than the dripping of honey’. The Stoics, regarding control of the emotions as the key to virtue, were entirely hostile to it.

The Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, has said the arts world must make the case for public funding by focusing on its economic, not artistic, value; it must ‘hammer home the value of culture to our economy’. The ancients would have wondered what she was taking about. There was no concept of ‘the arts’ in the ancient world; nor any concept of ‘art’, at least among the Greeks. What we call ‘art’ was, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘the trained ability to make something under the guidance of rational thought’. It was, in other words, craftsmanship. So ‘artists’ were regarded rather as we would regard car mechanics or dentists.

Every Polly in the country is up in arms about the ‘divisiveness’ of Mrs Thatcher. But for ancient Greeks, opposition, or polarity, was as inherent in the nature of things as it is in our adversarial political system. The first Greek philosopher Thales said: ‘There are three attributes for which I am grateful to Fortune: that I was born, first, human and not animal; second, man and not woman; and third, Greek and not barbarian.’ This is a very typical Greek sentiment.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury has argued against ‘pinning hopes on individuals’. The Roman historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) would have found that most bizarre. Livy’s 142-book Ab Urbe Condita traced the history of Rome from the city’s foundation in 753 BC to the first Roman emperor Augustus (died AD 14). For Livy, it was individuals above all that counted. The seven early kings of Rome shaped by their own decisions much of Rome’s later history. In the early republic (from 509 BC), the elite patricians, the land-rich, wealthy families who had advised the kings and now held all the top posts, were in constant conflict with the non-elite plebs, who wanted a share in power and a fairer distribution of the land.