Peter Jones

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.

Every ancient Greek juror would have warmed to their descendant Vicky Pryce, when she admitted in court that she wanted revenge on her faithless husband. Revenge, in other words, did not just happen in Greek myth. It was a splendid reason for going to law. In Plato’s Republic, ‘justice’ was defined as ‘rendering to every man what he was owed’, taken to mean ‘doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies’. This was a principle of conduct said to have been ‘laid down’ and ‘prescribed’ by one orator, and so common that Xenophon could say that true manliness was to ‘excel friends in benefaction and enemies in harm’. It was endlessly touted as justification for a case in Greek courts.

The Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy (Latin caelebs, ‘unmarried’), by which Cardinal O’Brien was bound, is not a dogma, but a discipline. In other words, it can be altered at the rotation of an encyclical. Like much else in the Catholic tradition, it has its roots in the pagan world. Asceticism derives from the Greek askêsis, ‘training, practice’. Pagans had long believed that humans could be transformed through mental and physical discipline. Pythagoras, for example, thought that the element of the divine in us could be brought out by fasting and contemplation.

So many people’s reputation is under threat these days — from bankers to cardinals to the Lib Dem peer Lord Rennard — that one imagines reputation management agencies, online or otherwise, are doing terrific business. The ancients got there more than two millennia ago. Greeks regularly expressed their desire to be virtuous in terms of being ‘seen’ to be so, as if there were no point in virtue per se unless people knew about it. One law-court speaker puts it like this: ‘What is at stake for me is not simply to recover a large sum of money, but to avoid being thought to have dishonestly coveted what was not mine. That for me is the most important consideration.

A senior civil servant in the Department of Education, having lost a case for ‘bullying’ brought against its special advisers, took her grievance to a tribunal and was promptly awarded an out-of-court settlement of £25,000. Hacks on a Sunday newspaper were jubilant, devoting three pieces to it: it must have been bullying after all, the Department was out of control, will no one rid us of these turbulent Spads, and so on. But were they right? The greatest of Roman historians, Tacitus (ad 56-117), was well aware how hard it was to get solid information. Though an insider himself — consul and provincial governor — time and again he found himself up against a brick wall.

Last week, Stoics applauded the idea that the doctor might in certain situations give the patient a book, not a pill, on the grounds that thinking rationally solved all personal problems. So why was Stoicism associated with the stiff upper lip? What was rational about that? Since Stoics believed that divinity/reason permeated the universe ‘like honey through a honeycomb’, they concluded that the will of the divinity ruled our lives inescapably: providence, or fate, must have its way. But this worried Stoics, because they also believed in free will. Square that circle! They did so by arguing that fate did not necessarily come in single statements. It could be conditional: ‘if I do X (e.g. go to the doctor), Y will result (I shall recover)’.

It has been proposed that, to deal with certain sorts of emotional problems for which we go to the doctor, we should be given an improving book to read. Quite right too, the Stoic would reply. ‘Stoicism’ derives from the Greek stoa, the portico in Athens where from 300 BC its inventor Zeno (a Cypriot) taught it. Its main principle is caught in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ with its ‘motion and a spirit that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things’.

The government is having its annual fit about the fat. In the ancient world, most of the population worked the land, while aristocrats kept trim in the gymnasia. Only the militarily obsessed Spartans made it government business, inspecting their warriors naked every ten days for signs of excessive thinness or corpulence. But ancient doctors were aware of the problems. While no one mentions anorexia or slimming for aesthetic reasons, the famous 5th C. bc Greek doctor Hippocrates commented that ‘dieting which causes excessive loss of weight, as well as the feeding-up of the emaciated, is beset with difficulties’. He was also aware that sudden death was more common in the fat, and judged obesity a cause of sterility in women, causing a blockage to the mouth of the uterus.

Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, may have to confront this year the possible break-up of the world-wide Anglican communion. Perhaps the splendid letter from Seneca the Younger (AD 1-65), sketching a pagan take on religious feeling, will suggest a way ahead. After discussing the divine spirit ‘which guards us and watches us in the evil and the good we do’, he turns to nature: ‘Imagine you come across a dense wood of exceptionally tall, ancient trees that shut out all sight of the sky with thick screens of overlaying branches. Its loftiness, its seclusion and your wonderment at finding so deep and unbroken a gloom out in the open, will prove the presence of a deity.