Peter Jones

And so the ‘God’ particle may have been discovered. Or not. Ancient Greeks would have thought it a waste of time, since the rational intellect could deal only with what was humanly intelligible, and gods barely fitted that category. Anyway, as the philosopher Heraclitus said, everything was full of gods. So why bother? When the farmer-poet Hesiod described how the world began, there was only Chaos, ‘Emptiness’. Then Earth appeared, then the dark Underworld. Rather surprisingly, Eros, sexual desire, pops up next. It soon becomes clear why. These basic elements start producing other elements, some by mating, some not. But none would mate unless they felt the desire to. So Eros must be in there at the beginning. QED.

Since tyrants have had such a high profile this year, child-slayer King Herod, an important player in Matthew’s version of the Christmas story, though absent from Luke’s, is sure to bulk larger than usual in Christmas homilies. Pompey had annexed this volatile part of the world in 64 bc, and part of the settlement involved allying with local kings. Herod’s father Antipater had been a client of Pompey and ally of Julius Caesar. Appointed procurator of Judaea, Antipater made Herod governor of Galilee, but was poisoned in 43 bc.

Since austerity is now the order of the day, Greeks are doing the sensible thing and beginning to barter. Aristotle thought it was the only system that kept the world honest. At the centre of Aristotle’s thinking lay a concept dear to him — the purpose for which something was designed (its telos). So, the purpose of a shoe was to wear it. That was its ‘use-value’. Bartering it for something else did not change that: the shoe was still a shoe, with a specific use. If you did not wear it, someone else would. In return for the shoe, you would be receiving a commensurate item — a cloak, a pot, a mattock — which you would also put to the use for which it was made.

Newcastle University library, happily removing academic journals from the shelves to the (apparent) cheers of the academics (Letters, 12 November), is well behind the pace. Michael Wilding, an Australian correspondent, writes that Sydney University’s Fisher Library is planning to chuck out 500,000 books and journals to make room for, of course, more computers. The first libraries we hear of are found in the Near East and, like Ashurbanipal’s (c. 650 bc), were mainly for internal reference purposes. That contained about 1,500 titles, with warnings against theft, maltreatment and late return. Libraries of the sort we would recognise began with the ancient Greeks. The finest of all was founded in Egyptian Alexandria in the 3rd century bc by the Greek king Ptolemy.

English juries are warned to reach their decision exclusively on the evidence put before them. Would the proposed intrusion of TV into the courtroom (as in the USA) threaten this restriction by turning the trial into a public performance? The ancient Athenian case may be salutary. In Athens, all cases were privately brought, before a jury of (usually) 501 citizen males over 30 (no judge). Litigants pleaded their cases themselves (no barristers). Both parties spoke once, for equal periods. The evidence of witnesses was read out (no cross-questioning), and the jurors then passed their verdict (no discussion). And it all took one day. But while it is clear that the facts of the case in hand were of some importance, they were not the whole story.

The French justified Greece’s entry into the EU by claiming that they ‘could not say no to the country of Plato’. You bet they couldn’t. In the Republic, Plato outlined his utopia. This was not a practical construct, but a vision of an imaginary, ideal community whose purpose was to act as a model for how things might be. He did this by sketching a picture of the educational and moral underpinning that went into making a good human and extrapolating from that an institutional programme that would create the good state. The consequence was twofold. First, Plato had to show up the deficiencies of existing constitutions, to demonstrate there was no future in them. Democracy in particular, the system under which Plato lived in Athens, came in for special contempt.

It seems most odd to become so agitated about the (very few) filthy rich when the (large numbers) of very poor should be the centre of the welfare state’s concerns. But if one wants to fleece the rich, a quid pro quo always helps, as the ancient Greeks knew. Every year in Athens, the richest 300 citizens could be instructed to carry out a leitourgia, lit. ‘work for the people’, i.e. a personal obligation in service of the state (origin of our ‘liturgy’). The wealth in property that qualified a man for such a duty was 3-4 talents (18-24,000 drachmas). This duty could involve anything from equipping a trireme for a year to underwriting dramatic productions. These did not come cheap. A working man’s wage was 1 dr. a day.

The Great Debate about whether people of the same sex should be allowed to ‘marry’ would have bewildered the Romans, and not because they had any hang-ups about that style of sexual behaviour either. For legal purposes, Romans defined the familia (‘household’) as Roman citizens, joined in lawful marriage, producing legitimate children and with some property to transmit by inheritance. But as the Latin matrimonium (our ‘matrimony’) makes clear, the main point about marriage is that it is all about the mater, ‘mother’. The family gives its daughter into matrimonium, the husband leads, receives and keeps his wife in matrimonio. The Latin for ‘wife’, uxor (cf.

In the ancient world, the sole sources of wealth were agricultural and mineral (no ‘industry’), and minted coin the sole monetary instrument, whose value was related to its weight and the purity of its metal content (no  paper money). There were no lending banks as we know them, let alone financial mechanisms for raising credit. So are there no lessons we can learn from the ancient world about our current financial plight? Au contraire. Financial problems were nothing new. Take the second Punic War between Carthage and Rome. By 216 bc, as a result of Hannibal’s ferocious assault on Italy two years earlier, Rome had run out of money. So it borrowed from its own citizens and king Hieron of Syracuse to fund its army, while also doubling its taxes.

Last time Pericles showed how a real politician dealt with the severe austerity measures he had persuaded the Athenians to adopt if they were to win the battle against Sparta in 431 bc (i.e. abandon their lands and come to live inside Athens’ protective walls): he pointed out that these measures meant that he and the rich would lose their vast properties and the income they generated. So last week the Greek parliament took this hint and slapped on a property tax. Politicians will obviously be very keen to pay it to prove they are not the cushioned shysters Athenians take them to be. But in summer 430 bc it got worse. Athens was hit by a terrifying plague which, in the crowded conditions, killed thousands and led to a breakdown in law and order.

The Greek people face serious austerity. How can their corrupt politicians (ask any Greek) possibly win them round? In 431 bc, the ‘Peloponnesian’ war broke out between the marine super-power Athens and the almost invincible land-based Sparta. Athens knew it could survive a siege (thanks to its encircling ‘Long Walls’ down to its harbour Peiraeus, built in 457 bc) but would not be able to prevent the Spartans ravaging its territory of Attica. So Athens’ leader Pericles set about persuading the citizen assembly (which took all decisions) that the only course of action was for those in Attica to abandon their homes and farms and take up residence within the city walls.

Commentators bang on endlessly about the desirability of a ‘global world’, with every economy linked seamlessly to every other. But when it goes wrong, as it has done in the last three years, the painful consequences are equally global. Ask the Romans. The Roman empire stretched from Britain to Iraq and from the Rhine-Danube to the northern edges of the Sahara desert. At its largest extent (c. ad 117) it probably comprised about 50 to 60 million people and covered 2.5 million square miles. When Rome took over a province, the local elites continued to run the show, as they had always done, but now under the ultimate jurisdiction of Rome’s governor and his remarkably small staff.

As Greeks howl for other people’s money and the EU coughs up, both should reflect on Aristophanes’ comedy Wealth (Ploutos), which pinpointed the mindsets 2,400 years ago. Chremylus, a poor man, brings home a blind man, who turns out to be the god Wealth. Blinded by Zeus so that he cannot distinguish the good man from the bad, he bestows riches on the bad alone (a typical Greek take on life). Chremylus restores his sight at the shrine of Asclepius and returns home to find his cistern full of olive oil and his crockery turned to gold and silver. The rest of the play is taken up with the amusing consequences — e.g., a starving Hermes complains everyone is so rich that they no longer offer the gods sacrifices, and is found a job in the kitchen.

If the Libyans really do want to move from 42 years of tyranny to a western-style ‘democracy’, i.e. an elective oligarchy, they will need a friendly tyrant to help them make the transition. In his Politics, Aristotle offers some top tips on the subject. Aristotle distinguished two sorts of turannos: one who, knowing that the people hated him, rendered them incapable of moving against him (Gaddafi), and the other who manoeuvred to make the people unwilling to move against him. The former protected his rule by three main strategies: (i) stamping out anyone with any independence of mind or spirit, (ii) ensuring no one had any trust or confidence in anyone else, and (iii) depriving his subjects of the chance of building up a power base.

There has been considerable comment on the severity of the punishments handed out to the looters in the recent riots. In Aristotle’s Problems, most of which, admittedly, is not by the great man, a stern justification is mounted. The problem is posed as follows: ‘Why is it that, if someone steals from a public bath or gymnasium or market-place or anywhere like that, the penalty is death, but if from a private dwelling, it is twice the value of what was stolen?’ In the case of the private house, Aristotle offers three arguments: first, it has walls and locks, and it is possible to set a guard; second, it rests with the owner whom to admit and whom to exclude.

Prime Minister Cameron wants to fix the ‘moral collapse’ that caused the recent riots. So do we all, but how? In a dialogue by Plato, Protagoras told the following mûthos about how man developed respect for others (aidôs) and a sense of justice (dikê). When men were first created, Prometheus gave them the knowledge of skills, so that they could develop language, agriculture, houses and so on. But living in small groups, they were vulnerable to attack from wild animals. So they began to group themselves together into cities. But lacking any of the required social skills, they at once turned to crime and fighting each other. Zeus therefore sent Hermes to instil in every one of them aidôs and dikê.