Peter Jones

A Today programme presenter used the term imperium (cf. ‘emperor’) with reference to Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland. To a Roman, it meant the authority to give orders that must be obeyed, no matter what. Anyone invested with that power by the Roman state was accompanied by lictors, attendants carrying the fasces, an axe bound inside a collection of wooden rods, suggesting what might happen to someone who refused the order. That was certainly one way to get people to obey you. But what about in normal life? This topic forms the subject of the opening scene in Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes.

‘Make America Great Again!’ cries Donald Trump. ‘Do Britain Down Again!’ (DOBRIDA!) screech our academic historical institutions. That was not the Roman way. In ad 31, Valerius Maximus completed his nine books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Roman world. They were enormously popular and became a sort of handbook of Roman moral standards for imitation. While there were sections that castigated cruel, greedy, treacherous Romans who did not live up to the proper standards, most of the 91 chapter headings concentrate on those men and women who exhibited, e.g. endurance, moderation, generosity, compassion, humility, a capacity for friendship, respect for gods, the ability to face changes of fortune, public spirit, determination and so on.

A hadith attributed to Muhammad said that there would be 73 sects of Islam (of which only one would reach heaven). However many there are, they seem as likely to kill each other as they do the infidel. The one virtue of classical religion was that it embraced all gods, come what may. So when the Romans arrived in Britain, they put up altars to local gods as well as their own. Olympus knows what Zeus and Mercury made of Garmangabi, Gontrebi, Mogti and Ricagumbeda, but that was their problem. Indeed, Minucius Felix (3rd c. ad) pointed out that one reason why Romans were so successful was that the moment they defeated a people, they sacrificed to that people’s gods as well. The big exceptions Romans came across were, of course, Jews and Christians.

The criminals Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin both believe that might is right. The whole question fascinated the ancient Greeks.  In his famous history of the long war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), Thucydides (d. c. 400 bc) explored the question through speeches on both sides, but on one occasion – when Athens demanded the surrender of the small island of Melos – he put it in the form of a debate. Here is an edited sample, strangely apposite too: Ath: You know as well as we do that, in the real world, justice comes into it only between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak have to comply.

We await the full details of Donald Trump’s ‘take it or leave it’ solution to the Ukraine war, but at least Romans liked that sort of clarity. Take the war between Rome and the Carthaginian Hannibal, begun in 218 bc. Rome had already defeated Carthage in a long drawn-out battle over the possession of Sicily. In search of revenge, the father of young Hannibal made him swear never to befriend Rome. His family conquered southern Spain, rich in silver mines, agriculture and manpower, and when in 219 bc Hannibal sacked Saguntum, a town allied to Rome, Rome sent an embassy to clarify the situation. The Carthaginians complained of Roman treachery and asked what they wanted.

Nearly six million people are on out-of-work benefits. It is claimed that, for most of those, going back to work would not be financially worth it. Aristotle would have agreed with them because for him, leisure was the most important possession a man could have. The ancients generally had no concept of the dignity of labour, apart from idealistic views about the farmer working in harmony with gods and man for the moral betterment of mankind. For most people, work was a painful necessity whose only purpose was to keep you from penury. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c.

‘I get along with him well. I like him a lot,’ Donald Trump has said of Sir Keir Starmer. ‘He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far. I may not agree with his philosophy, but I have a very good relationship with him.’ Sir Keir must be thrilled – how wonderful to be praised by the most powerful man in the world, joining Nigel Farage as teacher’s pet! There were many Romans too who prided themselves as being amici principis, ‘friends of the emperor’. These were an inner ring of advisers, many of them immediate family, agreed to be influential; but in what way was never quite clear.

Generation Z(oomer), aged roughly between 13 and 28, have expressed a desire to be ruled by a dictator. That term derives from the Latin dictator, which referred to an official given absolute power (i.e. he was above the law) for a fixed term to do whatever he thought necessary to deal with a clearly identified problem. Take the famous example of Cincinnatus. A soldier of repute and a very able ex-consul, he had been left penniless by paying off a debt incurred by his son, and was living the life of a peasant ‘in a deserted hovel across the Tiber, like a banished man’. In 458 bc he was at his plough when he was asked to put on his toga and attend the Senate.

Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement. Though the ancients would have employed oaths, the practical ancient Greeks often ensured there was a flexibility about them: the real world might intervene. For example, treaties between city-states were agreed between opposing generals. Hostages were exchanged, oaths sworn and the terms of the treaty widely inscribed on stone and bronze pillars, but it was citizens who oversaw the treaty’s maintenance. In a Greek democracy, however, there was no saying how, under the influence of different leaders, policy might change and annul a treaty at a stroke. Then again, though treaties could be sworn to last forever, ‘circumstances’ were very unlikely to remain so accommodating.

How does one attempt to console someone on the destruction of their home, a fate recently visited on so many citizens of Los Angeles? Seneca, the millionaire philosopher and adviser to the emperor Nero, associated consolation with ‘reprimanding, dissuading, exhorting, commending’. He exemplifies that in a letter musing on the reaction which his friend Liberalis had had to the destruction by fire of his beloved Lugdunum (Lyon) in Gaul ad 64. This had caused Liberalis to worry about the strength of his own character, usually so steadfast, when confronted with this disaster. Seneca contended that we should be ready for anything, since there is ‘nothing that Fortune, when it so wishes, does not topple at the height of its prosperity’.

One does not like to disagree with one’s editor, but while the image of Rome salting the earth of its bitter rival Carthage is a striking way of describing Labour’s plan to wreck our current system of education, Rome was not in the habit of destroying the advantages that its conquests produced. The salting story is a 19th-century invention, endorsed by no less an authority than the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), but now rescinded. As Mr Gove made clear in last week’s magazine, the universal imposition of a national curriculum, among other measures, will remove the freedom and choice – the two words you will find nowhere in discussion of Labour education policy – which played such a crucial part in improving educational attainment.

The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson wants schools to teach oracy, i.e. the ability to present orally a clear and cogent argument on a topic. Presumably the purpose is to teach ‘communication skills’, a vacuous term, well-suited to the modern world, with no interest at all in what it actually is that is being communicated. The ancient Greeks, with their passion for democracy and keen to settle arguments with words rather than fists (even the Homeric heroes understood that), took a far more rigorous approach. For the philosopher Plato (d. 348 bc), the absolutely central question was: in arguing your case, do you know what truth and falsehood, good and evil are, and which side you are on?

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and his chosen Attorney-General, Baron Hermer, both professional lawyers, seem to take the view that lying is just an aspect of public relations and parliament an irrelevance. As the Roman republic collapsed under the assault led by Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, Cicero reflected, in those perilous times, on the nature of the relationship between civil law (ius civile, the term given to the bulk of statute law in Rome) and government and how it might be enabled to control the situation. He turned, for example, to the jurists. These freelance experts in law, though they had no professional standing whatsoever, provided opinions on legal matters to anyone who wanted them.

Ancient Greek thinkers tried to explain every natural phenomenon in human terms, without reference to magic or gods. That was a major intellectual revolution. Greek doctors’ contribution was to invent what has been called ‘rational’ medicine, embedding a principle of the highest importance, however hopeless its premise: which was that the health of the human body depended on the proper mixture inside it of four ‘elements’: earth, air, fire (i.e. heat) and water and their associated properties (heat, cold, wetness, dryness and so on). Further, since dissection was mostly forbidden, they knew little about how the body actually worked (they did not know what the heart was for).

Aesop’s animal fables, as Robin Waterfield points out in his new translation, were certainly not written for children: the animals are ‘brutal, cunning, predatory, treacherous, and ruthless’, despising the weak and mocking people’s misfortunes. The ancients regularly used them against political opponents. Plenty could be so used today. Gnat, who had settled on Bull’s horn, was about to fly off when he asked Bull whether he wanted him to go away. Bull replied: ‘When you came, I didn’t feel you. And when you go, I won’t feel you either.’ Obviously, Nigel Farage or David Lammy with Donald Trump. So: match the following three fables with the late John Prescott, Rachel Reeves and George Galloway. Donkey asked Horse for a little of his barley.

A professor of neurophysiology has announced that anger is a good thing with a ‘very useful purpose’, unless it turns to aggression. Top thinking, prof! The first word of western literature is the ‘rage’ of Achilles, which Homer tells us was ‘murderous’ and brought endless grief to the Greeks. What? Come again, Homer old boy, surely you meant ‘the Trojans’? Alas, no. This led directly to the death of Achilles’s dear friend Patroclus and the early death of Achilles. When Achilles realises what he has done, he admits there may be pleasure in anger ‘sweeter than the dripping of honey’ but wishes it would disappear from the face of the Earth. So did many ancient moralists.

Many commentators have criticised the film Gladiator II on technical aspects of the fighting. But there was so much more to gladiators than that. The gladiator troupes, mostly criminals or enslaved prisoners of war, were housed in cramped cells in secure barracks, made to swear an oath to ‘be burned by fire, bound in chains, beaten and die by the sword’ and then put through the most rigorous training procedures to put on a good show. Their owners wanted to please not only the crowds but also the emperor who saw this as good government – punishing the wicked and thrilling the people all in one go (food for thought, Sir Keir?).

Kemi Badenoch, in an act of unusual awareness for an MP, intends to learn from her own party’s mistakes as well as Labour’s. She must have been reading the Greek statesman Plutarch’s ‘How to profit from your enemies’, one of his 78 essays and dialogues on a wide range of topics, from the intelligence of animals to old men in politics. Politics, he said, always encouraged spite, envy, and rivalry. These encouraged the wise man ‘to stay on guard, do everything with due care and attention, and lead a more mindful life’. The reason he gave for this was that there was a weakness in us that made us ‘feel more ashamed of our faults before our enemies than our friends’.

The ‘lifestyle guru’ Russell Brand is now under police investigation and (in desperation?) has taken to hawking magic amulets. Still, it has to be better than his announcement that he had become a Christian. As the Greek satirist Lucian pointed out, such a move did little good for one such would-be ‘celeb’ (Latin celeber, ‘busy, crowded’), Peregrinus. He was born c. ad 95 and, suspected of killing his father, went into exile. In Palestine he linked up with a group of Christians and soon became a figure of some authority, a prophet and church-leader widely admired for his understanding (and invention) of scriptures.

Such is the increasing cost of the welfare state that at some stage a government – never this one – is going to have the ask the question: ‘Welfare for whom, and what should it cover?’ There was no welfare state in the ancient world. But there was the elite 2 per cent, who owned the land, and hence the wealth, since the land (and sea) provided all human needs – food, fire (warmth), clothing and building materials (including metals), power sources (wind and animals) and international transport. But they also needed hoi polloi, since only by turning them into a fighting force could they protect and expand their wealth and the people keep their minuscule fraction of it. There was, then, an unspoken bond between rich and poor.