Peter Jones

The Sunday Times rich list would have excited the male citizens over the age of 18 who determined state policy in the Athenian assembly in the 5th century bc. The reason is that Athens levied taxes on citizens by their wealth, as judged by the property they owned. The most important tax was the leitourgia (source of our ‘liturgy’). This was imposed upon the 300 wealthiest Athenians and was hypothecated on two specific projects: the funding of the annual comic and dramatic festivals (one of which involved, among much else, the training of 1,165 men and boys for months on end) and the funding and maintenance of fully equipped Athenian triremes, which controlled Athens’s marine empire. At times of emergency, mainly war, a further tax was levied on the 6,000 wealthiest.

Will Pope Leo turn out to be a lion or a pussycat? That depends on what he has to confront, but one hopes he will do better than Pope Siricius (384-399), let alone Kirill, current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. When the Roman emperor Constantine published a letter in 313 allowing freedom of worship to pagan and Christian alike, it opened the door to Christian leaders taking over the function of the old Roman elite. This at once presented a problem: if there really was one true God, whose will only bishops could interpret, was the emperor lord over the church or the church lord over the emperor? In 390 Butheric, a close friend of the emperor Theodosius, arrested a star charioteer for homosexual rape. A riot ensued and Butheric was murdered.

This week we celebrated VE Day. When Pericles remembered the dead from the war against Sparta in his famous Funeral Speech of 431 bc, he was not celebrating victory – the war would end in 404 bc with Athens’s surrender – but doing something quite new: he was reflecting on what Athens stood for and why it was worth dying for.

An 1,800-year-old cemetery on the outskirts of the Roman legionary fortress town of York has been found to contain a skeleton whose pelvis was bitten by a lion. Since most of those buried there were decapitated young men, the victim was surely a gladiator. That lion must have been a major entertainment coup for the soldiers. During the reign of the emperor Augustus, 400 tigers, 250 lions and 600 leopards were slaughtered in the gladiatorial arena, together with bears, wolves, elephants, boars and other wild animals. This was one important way to win the favour of the plebs and was a very big business, employing thousands of men across the empire.

It is not surprising that Donald Trump holds the law in contempt. That is what happens when you have a criminal as President. His treatment of Harvard University is an example: he has cancelled a very large grant, saying Harvard is guilty, as charged, of doing nothing about student riots, on the back not of evidence, but simply a collection of opinions. For nearly 250 years, the Roman plebs (about 99 per cent of the free population) fought a battle to have some say in the way Rome was governed against the wealthy elite who made up the Senate, Rome’s ruling body. Under the kings (753-509 bc), they had no rights at all, but with the inception of the Republic, the real battle began. The story is told by the Roman historian Livy.

Donald Trump’s obsessive ‘awhairness’ makes one wonder: why is it so important to him? The topic was of some interest in Rome. The emperor Domitian wrote a treatise on baldness. So too did Cleopatra, who offered the following remedy: ‘For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as much as it will bear. Put on a rag and apply, having soaped the place well first. I have mixed the above with a foam of nitre, and it worked well.’ Pompey had himself depicted in statuary wearing a hairstyle associated with Alexander the Great, with a lock of hair brushed back from the forehead. Julius Caesar combed his hair forwards to try to cover his receding hairline.

The young in Canada are said to be taking up astrology. But why? Do they think Mark Carney is a star? The ancients saw astrology as a form of divination, which Cicero debunked in 44 bc. The debunking is in the form of a debate with his brother Quintus, who defines divinatio as ‘the foreknowledge and foretelling of events that happen by chance’. First, Cicero points out that no one summons up the diviner when there are experts to hand. On questions of nature men go to a scientist, on statecraft to a politician, on war to a general and so on. The diviner has no role anywhere. Then consider the logic. If something happens ‘by chance’, it cannot, by definition, be predicted: otherwise it could not be said to have happened ‘by chance’.

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.