Peter Jones

Apparently some scientists believe that the patterns in which bumblebees search for food — ‘geographic profiling’ is the technical term — could help detectives hunt down serial killers. The ancients would not have been surprised. It is largely to Virgil in the final book of his ‘farming-manual’ Georgics (c. 29 bc) that we owe our understanding of the extent to which the ancients saw in bees a model for human life. ‘I will set out in order for your admiration,’ Virgil explains, ‘the spectacle of a tiny world, with its great-hearted leaders, its customs and pursuits, its people and battles.’ It is as if bees alone shared in the divine logos (‘reason’) that raised humans above the level of animals.

Last time we saw how Socrates and Plato were among the majority of ancient thinkers who supported the ‘creationist’ theory of the world. But there was an ‘anti-creationist’ lobby too, led by the 5th-century Athenian atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Not that they set out to oppose the creationists; it was just that their understanding of the nature of the world led them, inevitably, to quite opposite conclusions. The atomists hypothesised that minute, unsplittable atomoi, below the level of sense-perception, were the basic stuff out of which the world was made. These atomoi grouped themselves in various ways to produce the world we see around us.

The debate between creationists and anti-creationists is nothing new. As David Sedley shows in his extraordinarily interesting Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Cambridge), it raged as strongly in the ancient world as it does in the modern. The ancients were, for the most part, creationists. The big debate for them was what happened next, i.e. how the physical world came to be. The natural science, therefore, was just as important as the ‘theology’. On this issue the spanner in the ointment [sic] was Socrates. He tells us that, as a young man, he was thrilled by speculation about the natural world: ‘whether it was blood that makes us conscious beings, or air, or fire; or is it the brain that supplies us with our sense of sight and hearing or smell?

The Anglican bishops have met and reached their grave conclusions on a number of doubtless vital issues — except one. What about the Olympic Games? Are they not pagan rituals? And was it not for that excellent reason that the Church banned them? It was Constantine the Great, founder in ad 324 of Constantinople as the ‘new Rome’, who encouraged the spread of Christianity without condemning other beliefs. But bishops like Ambrose of Milan were not enthusiastic about tolerating polytheistic cults or pagan intellectual movements, and their influence began to be felt.

The recent exchange of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers for five living Hezbollah (and much else) has produced outrage in some sections of the Israeli press. Admittedly, it lays Israel open to further blackmail from Hezbollah who, glowing with high-minded idealism, long to capture and murder as many Israeli soldiers as they can. But the press is wrong. Last time, we saw how important it was for ancient Athenian families that their dead be properly buried and their graves tended. This was felt to be even truer of its soldiers who died in battle, whom Athenians deemed worthy of hero-cult.

The recent return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers in exchange for five living Hezbollah prisoners exemplifies one of the most deep-rooted human feelings: that the dead must come home. At one level, it seems irrational. What do the dead care? But as the ancients knew, it is not the dead who count in this matter, but the living. In some respects, ancient Greeks were fairly relaxed about death. Corpses were not regarded as objects of horror. The prospect of death did not seem to fill them with terror. But while Greeks often expressed doubts about whether the dead possessed any faculties of perception, they equally often spoke as if they valued the goodwill of the dead and feared their disapproval.

We are happy that terrorist suspects be held for 28 days without charge. So there is no problem about the principle. But the government now wishes to extend this to 42 days, and all hell breaks loose. But on what grounds? Since the principle of holding without charge has been established, the time-scale is neither here nor there. Or is it? Though there was no such thing as a state-controlled prosecution service in the ancient world — all actions were brought privately — there was intense discussion about what the law was for and how it should be applied. As we saw two weeks ago, Cicero was in no doubt about what its main purpose was — security. ‘Our ancestors wrote laws whose sole aim was the stability and interests of the state.

Hamid Karzai’s government is said to control a mere 30 per cent of Afghanistan. The rest is in the control of tribal leaders and the Taleban. As David Miliband says, we will ‘win’ only by diplomacy. The long-term stability of the Roman empire depended on the Romans’ ability to rule through local elites. That was fine where the culture was largely urbanised i.e. with administrative structures conducive to governance and taxation, as it was in the Mediterranean and the Greek East where Alexander had been.  But tribal north-west Europe was generally different. True, where tribes were centralised and hierarchical, as in southern England, Romans could get to work.

Boris Johnson has vowed as mayor to emulate his hero Pericles, turning London into ‘an education to Britain’ as Athens was (Pericles claimed) to Greece. In one sense this will be difficult since the mayor has limited responsibilities, mainly transport and police, none of which feature in any known Periclean policy document. But if Mr Johnson is referring to a generally Periclean tenor to his period in office, there is much he could usefully achieve. First, Pericles (like every other Athenian citizen) wielded power over the decision-making Assembly (all Athenian males over 18) only by his ability to persuade it that his policies were best. He was, in other words, a master orator. But he did not try to fine-tune the Assembly.

Peter Jones investigates whether the Olympic Games have always been political. The sight of Chinese thugs invading the streets of our capital in the name of the Olympic Holy Flame Protection Unit (OHFPU — most people’s thoughts exactly) should banish once and for all the idea that the Olympic Games are not ‘political’. Since the Olympic Games do not do God either, the idea that the flame is ‘holy’ is also rather rich, especially coming from China. The ancient Greeks did do god in a big way at the Olympic Games, since the Games were held in honour of Zeus, god of Olympus (not that Mount Olympus was anywhere near the site).

According to Mohamed Al Fayed, the Princess of Wales was murdered on the orders of Prince Philip working in cahoots with some 30 named individuals, the Home Office, the CIA, the Inland Revenue and the French intelligence and emergency services, judiciary and police. Ancient Athenians would have loved it. They saw conspiracies everywhere. Let there be the slightest suggestion, for example, that someone might be at work to (say) destroy the democracy, and panic ensued, ranks closed and politicians would rush to say that Athens was safe in their hands. Take the famous affair of the mutilation of the Hermai (good-luck statues of Hermes) and the profanation of the Mysteries.

Macavity-like, Brown was never there when he was Chancellor, and rarely seems to be there now he is Prime Minister. When he is, he is always blaming someone else or avoiding the question. This is highly reminiscent of the second Roman emperor Tiberius who, like Brown, was following someone, Augustus, who had revolutionised the whole system. But there is a significant difference between them. Emperor was the last thing Tiberius wanted to be. Brown has been dreaming of nothing else. The Roman historian Tacitus could not believe that at Augustus’ death in ad 14 Tiberius was so antipathetic to the idea of assuming power. He therefore considered him duplicitous, cloaking ambition under the image of diffidence.

Last time we saw that the currently fashionable buzz-word ‘change’ was anathema to the Romans, because they looked for stability and permanence, and change implied failure. Romans reinforced this perspective by using the past to act as a guide to the present. The technical term for any particular instance was exemplum. Romans had always seen the old Roman family as the great exemplum, reliable, solid, held together by bonds of affection, the foundation of the stable society; and the key to that bonding was pietas, the respect for man and god that created those bonds and the duty that nourished them.

‘Change’ is the latest buzzword of contemporary politics. Change is, of course, quite meaningless until one knows what (precisely) is being changed and to (precisely) what; and, for a government in power for ten years, it leaves hanging in the air the objection, ‘If you want to keep on changing things, it rather suggests that you have kept on getting things wrong.’ The Romans had a terror of change. ‘Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque’, /intoned the epic poet Ennius — ‘Rome’s foundations are its tried and tested values and its men’ — and even when the going was at its roughest, Romans went out of their way to deny that change had happened at all.

One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since the Romans drew up their XII Tables, c. 450 bc, which were themselves originally a mere X until they decided they needed II more. In ad 533, when the Roman empire in the West was no more, the eastern emperor Justinian published a Digest of Roman law. It was condensed from some 2,000 volumes. Romans despaired of the problem. Julius Caesar decided to reduce the statute book to a manageable size but was assassinated in 44 bc before he could begin. The great Roman historian Tacitus took up the theme, commenting that there seemed to be no end to law-making, and with his usual sharpness put his finger on an exquisite paradox.

One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since the Romans drew up their XII Tables, c. 450 bc, which were themselves originally a mere X until they decided they needed II more. In ad 533, when the Roman empire in the West was no more, the eastern emperor Justinian published a Digest of Roman law. It was condensed from some 2,000 volumes. Romans despaired of the problem. Julius Caesar decided to reduce the statute book to a manageable size but was assassinated in 44 bc before he could begin. The great Roman historian Tacitus took up the theme, commenting that there seemed to be no end to law-making, and with his usual sharpness put his finger on an exquisite paradox.

Mission statements and codes of practice are all the rage today among business communities. Everyone has to have one. The trouble is, they are all the same, and consist mostly of strings of platitudes about ‘best practice’ and ‘personal integrity’. ‘Investors in People’ is a favourite example, invented (probably) by the CEOs of the 17th-century slave trade. Had Aristotle been asked to do better, he might well have come up with the following approach. Discussing what the good man needs to do to produce good results, Aristotle says that of any action we undertake we need to ensure that we have got it right in relation to: 1. The time at which we are acting; 2. The issues on which we are acting; 3. The people with whom we are engaging; 4.

Time, now, for a slightly different tack, to point out another great advantage of the Athenian model towards which Prime Minister Brown might even appear to be groping. It has to do with the party system. When Athenian male citizens over the age of 18 gathered on the Pnyx to take decisions about whatever matters of state confronted them, they must have brought with them a raft of prejudices on any number of matters, including their bias towards one or other of the influential, big-name speakers (like Pericles) who would be almost certain to address them. But what they did not bring was any preordained commitment to a party line imposed from above — unlike MPs, who for the most part know what the right answer is before what is laughingly called ‘debate’ is ever joined.