Peter Jones

Whatever the eventual result of the West’s incursion into Iraq, the Iraqi people will have to rewrite their history to make sense of the occupation. Doubtless the West will try to influence the outcome — but surely not as cleverly as the Roman emperor Hadrian wooed the Greek world. It helped that the Romans in general held the Greek, in particular the Athenian, cultural achievement in awe. The poet Horace talked of Greece educating rustic Rome in the liberal arts, and the emperor Nero felt his own artistic abilities were more appreciated there than anywhere else. In the ad 130s Hadrian set about proving his admiration for Greek culture by re-developing the city of Athens.

When an emotional Tony Blair bade farewell to the Labour party conference, he said how hard it was to give up, but needs must. The ancients too knew all about the love of power: but at least there was a serious price to pay for failure. Today’s failures simply wind up in the House of Lords. Ancient Greeks were as power-mad as anyone — despite the fact that, of the top ten executive officials appointed every year, two on average incurred the wrath of the people’s Assembly so badly as to be condemned to death. But it did not prevent candidates lining up for the jobs. The price of power came high for Romans too. Assassination of emperors was not uncommon, and damnatio memoriae greeted those who did not come up to scratch.

David Cameron, once a PR man for a TV company, has brought all his skills to bear on becoming the epitome of everything New Tory stands for, like, er, yes, of course, families (wow!) and the NHS (no!). Is this why he comes over as little more than a pretty windsock, without an idea in his head, but keenly pointing in whatever direction the zephyr blows? Very probably. Such a contrast with so many ancient Greeks and Romans. Take, for example, Pompey. On one occasion he could not make up his mind whether to describe himself as consul tertium on a stage he had had erected in 55 bc or consul tertio (a subtle grammatical point is at stake). He consulted widely among the most learned men of the day, who could not reach agreement. He therefore phoned up Cicero.

A group of gangsters’ molls in Pereira, which evidently has the highest murder rate in Colombia, has decided to withhold sex from their boyfriends until they give up their guns. Inevitably they have been likened to the women in Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata (staged in Athens in February 411 bc) whose purpose was to persuade their men to make peace in the war between Athens and Sparta that had been going on for some 20 years. But the Colombian ladies have not been reading their Aristophanes. The point about Lysistrata, the heroine of the play, is that she fully understands the nature of her fellow Athenians, i.e. that the women (in the best comic traditions of the ancient world) are as crazy for sex as their men are, while the men just love fighting.

Gordon Brown has promised that, when he comes to absolute power, he alone (not parliamentary colleagues, let alone the people) will appoint a cabinet ‘of all talents’ to do his bidding. Even the Romans were more democratic than that. Roman toffs naturally took it for granted that none but they could legislate effectively. As Cicero argued, ‘Many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robber had agreed to make them,’ and placed responsibility for law-making firmly with the Senate. That was because the people could in practice override the Senate, since the Senate contained tribunes of the plebs who could veto any legislation which they did not feel to be in the people’s interests.

We are hardly out of a long winter and already parts of the country are celebrating the traditional Festival of the Summer Water-Shortage, in which the god Hôspipês and his divine consort Sprinkla are ritually banished from the earth for six months, to be gloriously resurrected in the autumn. All very Demeter and Persephone. Strange that the Romans never had this problem. But then they had a superb aqueduct system for delivering water to far distant places. An aqueduct serving Constantinople, 75 miles long as the crow flies, is in fact 155 miles with all the twists and turns. Rome was served by 11 aqueducts, totalling over 300 miles in length, delivering some 1.2 million cubic metres of water a day to its million or so inhabitants.

A Guardian journalist seems saddened that the departure of the previous editor could signal that ‘The Spectator’s similarities with the last days of the Roman empire are apparently over’. It is even more saddening to report that they never came close. Elagabalus, Roman emperor ad 218–222, showed what could be done if you put your mind to it. Of Syrian extraction, he became emperor at 15 and took the name Elagabalus (the ‘unconquered sun god’ of Syria), planning to make that deity supreme across the Roman world.

It is a general rule that public services rarely work properly, if at all. But over the past 60 years there has been one shining exception — grammar schools. Yet New Labour agrees with great thinkers like the IRA hero and sometime Ulster education minister Martin McGuinness that the single example of our public services that has been an unconditional triumph should be blown up. The reason seems to be that, if not everyone can have it, no one can have it. In that case, make every school a grammar school. Why not? Because it would not serve the needs of large numbers of pupils, i.e., the truth behind the whole debate is that our political and educational establishment is too lazy or hidebound to think of ways of serving pupils to whom grammar schools are irrelevant.

Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome on BBC2 ended in nightmare: that, in Boris’s view, only when the EU has the equivalent of an emperor can it hope to emulate the achievements of the Roman empire in uniting disparate peoples under a single banner. But since it will never have an emperor, is the whole project not doomed? Very probably. There is, however, a tiny spark of hope, which can be glimpsed when one reflects on what happened after the Roman empire in the West collapsed in the 5th century ad. Apart from pockets of civilisation surviving among the elites, the answer is, broadly, an extended dark age, most clearly observed in the rapid decline in the standards of living in the West that archaeology records during the 5th–7th centuries ad.

In view of the new Tory leader David Cameron’s call for ‘social enterprise zones’, where local communities deal with local social problems, it may be worth reminding him of the alimentary schemes that the Romans developed for helping the children of the poor (alimentum, ‘provisions, maintenance’). The general idea was that private individuals and public corporations should work together to relieve distress. So, for example, in ad 97 Pliny the Younger promised his home town of Comum (on Lake Como) 500,000 HS (sesterces) — c. £5 million — for the purpose, but instead of giving them a lump sum, he transferred property worth far more than that to a local land-agent.

The British are about to replace the Americans in Afghanistan. Let us hope they take a good life of Alexander with them — Arrian or Quintus Curtius Rufus will do — because conditions for military campaigns have not changed much since then. When Alexander finally defeated Darius III and his Persian army in 329 bc — the purpose of his expedition — he pushed into Bactria/Sogdia, as it was then, to pursue the leader of the Persian resistance, Bessus. Bessus was duly turned in by his treacherous Bactrian lieutenant Spitamenes. But Alexander needed to feed his army and secure his rear, and did so by plundering widely and garrisoning the main villages. Further, he refused to allow the locals to do what they had always done in relation to their war dead, i.e.

Eheu, the long, hot summer idyll proved too much for the classical scholars among you. The entries for Round 2, therefore, will be held over to Round 3 (or new entries may be submitted). Rules for the final round to decide the Cup Winners are as usual: 1. Only one entry, in only one section, allowed per person. 2. Prizes are awarded for the best entries in each section. 3. Cups are awarded at the end of the year to the best entries over the year. 4. Each entry must be marked ‘Spectator Classics Cup Round 3’ and must identify the appropriate section. 5. Entrants for the Open section must enclose the English. 6. Entrants for the Undergraduate and Schools sections must quote their university/school address. 7. Entries sent by e-mail (editor@ spectator.co.

A new exhibition of ancient Persian material at the British Museum has brought out the usual affirmations about how wonderfully humane and civilised Persians were, and how vicious the Greeks were in painting a picture of them as slavish, effeminate subjects of an oriental despotism that has helped pervert Western views of the East ever since. It is true that, since the Persians left no accounts of themselves except the usual boastful lists of royal achievements (Darius talks merrily about the number of enemies he impaled), we largely rely on Greeks for information about them, especially Herodotus (died c. 430 bc), who investigated why Greeks and Persians fought the Persian Wars (490-79 bc). He has much of interest to say about the Persians.

In his Investigation a few weeks ago, the editor turned his thoughts to the poet Horace and his ‘special relationship’ with the emperor Augustus. He pointed out that, while the emperor’s largesse obliged Horace to turn out a good deal of praise poetry, Horace himself, while genuinely grateful, nevertheless exercised a good deal of ingenuity in not laying it on too thick. The editor may not have had the space to point out the intense pressure Horace was under ‘from the emperor himself’. In his Life of Horace, the historian Suetonius records the various attempts that Augustus made to grapple Horace to him tighter than a brother.

Two weeks ago, we wondered how Tacitus, that pillar of the Roman establishment, was able to get away with putting a speech in the mouth of the Caledonian ‘terrorist’ Calgacus to his troops that sounded so sympathetic to him and his cause. This week concludes the extracts and offers some comments. Note that Calgacus admits that some Britons, Gauls and Germans were fighting on the Roman side. He argues this is partly the allies’ own fault for not showing a united front before enemies he regards as a ‘motley rabble’: ‘Do you really believe the Romans to be as courageous in war as they are lecherous in peace?

These days the ability to understand and explain in public prints the aims of the people perceived as public enemies is likely to get you deported. So one wonders what our government would have made of that pillar of the Roman establishment Tacitus — consul, provincial governor and historian — who invented an extraordinarily sympathetic speech to put in the mouth of Calgacus, the Caledonian ‘terrorist’ who fought Agricola’s army somewhere in the mountains of Aberdeenshire in ad 83. Here is the first selection of extracts from it: ‘As often as I examine the reasons for this war and the crisis we now face, I am fully confident that the united front you present today will herald the beginning of freedom for the whole of Britain....