Peter Jones

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.

Craig Brown’s exquisite disembowelling of the ‘publicist’ Max Clifford in the review pages the other week would have reminded the Greek comedian Aristophanes (c.

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....

Given the fault-line between religion and politics in the Muslim world and the priority of Sharia over secular law, what can Muslims do to reassure us that they understand their responsibilities as British citizens? Pliny the Younger and Daniel Stylites may be able to help them. In the absence of an imperial policy towards Christians, Pliny (governor of Bithynia, northern Turkey, ad 110–13) had them arrested and ordered to invoke pagan gods, make offerings to the emperor’s statue and revile the name of Christ. If they did not, they were executed. The emperor Trajan approved, adding three important riders. Christians must not be hunted down; if they repent they must be forgiven, whatever their past conduct; and there were to be no witch hunts.

Six former chiefs of the defence staff have rounded on politicians and lawyers for threatening to prosecute soldiers who are simply trying to do their best in life-or-death situations. Romans would have been aghast. The two cardinal virtues demanded of Roman soldiers were virtus (‘manliness, courage’) and disciplina (‘obedience to orders’), and the two frequently clashed. When in his Gallic campaigns of 52 bc Caesar was defeated at Gergovia (south of Clermont-Ferrand) with the loss of nearly 700 men, including 46 centurions, he read his men the riot act, saying that ‘he admired their greatness of heart but not their lack of control and high-handedness in believing they knew more about winning victories than their commander-in-chief ...

In our youth-besotted blame culture, the newly recovered poem by Sappho (600 bc: only our fourth complete one) has a point to make. I translate in plodding prose (square brackets = restored words): ‘You, children, [rejoice in] the beautiful gifts of the violet-robed Muses/ [and the] clear, song-loving lyre./ As for me — old age [has laid its hands on] my once [soft] skin./ My hair has gone from black to white./ My heart has become heavy. My knees do not carry me,/ that once were nimble to dance like fawns./ This I lament without end; but what can I do?/ It is impossible for man not to grow old./ The story was that rosy-armed Dawn, overwhelmed by love,/ once carried off Tithonus to the ends of the earth.

A reader, Mark Savage, points out to me that there are comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Cleopatra — both wily, mysterious Easterners needing eradication because (according to the spin-doctors) they posed such terrible threats to a Western way of life. But that makes George Galloway, whose passion for Saddam was such a rare and precious thing, the equivalent of Marc Antony. Where might it all end? [Scramble lawyers at once — Ed.] Whenever Roman envoys visited Egypt, they were given the grand tour up the Nile to Memphis. On one such occasion a Roman commented that Egypt had the potential to become a great power if only its leaders could get their act together.

No election manifesto has anything to say about an issue vital to the British understanding of government — the relationship between Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament (forget the people, of course) which has been so badly corrupted by Blair’s ‘sofa’ politics. The Greek historian Polybius (200–118 bc) was greatly impressed by the Roman republican system of ‘checks and balances’, which he saw as a combination of democracy, kingship and oligarchy. The people’s assemblies (democracy) appointed magistratus to serve Rome for one year as e.g., finance officers, judges and so on. The top magistratus were the two consuls (kingship), with powers so wide (commanding the army in particular) that two were appointed to keep an eye on each other.

The death of the Pope has relit a number of arguments, few more contentious than the status of the foetus. Naturally, on a subject about which the Bible has almost nothing to say, the Church has taken its cue mostly from pagan thinkers. For the early Church, Pythagoras (6th century bc) set the tone, arguing that from the moment of conception the foetus was body and soul with every innate human capacity intact. This was in contrast to Empedocles (5th century bc), who thought the foetus became fully human only at birth (as did the highly influential Stoics much later). Yet most ancient doctors, observing the physical development of the foetus in the womb, concluded that it gradually became human.

Great thinkers have recently been grappling with what ‘happiness’ is, and various answers have emerged that have surely never occurred to anyone before: ‘love and friendship’, to which ‘respect, family, standing and fun’ have been added. Who would have thought it? Ancient Greeks would have narrowed those six down to three. They would have matched ‘family’ with ‘friendship’ and seen both as aspects of philia, feebly translated as ‘friendship’ but actually meaning something like ‘being in a relationship with someone who makes common cause with you’ (philia is cognate with Latin suus, ‘one’s own’).

A Lithuanian girl arrived in England looking for work and was promptly sold for £4,000 to an Albanian. He raped her and put her in a brothel. She escaped, was recaptured, sent to another brothel, then sold for £3,000, escaped again, was recaptured again, sent to London, traded several more times and finally fled to the police. She was 15. This poor girl must feel her life has been utterly destroyed, but she must not give up hope. Even in the ancient world, where slavery and therefore trading in humans as commodities were commonplace, there were glimmers of it.

The IRA now revealed as the criminal gang the government has been desperately trying to pretend it is not, there can be no more pretence of democratic dealing with Sinn Fein–IRA and its leaders Adams and McGuinness. So what next? The collapse of the Roman republic in the 1st century bc was largely down to the naked power that dynasts like Caesar and Pompey could wield by having private armies at their back. The result was that the tradition of ‘checks and balances’ involving Senate, consuls and people that was felt by Greeks and Romans to be the great strength of the republican system applied no more. When Julius Caesar emerged as top dog after defeating Pompey in the civil war (49 bc) and made himself dictator, the republic was to all intents and purposes dead.