Peter Jones

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.

Last year there was one Classics Cup on offer. This year there are no fewer than three: one for the Open competition (any 200-word piece from The Spectator in Latin or Greek prose or verse); one for undergraduates (200 words in Latin or Greek on the theme ‘Tony and Gordon’); and one for school pupils (200 words in Latin or Greek retelling the story of Homer’s Odyssey). For the stars of the Open competition, it will be exquisite business as usual: the chance to take any passage from The Spectator and map the language and concepts of this world on to that of the ancient. Take Steyn: ‘If Rumsfeld were to say “Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Division go in on Thursday”, the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast’.

The problems relating to asylum-seekers have hit the headlines again. The concept of asylum is ancient, and the problems not new. Asylum derives from the ancient Greek asulos, ‘inviolable’ (noun asulia). Its basic meaning was ‘protection against the right of reprisal, especially seizure of goods’, and it could be granted to a wide range of individuals, e.g., to ambassadors visiting foreign states and traders visiting foreign ports as well as to refugees seeking protection in foreign lands. Asulia could also be applied for by communities holding religious festivals. These were major sources of revenue and would attract pilgrims only if pilgrims knew that, in leaving the safety of their own states, they would still be protected abroad.

All lovers of elective oligarchy will applaud last month’s ballot in Iraq, but that will not stop debates about America’s role there. Athenians of the 5th century bc, committed like America to the idea of freedom, obsessively debated how to justify the power which they exercised over their empire. In his early speeches, Pericles condones the right to rule by arguing that Athens exerted far less brutal control over its empire than its supremacy might have allowed, and was anyway culturally superior to everyone else. The tone changes, however, in the final speech before his death in 429 bc. Here he argues that Athens had no option but to continue down the imperial path ‘because of the danger from those whose hatred you have incurred in gaining your empire ...

The government ardently denies that its proposal to allow 24-hour drinking will lead to streets filled with drunks. It then legislates to, er, deal with streets filled with drunks. Nothing could more perfectly exemplify Plato’s brilliant image of law-makers as people ‘slashing away at a kind of Hydra’ — the many-headed monster which grew two heads for every one chopped off. In his Republic, Plato (429–347 bc) argues that it is the mark of a badly governed society to need constant rafts of legislation. He likens such societies to the sick, who imagine that they will get better by stuffing themselves with varieties of medicines, when they should be changing their way of life instead. Plato’s contemporary Isocrates develops the point.

The Archbeard of Canterbury has proclaimed that the tsunami disaster in Asia justifies people’s doubts about the existence of any God, let alone a good one. If he needs comfort on the matter, Seneca (the millionaire philosopher and adviser to Nero, d. ad 65) will provide it. Since the world and its gods were formed at the same time — when Uranus (Sky) mated with Gaia (Earth) — the gods and nature were inseparably linked. When nature therefore turned violent, that proved the existence of the god of that particular phenomenon — how else could nature act with such terrifying power? The question then was: why had the god so acted? The answer was usually that (s)he had been worshipped improperly or insulted.

Whenever the subject of the EU comes up, someone is bound to compare it to the Roman empire. If the comparison relates to the beginning and subsequent development of that empire, it fails. But the end of the Roman empire in the West in the 5th century ad may well offer quite a good model of how EUthanasia will set in. Rome entered the imperial stakes after defeating Carthage in the first Punic war (264–241 bc). The two greatest powers of the western Mediterranean had been fighting it out over control of Sicily, which became Rome’s first provincia when Carthage surrendered.

Old age is in the news at the moment because people may not be financially prepared for retirement. But old age has much more interesting questions to consider, and none more interesting than its conclusion. The Roman philosopher-statesman Seneca (ad 1-65) makes some most interesting observations on the matter. Seneca, being a Stoic, takes the view that death is no evil, and therefore suicide is a rational act. ‘In my opinion, old age is not to be refused any more than it is to be craved,’ he argues. ‘It is very agreeable to enjoy one’s own company as long as possible, on condition that one has ensured it is worth enjoying.