Peter Jones

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.

Government advisers are suggesting that religious education in schools should teach Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh beliefs. The purpose is to encourage ‘tolerance and respect’. Greeks and Romans would have found this incomprehensible. In the absence of divine and therefore authoritative scriptures, monotheistic, jealous gods did not exist in the ancient world, let alone ‘churches’ with a ‘priesthood’, imposing creeds, beliefs and moralities. Religion was a form of cult, hallowed by tradition, centred on rituals carried out in the right way at the right time. At its heart was sacrifice (lit., ‘making sacred’) when something useful to humans was made over to the god.

First Gordon Brown removed billions of pounds from our pensions; now he is about to land 20,000 pensioners with vast tax bills by cancelling a perfectly legal ‘equity release’ scheme. Ancient Greeks and Romans would have thought it beyond belief that the main purpose of modern government was to remove money from its own citizens. Government had two functions in the ancient world: first, to protect its people from attack, whether from external forces (war) or internal forces (law-breaking), and second, to stay in power (because power = status and wealth). For both of these functions it needed money (or its equivalent). The question was: how to raise it?

Any ordinary member of the human race is revolted by the beheadings in Iraq and longs for revenge: let us indeed return the people the terrorists want released, but with their heads cut off too. The Roman historian Livy might have repeated a story from his Histories to suggest otherwise. The Romans were besieging Falerii, and having little luck. Now a schoolmaster to the children of the leading families ‘used in peacetime to take his boys outside the town walls for play and exercise, and the war did not alter his practice.... One day he took them through the enemy outposts into the Roman camp and Camillus’ headquarters. This vile act was accompanied by yet viler words: “These boys’ parents run the city. I have delivered them into your hands. Falerii is yours.

The middle classes are apparently abandoning the work ethic in favour of leisure. Aristotle would have strongly approved — on condition that they knew what to do with it. ‘The dignity of labour’ is not a concept Greeks would have understood. There are two reasons. First, they did not have any unified concept of ‘work’ as one of man’s great functions. Instead, they saw a multiplicity of different occupations, one as boring as the next, whose purpose was simply to keep one from penury. In other words, work had no positive value. Second, Greeks did not distinguish, as we do, between a person and what he had to offer. So to work for someone else was to make your very existence dependent on, and therefore subject to, another.

Today’s rich are not, apparently, giving enough of their wealth to good causes. The ancients would have known why. Euergesia — ‘benefaction, philanthropy’ — had always been seen as a virtue of the well-born Greek (for Aristotle it was an act that characterised the ‘magnificent’ man). It was, therefore, highly popular among the great and good of the Hellenic world, as the vast number of inscriptions and statues attesting such ‘euergetism’ indicate, whether erected by the euergetist himself or a grateful people. The culture spread to Rome too. Pliny the Younger, for example, endowed his home town, Como, with a school and a library, and in his will bequeathed it a public bath and a capital sum to give everyone a free annual dinner.