Peter Jones

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.

Is evidence obtained under torture admissible in this country? Yes, argues Lord Justice Laws, as long as it comes from a state where Home Secretary David Blunkett has no powers to stop it, and he does not ‘promote’ or ‘connive at’ it. The ancients understood perfectly well that the value of evidence from torture could be flimsy, especially when it was to be used against other people (evidence from slaves under torture against their masters was not accepted by Romans, unless, for example, treason was involved). But this did not stop them using it far more widely than we ever would. There is, however, another principle at work. The notoriously severe Cassius Longinus (c. 140 bc) — famous for formulating cui bono?

How Francis Crick, discoverer of the structure of DNA, must be enjoying himself in the Underworld! He had so much in common with the early Greek philosophers. These thinkers, who were natural scientists rather than philosophers, debated what the world was made of and how it came to be as it was. They established some basic rules of scientific debate — that the world was rationally constructed and could therefore be understood by the use of reason and argument from hypotheses, and that supernatural explanations for the phenomena under discussion were not allowed. Crick would have thoroughly approved of all this, especially of the fact that some of these thinkers could be accused of being atheists (Crick had no time for religion).

When Plato writes about education, he comes up with a brilliant image of the master-pupil relationship: ‘After a long partnership in a common life, truth flashes on the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark.’ The Labour and Tory education manifestos have very little to say about this ‘rather dodgy’ (© C. Clarke) concept. They think the answer to school problems is to play about with systems and structures. The Roman professor Quintilian (c. ad 90) is the first ancient to think seriously about how schools work. He insists that a good school depends as much on the character and psychological understanding of the teacher as on the materials for instruction. He must be a man of scholarship and high principles, since pupils learn by example.

Aitios in ancient Greek means both ‘responsible’ and ‘culpable’. Since Greeks were well aware of the distinction, they would have much enjoyed the nuances of the Butler report and the responses to it. The Athenian orator Demosthenes (384–322 bc) comes up with some fascinating general statements about the problem. First, Demosthenes recognises that a wrong policy might be recommended because the relevant facts were not known and the situation was not understood.

As George Bush continues to battle with the problems of Iraq, he could do worse than read Virgil’s Aeneid (19 bc), in which Virgil applauds Rome’s world-wide dominion, but does not discount its human cost. Defeated by the Greeks, a band of now homeless Trojans under Aeneas flees the burning city and, assured by the gods that a new land awaits in the West, sets out on the high seas to find it. False leads take them to Crete and Sicily, and then a storm drives them to Carthage, where the queen Dido seems likely to persuade them to settle, till the gods warn Aeneas off and Dido commits suicide. After a visit to the underworld to visit his father Anchises, who reveals to him the whole future of Rome, Aeneas and his men arrive in Italy.

An American has done some ‘research’ to demonstrate what he claims no one has yet acknowledged: that hoi polloi know better than the experts. Ancient Greeks knew that some 2,400 years ago. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato makes Socrates wonder how it can be that, when technical matters like ship-building are being discussed before the sovereign Assembly (all Athenian males over 18), the Assembly howls down anyone who is not an expert; but when state policy is being discussed, any Nikos, Stavros or Giorgios can stand up and have his say. Clearly, says Socrates, they don’t believe that ‘policy’ (unlike ship-building) can be taught, otherwise they would demand that only experts in ‘policy’ would be allowed a say.

As MPs prepare yet another raft of vital legislation relating to killer dogs, no, sorry, gun-control, no, ah yes, of course, the obesity ‘epidemic’ (or was it anorexia? no, that was a year or so back), they might do well to read what Plutarch (c.ad 110) has to say on the general issue. In one of his ‘Table Talks’, Plutarch and friends are trying to work out whether brand new diseases could come into the world — as some doctors claimed — and if so, how: from other worlds, or what?