Peter Jones

Since Christmas is the season of good cheer but seems to leave millions squabbling, resentful and as miserable as sin, it is an appropriate time to consider what the key to happiness is. The ancients provided two distinct but highly practical theories, easily condensable into the average cracker.

As WMDs fail to surface in Iraq, it looks more and more likely that we went to war on false pretences. This is no new phenomenon. According to the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 490-425 bc), the first war of Western literature was fought on equally illusory grounds — though that did not stop Herodotus justifying it. In his Iliad and Odyssey, Homer (c. 700 bc) informs us that Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, seduced Menelaus’ wife Helen back to Ilium in Troy. The Greeks raised an army to get her back. Efforts to reach a settlement failed, but after a ten-year siege Ilium was sacked and Helen recovered. Homer even portrays life chez the Menelauses back home in Greece in their twilight years.

What should men pray for? The Roman satirist Juvenal (writing c. ad 120) famously answered mens sana in corpore sano, ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. One wonders what he would have made of today’s men and women in search of the corpus sanum, lurching along the fume-filled roadsides in their huge fluorescent trainers, chatting earnestly into the bottles of water clenched to their ears. Good health, largely a matter of pot luck in the ancient world, was very highly valued. If you survived birth, childhood and disease and could enjoy a respectable diet, you could count yourself pretty fortunate. In such a world anything that could do you good was to be recommended, and exercise was high on doctors’ priorities.

Cheque-books have been sharpened in America to lure top professors to top universities, and the ones attracting the most attention are those ‘great communicators’ with a reputation based only loosely on specialised knowledge: e.g. those who have released ‘rap’ records, or undergone sex-change operations, or achieved something of comparable intellectual value. The ancient Greek sophists, too, knew all about what would sell. The sophists were freelance professional educators, with a commitment to teaching pupils to make a successful public career for themselves by becoming great ‘communicators’.

So Gordon Brown's Treasury has overspent its budget by 40 per cent - all on itself! No wonder the officials didn't know where the money had gone. What fun if they had had to account for it in classical Athens .... One of the most extraordinary innovations of Athenian democracy was the appointment of executive officials. To simplify and omit some of the steps in the process, most of them were picked out of a hat from those who put themselves forward.

Commentators are expressing shock at the Hutton inquiry's 'revelation' that Tony Blair consults a private cabal of chums about policy. Excuse the Roman historian while he stifles a yawn. The Greeks had a word for 'a monarch's court', and Roman writers adopted it (aula) to describe the imperial 'court' that emerged with the advent of emperors: politics having been a relatively open affair under the republican system (rule by Senate and elected executives), power was now in the hands of the emperor and his chosen associates, a closed circle with personal access to the emperor and the power to control access for others. Immediate family, including wives, bulked large in this circle.

The death of Dr David Kelly has raised questions about justifications for suicide. The ancient Greeks were equally interested in the issue. Greeks, like Romans, tended to take the view that humans were, for the most part, in full control of what they chose to do. The concepts of ‘mental imbalance’ or ‘unconscious motivation’ were not commonly applied. The main question, then, was ‘Why did X commit suicide?’, and the judgment about whether the suicide was to be applauded or condemned depended on the circumstances. In general, it was more favourable to commit suicide as a result of conscious deliberation than rash impulse: one must at all times be in control.

Year by year at exam results time, every Candice in the world points to her sheaves of A-grade A-levels and from the depths of her Pot Noodles ululates her indignation at the manifest injustice of her rejection by Oxbridge. Greeks would have thought such youths deranged: did they not know what it meant to compete?

Schools minister David Miliband, condemned to a life of perpetual enthusiasm for New Labour policies as he attempts to climb the greasy pole, has drawn an analogy between students getting As at A-level and Paula Radcliffe beating a world record; while the gay cleric Canon John, recently rejected as Bishop of Reading, finds a 'true analogy' between homosexual use of the body parts in love-making with unconventional methods of painting a picture (e.g. with the feet). Both had better read Aristotle on the subject before they get carried away. Aristotle sees analogy as a sort of paradigm.

It is fashionable to dismiss the ancient historians' descriptions of tyrannical Roman emperors as so much literary stereotyping. But the evidence offered by, e.g.

The MP John Redwood has hired a London PR firm to raise his profile. The firm is keen for him to feature in lifestyle articles, when he will talk about his great love of windsurfing, films and theatre. 'John is happy to talk about a wide range of subjects,' we are told, including 'his favourite restaurant/food and his passion for motoring.' It sounds an exciting prospect – how one longs to hear about why he loves going vroom – and all too horribly typical of Plato's democratic man. In his Republic, Plato analyses the way in which societies degenerate over time and mutate from one type of political system to another.

Dr David Kelly was a government expert but, in his desire to put the record straight about Iraqi arms, found himself crushed between the grindstones of government determination to impose it own views about the weapons of mass destruction, whatever the truth, and the sense of duty he had to ensure that the public was properly informed. The issue boils down to one of morality, as the opening of Plato's Republic shows. Socrates and his friends are trying to define 'morality', and Thrasymachus asserts that morality is 'acting to the advantage of the stronger party'.

Poor old Archbeard of Canterbury! Who will rid him of these infernal gay priests? Or infernal anti-gay priests? Ancient Greeks would have found the whole issue baffling. First, consulting gods for their views was a straightforward business: one examined entrails or sent a delegation to an oracle. If they got the interpretation wrong, the god would let them know soon enough. Greeks would have wondered what sort of Christian god this was who was incapable of alerting his followers to his will. Second, ancient gods were interested only in being honoured, not in overseeing human morality. So Greeks would have found it strange that gods should be concerned about what people did in bed. To both men and gods, sex was just another aspect of the natural world, like rivers and the harvest.

Last week this column began publishing Alexander Demandt's list of the 210 reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire (from Der Falls Rom, 1984). The list is now completed, and a conclusion drawn: 'Lack of leadership, lack of male dignity, lack of military recruits, lack of orderly imperial succession, lack of qualified workers, lack of rainfall, lack of religiousness, lack of seriousness, large landed properties, lead-poisoning, lethargy, levelling (cultural), levelling (social), loss of army discipline, loss of authority, loss of energy, loss of instincts, loss of population, luxury.

Greeks and Romans loved lists, from Tables of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning together with a List of Their Writings to Words Suspected of Not Having Been Used by the Ancients. In the same spirit, this column will over the next two weeks publish, from Professor Alexander Demandt's Der Falls Rom (1984), a list of the 210 reasons for the fall of the Roman empire. As modern empires rise and fall in these troubled times, the lessons of history – or should that be historians? – may help us find our bearings: 'Abolition of gods, abolition of rights, absence of character, absolutism, agrarian question, agrarian slavery, anarchy, anti-Germanism, apathy, aristocracy, asceticism, attacks by Germans, attacks by Huns, attacks by nomads on horseback.

A spate of books is being published to explain the many useful lessons that businessmen can learn from the great figures of the past. One of the figures is Alexander the Great. Well, yes. But then again, no. In 334 bc, with a formidable army at his back, Alexander set out to take revenge against the might of the Persian empire for having dared to attack Greece 150 years earlier. By 331 bc he had driven the Persians out of Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Judaea and Egypt; by 330 he had conquered Iraq and Iran (the Persian homeland) and defeated the Persian king Darius. Mission accomplished? Not for Alexander.

In his essay 'Politics and the English Language' (1946), George Orwell laments the corruption of the English language in postwar society. Everywhere he finds pompous phrases designed to sound weighty ('render inoperative', meaning 'break'); Latin- or Greek-based words where simpler words will do ('ameliorate' for 'improve', 'clandestine' for 'secret'); words which have lost their meaning ('fascism', meaning 'something not desirable'); padding to give an impression of depth ('this is a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind'); clichés ('ring the changes on', 'play into the hands of', 'toe the line', 'explore every avenue').

Chancellor Brown has identified our national genius with 'enterprise and inventiveness, our tolerance and belief in liberty, fairness and public service – and our internationalism'. This last, meaningless aspect of our 'genius' is tossed in to help him argue that we should adopt the 'you-row', as that Welsh newscaster puts it, and change Europe to our way of doing things. It is not a logic that would have appealed to Pericles. The Athenian historian Thucydides tells us that Pericles devoted his Funeral Speech of 430 bc (commemorating those fallen in battle that year) to identifying the unique qualities that made up the 'national genius' of Athens.

Nearly 75 per cent of university lecturers think the current intake of students is the worst they can remember. Plato may help us decide what 'worst' means; and an important conclusion follows. In his Euthydemus, Plato portrays two clever-clogs sophists, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, toying verbally with a young man, Cleinias. First Euthydemus asks him who learns – the wise or the ignorant? Cleinias answers, 'The wise'. Euthydemus now points out that, when Cleinias was learning (for example) how to play the lute or to write, he had a teacher; and the teacher taught him because Cleinias did not know how to do either of those things. Cleinias assents, and Euthydemus asks him if in that situation he was wise or ignorant; and Cleinias is forced to admit that he was ignorant.