Peter Jones

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.

As the forces returning from duty in Iraq know best of all, important though amazing technology is, the camaraderie and morale of the unit make the crucial difference. The Romans knew this, too, and took steps to nurture the right frame of mind in their soldiers. First, punishments and incentives strongly affected personal behaviour. The penalty for sleeping on watch, failing to obey orders or abandoning weapons in battle was to be clubbed to death. But the soldier who performed well was congratulated and rewarded by the general in front of the whole army, while victory usually meant a distribution of booty among the men, often worth a very great deal (a prospect that always did wonders for recruitment). Second, high-quality leadership brought out the best in the men.

Apologies for singing a very old song, but with the debate on a referendum over the European constitution in full swing, and the term 'parliamentary democracy' being bandied about by New Labour to repel the notion, it is time to remind readers again how meaningless the term 'parliamentary democracy' actually is. 'Democracy' derives from d'mokratia, 'people-power' (Greek d'mos 'people' + kratos 'rule, authority, power'). This term was invented to describe the system put in place in Athens by Cleisthenes in 508 bc. The result was that all the decisions which our MPs take today were taken in Athens by the majority vote of the people (male citizens over 18) meeting in the Assembly. D'mokratia was destroyed by the Macedonian conquerors of Athens in 322 bc and has never been tried since.

The footballer David Beckham has had new tattoos imprinted on his arms, complete with Latin tags. One reads perfectio in spiritu, 'perfection in spirit', the other ut amem et foveam, 'to love and to cherish', translated into Latin from the Solemnisation of Matrimony in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. What is going on? Tattoos have a long history going back to 11th-dynasty Egypt (c. 2000 bc). They were especially popular in Britain – Britanni, originally Pretani or Priteni, meant 'painted/tattooed people' (cf. Latin Picti). These days they have become a form of heraldry, marking the body rather than the shield with one's personal 'coat of arms', for sexual as well as social purposes.

Two British commandos from the Special Boat Service (motto 'Not by force, but by guile') escaped capture in Iraq by trekking some 100 miles across mountainous terrain, by night, to the Syrian border. Who were they? Nobody knows, or will know – a unique form of heroism. In the ancient world it was public performance, and so public acknowledgment, that counted. In Homer's Iliad, Sarpedon, a Trojan ally from Lycia, gives the classic statement of the heroic 'contract' to his second-in-command Glaucus that in return for the best of material rewards 'we are obliged to take our places in the front ranks and fling ourselves into the flames of battle. Only then will our Lycian men-at-arms say of us, "Well!

The Americans say they have no plans to attack any other foreign power – at the moment. To judge by the Iraq conflict, however, it will not be St Augustine's concept of the 'just war' that controls that decision, but that of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. In his de officiis ('On Obligations', 44 bc), Cicero discusses how justice should be applied in a range of cases, including war. Arguing that there are laws of warfare which must be strictly observed, he continues, 'Since there are two ways of settling a dispute, by discussion or by force, and the former is characteristic of man, the latter of animals, we must resort to force only when discussion is no longer possible. The only excuse for going to war is that one may live in peace, unharmed.

What will be Middle Eastern historians' judgment of Saddam's regime and its enforced collapse? Is there a Tacitus among them? In his Histories, Tacitus describes the traumatic 'Year of the Four Emperors' (ad 69) that followed the death of Nero, a year when general after general attempted to seize power by force, and the Roman world seemed to fall apart. There is an especially dramatic description of the fall of the third brief tenant of the imperial throne, Vitellius – an end which may yet mirror Saddam's. When Rome was captured by the troops of his successor, Vespasian, Vitellius was taken by chair through the back of the palace to his wife's house. His aim was to lie low and get away by night to his brother's home, 60 miles to the south in Tarracina.

Commentators are complaining that the Iraqi army is refusing to confront the coalition forces head-on. Very sensible of them. Quintus Fabius Maximus (charmingly known as Verrucosus, 'covered in warts') would have applauded. In 218 bc Hannibal brought his Carthaginian army (complete with elephants) from north Africa, across Spain and southern France, and over the Alps down into Italy. His purpose was to take revenge on the Romans for the Carthaginian defeat in the first Punic War (265-241 bc). In battles at Ticinus, Trebia and Trasimene, he thrashed the Romans in open field, at a cost to the them of about 50,000 casualties. The Romans were appalled at this turn of events.