Peter Jones

To judge from current events in the Middle East, the god of Israel appears to be battling the god of the Palestinians, even though they both seem to be the same god. But are they guiding events? And if not, why not? The Greek historian Thucydides (d. c. 400 bc) had no truck with the idea. In his account of the long war between the two most powerful Greek city states of their time – democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta (431-404 bc), each with their respective allies – Thucydides was the first historian we know of to discount divine intervention in human affairs. Naturally he reported on the widespread phenomenon of religious belief among the Greeks and the use to which it was put.

Street protests are all the rage at the moment. Among the crowds marching up and down in London, there are those holding up banners urging Palestinians to destroy Israel. When ancients protested, they did so to serve their own interests. Athenians did not need street protests. They invented democracy (508 bc), and all male citizens, meeting in Assembly, debated their protests there. The Roman republic, founded in 509 bc, was initially run by ‘patricians’, men chosen from a few select tribes by Rome’s earlier kings to advise him. Over the next 250 years, the rest of the Roman population (‘plebeians’), vastly outnumbering patricians, periodically withdrew their labour (especially from military service: there were no standing armies) to win political equality.

Elon Musk has predicted that AI will prevent anyone needing to work and will raise worldwide incomes at the same time. But will it rustle up a quick lamprey à la Bordelaise at a minute’s notice, to be washed down with a vintage Ch. Bruce Anderson? Greek comic poets had far more satisfying fantasies. Perhaps encouraged by philosophers like Plato who dreamed up visions of past times when, for example, birds and animals were tame and conversed happily with men on a wide range of topics, comedians took to constructing a fantasy derived from the almost universal ownership of slaves; the point being that, although slaves should do everything you wanted, they were so devious, incompetent or simply lazy that there was no guarantee anything would be done properly, or indeed at all.

This year, in its annual Supreme Court moot trial of a famous ancient figure, the charity Classics for All charged the consul Cicero with illegally ordering the execution of five traitors working with the failed politician Catiline to bring revolution to Rome (63 bc). In his history of that crisis, Sallust composed speeches for Julius Caesar in defence of the conspirators, and for Cato the Younger for their execution, followed by a character assessment. This package may prompt reflections on our times. Caesar argued that men facing difficult questions ‘should clear their minds of hatred, amity, anger and compassion… success is achieved by applying judgment; but your passions will rule you, if you let them, and your judgment will go out of the window’.

The Hamas charter does not mince its words: ‘The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’ A return to the ancient pagan gods would surely be an improvement, but the modern world adopts the Hamas line. Consider the current deities of the bigots whose opponents, hiding behind a clearly sacrilegious belief in rational argument, must be condemned to eternal cancellation. The Greek and Roman gods of myth were far more accommodating. Take Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the first works of what we call western literature (c.700 bc).

To protect Gazan civilians (used as shields by Hamas), Israel has told them to leave their homes. When in 665 bc Romans forced the people of ancient Alba Longa (from which Rome had been founded) to leave and move to Rome, the historian Livy sympathised with their civilians’ plight as legions arrived to demolish their city: ‘They found none of the pandemonium associated with gates being smashed down, walls reduced to rubble, citadel captured, and armed men rampaging through the streets, killing and burning, but only a despairing silence and wordless grief, so paralysing that the populace had no idea what to leave or take with them; they just stood at the doors of the houses, asking each other what to do, or wandered through them, as if for the last time.

After the scrapping of the HS2 link to Manchester, private investment may be needed to build the Old Oak Common to Euston section. Romans would have invited private investment and construction, the bill paid on completion. Wealthy Romans formed a legal association called a societas when putting their own money into personal ventures, e.g. slave-trading, maritime ventures, the export of garum (fish sauce). But since Rome had no civil service to speak of, it needed wealthy individuals also to put their money behind state contracts put out for tender, when they were called publicani, ‘public servants’.

Scientists at Cambridge University have made the astonishing discovery that repressing your emotions might have something to be said for it. The ancients turned their analytical minds to that, and much else, long ago. In the 7th century bc the ancient Greeks invented natural philosophy, arguing about the physical world in rational terms, excluding gods. Socrates then got them wondering how best to lead one’s life: why not reason about its problems, including emotional ones? For example, Plato (d. 348 bc) argued that emotions such as distress, fear, and anger, but most of all insatiable pleasure – ‘the greatest spur to evil’ – were destructive forces:  reasoned reflection was required to control them. Epictetus (d.

Excited crowds of youth, encouraged by adults who should know better, take the view that opinions with which they disagree should not be debated but subject to control by the mob. In the ancient world we know of only a handful of examples. Socrates’s trial is the most famous: at a politically fraught time in 399 bc, he was executed on a charge of impiety, i.e. atheism (it was widely believed that if gods were unacknowledged, Athens would be in trouble). But thinkers long debated the subject quite freely: here are two from an extensive list. Assume the existence of traditional beliefs about the gods was of the same importance today and imagine what the mob would have to say about Xenophanes (died c. 475 bc).

The government is supplying the obese with a slimming drug Wegovy. But the ancient world was dominated by the emaciated, and the fat were extremely thin on the ground. They were therefore the subject of considerable interest. A degree of corpulence was the sign of a rich, healthy and prosperous man. But obesity turned one into a figure of fun or ignominy: it demonstrated an inability to control one’s appetite for luxuries. The 8th Ptolemy of Egypt was so fat that it was impossible to put one’s arms around his stomach. His son was equally fat and incapable of walking without leaning on people, though loved dancing at drinking parties. Dionysius, the ‘gentle, reasonable’ tyrant of Heraclea, was so fat that he choked when he fell into a deep sleep.

Whatever the problems involved in building, let alone finishing, HS2, it is hoped that it will replicate what was ultimately achieved – prosperity, intentionally or not – by the 53,000 miles of roads with which Rome covered its empire (and so successfully that prosperity is now found wherever networks of Roman roads were established across Europe, including Cornwall). The first Roman road was the Via Appia (named after its proposer Appius Claudius), built in 312 bc. It connected Rome with the port of Brindisi 300 miles south; it also offered easy crossing to the wealthy Greek East. This became of great importance: travel by ship, far faster than by road, became vital for economic expansion.

The American firm B Corp offers businesses the chance to win a ‘kitemark’ by a box-ticking process showing that they are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, and Coutts decided to go for it. Given how that turned out, one wonders how they reached that decision. Had they followed Aristotle’s advice on decision-making, they might have come out better from the debacle. In dealings with other people, Aristotle argued, it was essential to pay close attention to the following criteria: a) What are the reasons for which you are taking action? b) What were the needs that prompted it? c) How do you hope to achieve what you want? d) Are you dealing with the right people on the matter? e) Is it the right time to act?

For most people in the ancient world, holidays meant local public festivals – in Rome there were 135 a year – when politicians staged extravagant games and theatrical shows. But the elite mostly spent summers in their own or their friends’ villas, well away from the stench, heat and mosquitoes of Rome. We tend to go abroad to ‘get away from it all’, though Seneca would have doubted that would do us any good – because it was ‘a change of character, not of air’ that people needed. He also quoted Socrates asking, ‘How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you and are saddled with the very thing that drove you away?’ For those who did travel abroad, as today, there was no escaping local guides.

SOCRATES: I was walking back from the gymnasium when I saw Keir Mather, the new MP for Selby, on his way there. I had been told he was young and good-looking and went to a world-famous Oxford College, so I have been very keen to meet to him. Hello, O Keir. MATHER: And you too, Socrates. But what, therefore? SOCRATES: Now that you are an MP, you must tell me what justice is. For that surely is a lawmaker’s main concern. MATHER: Enough verbal games. Justice is defined by the laws. My job is to solve problems in the real world. SOCRATES: Are Tory laws, then, just? MATHER: Of course they are not!

The ancients were as fascinated by rumour as, to judge by recent events in Russia and the BBC, we are. Homer called rumour ‘the messenger of Zeus’, with a fondness for racing through crowds. Virgil described it as a winged monster, with an unsleeping eye under every feather, a mouth and tongue never silent and an ear always pricked, combining truth with lies and distortions. Ovid saw it as a sort of clearing-house ‘from which the whole world is in view’ – a structure of echoing brass, with thousands of entrances and exits, echoing back, and so increasing the volume of, the ‘murmured whisperings’ it picked up. Roman politicians were well aware that rumour was an important force in creating public opinion.

It is encouraging to see Sir Keir Starmer taking a leaf out of the ancients’ book by putting oracy (from Latin orator) on the curriculum. Indeed, on the ancient curriculum, there was little else of such importance. State education did not exist. It was an entirely private operation, designed to supply the elite with the skills necessary to win arguments in political and legal forums. (They alone had the time for such an activity; our ‘school’ derives from scholê, the Greek for ‘leisure’). It began with the young relentlessly analysing language in minute technical detail, e.g.

Daisy Goodwin, a 61-year-old married novelist and TV producer, has alleged that ten years ago she was molested by Daniel Korski, and said she felt ‘entirely justified’ in describing the alleged incident a decade later. She claimed that other women had come forward with ‘very interesting stories’ on the topic. What would the Athenians have made of this? An Athenian woman was a precious asset, supplying children for battle but, being too weak to fight, denied political decision-making. She was integrated into society within the family unit, with female friends and vital religious functions, and certainly holding views of her own (as Homer’s epics make clear).