Peter Jones

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).

How secure is Vladimir Putin? His Presidential Security Service consists of 2,500 personnel, his Federal Protective Service of 50,000 troops and the National Guard, essentially his personal army, of 350,000. What could possibly go wrong? Roman emperors might have had a view. It was Augustus who invented the Praetorian Guard (27 bc), a personal, prestigious protection force of 9,000 men, based in Rome and accompanying him abroad. It did not start well. The second emperor Tiberius came within an ace of being displaced by his captain of the Guard Sejanus. The next (insane) emperor Caligula was murdered by conspirators, including a Praetorian, and the Guard hauled out a terrified Claudius from behind a curtain and made him emperor.

SOCRATES: I was walking through the agora after having had a discussion with an impetuous young man who argued that a good orator could win a debate on any subject, even though he knew nothing about it. This left me rather baffled, so it was a pleasure to fall in with the lawyer Lady Hallett, on whose good sense one could always rely... SOCRATES: Good morning, Lady Hallett. Whence, whither, and wherefore? LADY HALLETT: From home, O Socrates, to chair the inquiry into the Covid pandemic. S: Clearly, then, you are an expert in pandemics. LH: Far from it, O Socrates. S: Then where is your expertise? LH: In carrying out inquiries. S: Then could you carry out an inquiry into anything? LH: But of course. That is the job of a judge.

What does a king do when his privileged but dysfunctional son turns against him, flees to America and spends his time there attacking the monarch and his family? King Charles’s reaction has been to let him get on with it. But given what he might have done, the Stoic philosopher Seneca (d. ad 65), and adviser to Nero would have seen this as an admirable act of mercy. In his essay on that subject (De Clementia), Seneca discussed the case of Tarius, who discovered that his son was plotting to murder him. In such circumstances, it was customary for the father, who had the right of life and death over his whole household, to summon a private council of family and friends, which in this case included the emperor Augustus, to decide what action to take.

What would ancient Greeks have made of the current protests relating to the oil industry and identity reassignment? Very little indeed. The Greek invention of democracy (‘people power’) emerged in the late 6th century bc after strong popular demand for more political control over tyrants and oligarchs. The result was a system in which all male citizens over 18 debated and determined all political questions in the regular Assemblies. Most official posts were held, usually for one year, by citizens who presented themselves for selection by lot (voting was considered meritocratic, not democratic), with serious consequences for failure. Anyone who wished to wield power could do so only through his capacity to persuade a majority of the all-powerful Assembly.

Classical literature has the reputation of being pretty serious stuff, far removed from the world that Jeremy Clarke inhabited. But he would have felt perfectly at home in Pompeii. Take the conversation decorating the grave monument of the bar-owners Lucius Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas (beat that, Frankie Howerd!): ‘Innkeeper! The bill!’ ‘You’ve had a sextarius of wine, and bread: one as. Relish, two asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘The girl, eight asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Hay for the mule, two asses.’ ‘That mule – it’ll be the ruin of me.’ Jeremy would also surely have admired the lifestyle and works of the scandalous author Petronius, whom the historian Tacitus described as follows: ‘He slept during the day and spent the nights in business and pleasure.

Last week’s column ended with a Roman funerary inscription: ‘I died of a surfeit of doctors.’ But where did this surfeit come from? Let Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) explain. Pliny devoted book 29 of his Natural History (a vast encyclopedia of Roman life) to the history of medicine. Claiming that no discipline ‘undergoes more frequent changes, and none is more profitable either’, Pliny pointed the finger at Greek doctors. These had been welcomed into Rome from the third century bc with their fancy philosophical ideas – all different – which their eloquence persuaded people immediately to adopt in place of the good, old, experience-based Roman herbal treatments, overseen by the trusty master of the house.