Peter Jones

Research in the USA has shown that it is possible to do something about grey hair. But ‘grey hair’ stands for ‘old age’, and there is nothing we can do about that, except make it easier to live with. Modern medicine certainly helps. There was no such luck in the ancient world, where the playwright Sophocles described old age as ‘unregarded, powerless, unsociable, unfriended, where misery couples with misery’. Take Fronto, a close friend of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. He died at the age of 60, and many of his more than 200 letters mention his physical ailments. Almost every limb was in pain at some stage or other, while he also suffered from gout, neuritis, rheumatism, sore throats, coughs, insomnia, stomach pains and perhaps cholera.

After much debate it was decided that the people would not be ordered to reciprocate the King’s oath of allegiance. This was wise. As ancient Greeks knew, oaths have serious implications. For them, to take an oath was in effect ‘to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it was false’. The Trojan war – the subject of the West’s first work of literature – happened only because Tyndareos, stepfather of Helen, compelled all her Greek suitors, on oath, to go to war on anyone who seduced her from her husband – which the Trojan Paris proceeded to do. Betraying that oath (Achilles was too young to swear it) would have meant divine punishment in the future. But the practice was open to abuse.

Baroness Benjamin has suggested that King Charles’s choice of her to join the coronation procession demonstrates that he is in favour of ‘diversity and inclusion’. What would the ancients have made of that, let alone of ‘equality’ and ‘identity’? ‘Equality’ had little purchase. Politically, male citizens had a vote in democratic Athens and (of sorts) in republican Rome. Otherwise there were human experiences of ‘levelling’ or ‘belonging’ in e.g. the battle-line, at childbirth, at the games, religious festivals and initiations. For the rest, it is important to understand that the ancient world was an unforgiving place and took no prisoners.

Elon Musk’s Twitter motto is Vox populi, vox Dei (‘The voice of the people, the voice of God’). This obviously appeals to the lawyer in Sir Keir Starmer since Twitter (being the voice of God) cannot be sued and therefore gives him scope to sail close to the wind. There is much he can learn from the example of the Romans. The mob is in full song on the walls of Pompeii. ‘Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this’; ‘Phileros is a eunuch’; ‘Nero’s finance officer says the food here is poison’; ‘Secundus likes to screw boys’ and much else of this sort. Roman orators too went the full Starmer. Curio described Julius Caesar as ‘every woman’s husband and every man’s wife’.

Refugees and asylum seekers are always with us. In the ancient world too, exiles, criminals, refugees, sometimes whole communities were on the move. There were three main conventions in place to help them. For an individual there was the act of supplication. If you knelt before someone – no Greek would willingly wish to appear so helpless – perhaps touching their knees, you would expect to be offered hospitality. Likewise, if there was a shrine nearby, putting yourself in contact with that would make you inviolable under the gods’ protection. Finally, one could appeal for asylum, derived from the ancient Greek word meaning ‘freedom from seizure’. There were even bilateral asylum treaties covering individuals (e.g.

The Guardian is worshipping at the shrine to its own piety with even more self-satisfaction than usual because it is paying millions in reparations to African-Americans based in Georgia and Jamaica, whose slave labour 200 years ago underpinned the wealth of the newspaper’s founders. But where is the justice in that? Aristotle argued that justice, which was good, depended on a form of equality. So for him, injustice was a matter of a man doing something wrong for his own advantage, thereby gaining an unequal share of something good. This could arise from (for example) buying and selling, ‘when quarrels arise when equals get unequal shares’. That was why money was invented, thought Aristotle, to solve problems that arose from such situations (e.g.

Charlie Mackesy’s bestselling and Oscar-winning stories about a boy, a mole, a fox and a horse deal in aperçus such as ‘Nothing beats kindness. It sits quietly behind all things’; ‘always remember, you’re enough, just as you are’. The ancient Greek Aesop – whoever and whenever he was (6th century bc?) – is the West’s inventor of animal fables, and his creations are rather more challenging. The c. 350 fables credited to him mostly feature stereotyped animals – the mighty lion, tricky fox, ravenous wolf and so on. Some examples: a fox and donkey agreed to hunt together. But a lion appeared and the fox, hoping to save himself, said he would entrap the donkey for the lion to eat. The lion agreed, and the fox led the donkey into a hunting pit.

In the ancient world, where life was insecure and refugees and asylum seekers not uncommon, there were no border posts, and free people could mostly come and go at will. But a concept of citizenship, technically differentiating ‘citizen’ from ‘non-citizen’, then emerged among the autonomous communities (‘city-states’: there were hundreds) of the ancient Greeks. Take 5th century bc Athens. Two Athenian parents were needed to produce citizen offspring, whose status was confirmed and registered by their local deme (a sort of parish). When the males became 18, they were permitted to attend the Assembly which made all the decisions that MPs make on our behalf today, and at 30 they could sit in the courts and stand for office.

Boris Johnson wants to give his father a knighthood. How very classical of him! Xenophon said that it was ‘the mark of a man to excel his friends in benefaction and his enemies in harm’ and no one was more of a friend than a man’s father. This mantra to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies was endlessly and publicly repeated (so litigation between family members and injustice against a relation caused great embarrassment). But how did one make friends beyond parents and kinsmen? Mutual benefit was the answer, the argument being prudential.

The leaked WhatsApp messages about Covid tell us little of relevance to the handling of the disease (but much about personalities) because we all know what policies they resulted in and who was responsible for them. They have simply encouraged many journalists to proclaim (again) how they were completely right all along about lockdowns, and many readers to demand they are never repeated. Athenians might have disagreed. In 430 bc, one year after going to war against Sparta, Athens was hit by a deadly plague, made all the more devastating by the fact that the whole population had been crammed within its defensive walls for fear of attack by the formidable Spartan army. It killed about a quarter of the population, perhaps as many as 100,000 people.

Our brave comedians spend much of their time fearlessly attacking politicians, to little or no effect. So did the comic playwright Aristophanes (5th century bc), but he also attacked his audience too if, when meeting in assembly as the dêmos (cf. dêmo-kratia, ‘people-power’), they were in his view too easily persuaded by politicians he hated, such as Cleon, to make bad decisions. In one comedy (424 bc), Aristophanes imagined the Athenian state as a household, headed up by Dêmos (‘The People’). Dêmos is served by two slaves (= politicians), who are fed up that a foulmouthed new slave Paphlagon (a thinly disguised Cleon) has taken total control of their master. But they find an oracle saying that Paphlagon will be displaced by a tripe-seller, i.e.

In ad 115 Antioch (Antakya) was destroyed, as today, by a huge earthquake, described dramatically by a historian 100 years later. In ad 178, Smyrna (modern Izmir, west Turkey) suffered the same fate. The next day one of its sons, Aelius Aristides, wrote to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius: ‘Smyrna, the jewel of Asia that beautifies your empire, lies low, wiped out by fire and earthquake. In the name of the gods, reach out your hand to the limit of your capacity. Smyrna, the greatest of today’s Greek cities – thanks to the gods, you emperors past and present and the senate – has now suffered the greatest disaster in living memory. Yet for all that, destiny has preserved for us one lifeline of salvation: you. You saw the city, you know what has been lost.

If Dominic Raab has been bullying, he must think it was to his advantage. Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, thought so too. At the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, he brutally dismissed the old priest of Apollo who had offered a huge ransom for the return of his daughter. So the priest prayed to Apollo, who loosed a devastating plague on the Greek army. In contrast, let Mr Raab contemplate the founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great (d. 530 bc). Cyrus was grandson of the earlier king Astyages, a Mede. But Cyrus’s father was Persian, not Median, and because it had been foretold that Cyrus would inherit the throne, Astyages ordered that the child be left to die on the mountains.

A fast-food restaurant in Wrexham will play classical music during the evenings in a bid to stop antisocial behaviour. While some ancient Greeks denied that music per se provided anything for you apart from an unimportant kind of pleasure (though the words of a song might make a difference), others thought that music could have powerful mood-altering effects, for good or ill. For example, we are told that Pythagoras developed a form of musical therapy, consisting of songs and pieces for the lyre designed to help students get up and active in the morning and sleep well at night.

One MP pays a tax fine, one borrows money from a relation and one is accused of bullying staff. More ‘corruption and sleaze’? Romans might have seen it as a matter of basic values. In 443 bc, Rome established the prestigious office of censor, to be held by two men, usually ex-consuls. As well as maintaining an official list of Roman citizens and their property (the census), they were also responsible for the oversight of public morals (regimen morum). Anyone who fell below what the censors regarded as the high standards of a Roman citizen was removed from his tribe, was not allowed to vote and had a mark made against his name on the citizen register.

Where should the Elgin marbles be on show? Their display in the Duveen gallery of the British Museum is not impressive. To put it crudely, a Greek temple consisted of a sturdy shoe box surrounded by columns. The purpose of the shoe box (cella) was two-fold: to support the massive weight of the roof, and to provide a secure house for the god, represented by a statue, to live in. People did enter to venerate the statue, but the focus of worship was the altar outside. The external view of the temple, then, was crucial.

Google provides information easily, which the ancients did as best they could. But what would they have made of ChatGPT? Ancient education drew on information about the past to help deal with the problems of the present. Take the Romans. Future statesmen were taught to scour sources – both myth and history – for learning military strategy as well as how to win political and legal arguments. The cultural elite (poets) learnt the basics of poetry – i.e. verse composition – at school and then ransacked the masterpieces of ancient Greek literature to hone their skills. But that was a long and arduous process, and Google-like reference works eased the problem. Varro wrote extensively on the Latin language, grammar and rhetoric (and much else).

The antics of Harry and Meghan would not have gone down well in the ancient world, where the family and its future flourishing were an absolute priority. Harry’s proposal to marry Meghan would have been a matter of some negotiation – Roman orators argued that the paterfamilias (‘head of the family’, with absolute authority over it) should always be consulted on such matters, but ultimately it was wise to allow the son to have his way – but Meghan’s attitude would not have gone down well. The point is that the family was welcoming into its bosom a female outsider – a doubly dangerous moment – who had to learn the family’s ways.

As Vladimir Putin’s war grinds on, how does one make the case for peace? Around ad 100, the ancient Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (‘golden-mouthed’), persuaded the citizens of Nicomedia in the Graeco-Roman province of Bithynia (N. Turkey) to make peace with their bitter local rival Nicaea. His central theme was praise of harmony. While discord splits marriages and households, and war brings death and destruction alike to young and old, harmony lies at the heart of ‘friendship, reconciliation and kinship’. It enables us, he said, to trade freely with Nicaea, with whom we exchange embassies, and enjoy marriage and ties of personal friendship.

Christmas is a time of feasting. So too was the Roman festival of Saturnalia, held in honour of the god Saturn, which took place between 17 and 23 December, when even a poor peasant might kill a pig fattened up for the occasion or, if not, hope to join the company of someone who had. Drinking and riot too were all part of the festivities. Such self-indulgence was fair – or fare – enough once a year, but throughout the year? That was what made Roman moralists reflect sadly on the corruption of that frugal and simple life which they judged to have been the key to Roman greatness.