‘I get along with him well. I like him a lot,’ Donald Trump has said of Sir Keir Starmer. ‘He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far. I may not agree with his philosophy, but I have a very good relationship with him.’ Sir Keir must be thrilled – how wonderful to be praised by the most powerful man in the world, joining Nigel Farage as teacher’s pet!
There were many Romans too who prided themselves as being amici principis, ‘friends of the emperor’. These were an inner ring of advisers, many of them immediate family, agreed to be influential; but in what way was never quite clear. The philosopher Epictetus (once a slave of Nero’s secretary) drew attention to the dangers that faced an amicus. Invited to dinner, he would fawn like a slave, fearful of making the slightest faux pas. But not invited, he felt humiliated.
For the emperor’s amici, it was that fear of losing out that kept them in line. Epictetus made the point: ‘No one loves the emperor – we love riches, a tribunate, a praetorship, a consulship. Anyone who has these things at his disposal [and especially a good trade deal for Britain] must necessarily be our master.’ But the price was a high one, with no guarantee of success. As he said: ‘You must stay up at night, run back and forth, kiss hands, wait on other people’s doors, and say and do many slavish things… like children at parties scrambling for nuts and figs.
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