Peter Jones

Whatever the result of Sue Gray’s report on ‘gatherings’ in Downing Street, there is a political lesson to be learned: any excuse will do, even a party, when people are out to get you, as the Roman historian Tacitus (ad 56–c.ad 120) well knew. ad 69: the emperor Vitellius was lying seriously ill when he noticed a mansion with lights ablaze throughout the night. He was told that a ‘lavish, licentious’ party was being held in honour of Junius Blaesus. Critics denounced it and Vitellius angrily agreed (Tacitus commented: ‘There are people on the lookout for signs of the emperor’s displeasure’). Lucius Vitellius, the emperor’s brother, who loathed Blaesus, now saw his chance to destroy him.

The statue of the Bristol merchant Edward Colston is apparently guilty of a hate crime. Let us hope that the four charged with pulling him down are indeed, for their sake, ‘on the right side of history’, as they claim, since statues have a habit of getting their own back on those who dishonour them. The statue of Theagenes (5th C bc) provides an instructive example. A Greek from the island of Thasos, Theagenes was one of the greats of the games’ circuit (so one should hope: his father was a priest of Heracles). As a boxer and all-in fighter (pankratiast), he won twice at the Olympics (boxing 480 bc, pankration 476 bc), and 22 times at the three other major games (Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean).

Saturnalia was a period of Roman fun and games held just before our Christmas. Macrobius (c. ad 430) composed a series of conversations enjoyed by cultured Romans over this festive period, covering a vast range of topics, one of which featured amusing true stories. What better way to start the year? The emperor Augustus, tired of being offered epigrams almost daily by a poor Greek, dashed off one in Greek himself and gave it to him. Expressing his admiration, the Greek gave Augustus a few coins, swearing he would have given more if he had them. Everyone burst out laughing, and Augustus gave him 100,000 sesterces. A man appeared in Rome, looking remarkably like Augustus. Augustus summoned him and asked: ‘Was your, er, mother ever in Rome?

Problems about the misuse of history, especially on subjects such as race and colonialism, have been running for a long time. But when it comes to the ancient world, there are also problems about the misuse of literature. Dame Mary Beard’s ‘manifesto’ Women and Power (2018) contains an example of the problem. Her thesis is that women’s voices in the public sphere (my emphasis) have been ‘silenced’ by men ever since the West’s first literature (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) gave us our first access to ‘western’ thoughts, deeds, beliefs, hopes and fears (c. 700 BC). The problem exists in the first example of her thesis, to which she returns four times — Penelope, the wife of Odysseus.

Time to settle the Great Omicron Question. First, there is no word omikron (and no c) in ancient Greek. Second, the classical Greek (5th-4th centuries BC) name for omicron was an accented ou. In the 2nd century AD it was replaced by the name o mikron (‘little/short o’), when Greece was under Roman rule. So how did Greeks pronounce o mikron? The little o was pronounced short, as in ‘lot’. The letter i (iôta, whence our ‘jot’) was pronounced either long (as in ‘purine’) or short (as in ‘tin’). In the case of mikron, it was pronounced long. The r was lightly trilled. Finally, the last o was stressed. So o mikron was pronounced ‘o meekrrón’. So much for replicating ancient Greek.

A teacher wanting to teach Latin has enquired whether it is worth doing because the subject has ‘such a bad reputation’. As ever with such assertions, it is always wise to ask, ‘In whose eyes?’ The bizarre fact is that, both here and in the United States, the answer is in those of a certain type of academic, for a very specific reason. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, for example, a professor at Princeton University, wants classics to disappear because it has been used for 2,000 years as a justification for slavery, colonialism and fascism. But what ‘authoritative’ human (Plato) or text (the Bible) has not been used to justify something that some nutter has dreamed up?

The ‘globally outstanding’ University of Durham has plans to help its undergraduates who pay their way by prostituting themselves. Three heavyweight ancients, all from different perspectives, might have rather approved of the scheme. St Augustine, looking at the world as it was, regretted his conclusion but decided that if prostitutes were banned, society ‘would be reduced to chaos through unsatisfied lust’.

Greta Thunberg and her supporters were loud in protest at COP26, but one wonders to what end. They demanded deeds, not words, but words were all they had to offer, except when they were so devoutly letting down the tyres of SUVs. Ancient Greeks were extremely interested in the distinction between word (logos, cf. our ‘-logy’) and deed (ergon, cf. our ‘energy’). In one branch of usage, logos was seen in opposition to ergon. The distinction was that logos was merely verbal and therefore a potentially deceptive representation of reality, while ergon was the real thing, reality itself, a fact.

MPs are not exactly attracting plaudits for their recent attempts at governing. Perhaps Cicero’s three-book work On Duties (De Officiis) might be of assistance. It was written in 44 BC, a few months after the tyrant Julius Caesar was assassinated. Seeing life as a complex of obligations to others and oneself, Cicero picks apart the challenges this raises. Book III is of particular interest, where he tackles the problem of how to resolve a situation in which there is a clash between what is advantageous and what is right. He is not looking for the perfect solution, he says — no one is perfect — but for a working solution that ‘comes within the range of our comprehension’ and is ‘relevant to all mankind’. His example is Caesar’s assassination.

The ‘social mobility tsar’ Katharine Birbalsingh has suggested that children, born evil, ‘need to be taught right from wrong and then habituated into choosing good over evil’. The Twitter mob is equally certain that all children are born ‘good’, and it is their environment that spoils them. Ancient Greeks, ignorant of St Augustine, did not think that this was a simple either/or question but that moral capacity was determined in many different ways, depending on e.g. age, sex, status, intelligence, chance, fate (etc.) — and nature. Greeks thought the gods had little to say about the question, since myth did not suggest they were our moral superiors, though that did not stop gods intervening in a man’s life if they so chose.

The Globe theatre’s project to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, as if that would make plays like The Tempest ‘acceptable’ to them and their audience, would have met with no approval at all from Plato (c. 425-348 BC). For him, all poetry and the arts were corrupt, and in his Republic, a discussion of how an ideal state should be constituted, he called for them all to be banned. Plato’s argument begins from exactly the same position as the Globe’s: that all art, but especially that which deals in words, has an educational effect. In other words, it instructs, whether it likes it or not (and Greeks did indeed argue that this was its effect, and even purpose).

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to ‘bind’ the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to ‘hobble’ the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before their time.

Professor Kathleen Stock of Sussex University is accused by a group of students of being transphobic and a danger to transgender people because she believes that people cannot change their biological sex. ‘We’re not up for debate,’ the students said. ‘We cannot be reasoned out of existence.’ This, in Aristotle’s terms, is pure hatred. In his Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle tackled the emotions and made a most instructive distinction between hatred and anger. Anger (orgê), as he defined it, was ‘desire, accompanied by distress, for revenge because of an obvious but undeserved belittlement of oneself or those near to one’. If that is the case, he went on, the angry man must ‘always be angry with a particular person’.

So James Bond is back, doing exactly what he always does, inviting the audience into a fantasy world for the pleasure of wondering ‘What if?’ In this respect, Bond films resemble the work of the world’s first recorded comic poet, the Athenian Aristophanes (c. 440-380 bc). His premise was that Athens’s problems could be solved only by little people of no importance, not the greedy, vain and incompetent leaders in the public eye. So the scene was set for the hero(ine) to put them firmly in their place. One favourite subject for his comic fantasies was the long war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc). Take three examples. In 421 bc Aristophanes sent a farmer Trygaeus up to heaven on a dung-beetle to find Peace and restore her to earth.

Hardly a day goes by without headlines about immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees. In the ancient world, movements of people were also very common (state boundaries did not exist), often because war, famine or exile left them with no option. So how did refugees try to win acceptance? In Homer’s world of heroes (c. 700 bc), a man indicated he was harmless by kneeling before his (proposed) helper, perhaps touching the knee, and appealing for aid in the name of Zeus, god of suppliants. He expected a welcome into the household as a guest, and becoming part of that household, or being helped on his way. When Athens was a democratic city state (c.

Why are cabinet ministers Liz Truss and Dominic Raab squabbling like children over access to grace-and-favour Chevening? Because they know they are, ultimately, powerless. The Greek statesman Solon (c. 590 bc) made the point long ago: ‘Those who have influence with monarchs are like pebbles used in calculations: for [depending on their place on the board] they can one moment represent a very large number, the next a very small one. So a monarch treats each of his advisers now as important and famous, now as valueless.’ Result: they seek to inflate their self-importance — while they can. No one understood that better than the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (d. ad 135).

The extraordinary sporting achievement of Emma Raducanu and the response it has received from royalty and politicians alike makes one wonder whether she, too, might start to encourage popular initiatives of the sort Marcus Rashford supports. Roman elites were keen to use such figures in the public eye to keep the people happy. Romans were a rough and ready lot and used rough and ready tactics when it came to drawing the attention of the elites to their concerns, e.g. food shortages. A street riot was one way of getting through to the bosses, and plenty of street leaders were happy to organise them.

A ‘State of the World’ report warns that a third of the world’s wild tree species are threatened with extinction. Agriculture and logging are the main culprits. They were in the ancient world too. It is hard to overestimate the importance of trees for past societies: they were the only source of fuel for heating, cooking, potting, including tiles and bricks, and smelting (coal came into play only from the 16th century), and of timber for building. The emergence of palace states and the growth of trade during the Bronze Age from c. 3000 bc — bronze, made by smelting tin and copper, was far more durable than copper — increased its use dramatically.

In the 18th century, art historians’ admiration for the beauty of white-ish ancient Greek marble statuary led people to draw conclusions, on the back of their belief in classical ‘authority’, about white superiority. This, we are told, turned many classicists into racists. Today some members of the Cambridge Classics Faculty feel the white-ish plaster-cast replicas of those statues in their museum ‘entrench[es] racism’ in the same way. Their proposal is to put up a notice about it. Wow. Go, Cambridge! That’ll show those racists! And surely those still disgustingly white originals all over the world need notices as well. Two things need to be said.

‘No one is stupid enough to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons,’ said Croesus to his conqueror, Cyrus of Persia, according to Herodotus. But actually man’s stupidity has lasted thousands of years, and one rather doubts whether the fanatical Taliban will buck that doleful trend. Romans were proud of their pax Romana, but it had been won in blood, over centuries, as they were well aware. ‘Who wishes for peace, let him prepare for war,’ said Vegetius. ‘Peace was secured by victories,’ boasted Augustus; Virgil talked of Rome ‘imposing the practice of peace’. Tacitus made the Caledonian leader Calgacus remark that Romans ‘make a desert and call it peace’.