Peter Jones

With parliament irretrievably deadlocked over Brexit and the EU intransigent, there remains little belief that either of the prime ministerial candidates can find an even remotely happy solution to the problem. All they can currently offer are the tender leaves of hope. The ancient Greek farmer poet Hesiod (c. 680 bc) told the story of this ambiguous commodity. The gods, determined that life on Earth should be one of suffering, fashioned an irresistibly beautiful woman, Pandora, and sent her down among men with a large storage jar, which she proceeded to open.

If Rory Stewart had taken full advantage of his education at Eton and read classics at Oxford rather than PPE, he would not have made the basic mistakes that blew apart his short-lived campaign to become prime minister. Not that his failure was one of content: far from it. His views on public services and Brexit were entirely predictable and could be correct. So what went wrong? His failure was one of rhetoric, the skill of peaceful persuasion dissected by Aristotle and further refined by Cicero; and his failure consisted in his being so swept away by his millions of followers on social media that he started to believe his own hype, as if that guaranteed victory. But to win, you must persuade those who are not your followers.

So: Boris triumphans, ready to deliver a 140-seat majority for the Tories and lead the UK out of Europe and on to greater triumphs? The shade of an Athenian statesman might offer a warning. Themistocles (c. 524-459 bc) came from an obscure family, but early on conceived a passion for politics. His father ‘pointing out some ancient triremes, mere hulks abandoned on the seashore, said that was what happened to leaders when the people decided they were irrelevant’. This merely spurred him on. Themistocles flourished in the direct democracy invented in Athens in 508 bc. He built up a following among the poor, was said to know every citizen by name, and helped many with difficult court cases. The elites regarded him with great suspicion.

As Tory hopefuls bid to become prime minister, they might like to reflect on Cyrus the Great (r. 557-530 bc), who created the first Persian empire, stretching from the Mediterranean to Pakistan. The soldier-essayist Xenophon (d. 354 bc) spent eight books explaining why he was the model Supreme Leader. The Romans were wildly enthusiastic about it, as were Milton, Gibbon and Machiavelli. Cyrus’s secret was that he was able to command willing obedience from a vast range of peoples, cities and tribes. It was all down, said Xenophon, to his character: ‘The most humane of men, most devoted to learning and most ambitious for honour. The result was that he would put in any effort, however painful, and face any danger, for the sake of esteem.

Boris Johnson is to be tried at the Crown Court on the grounds that, during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, he crucially affected the referendum result by arguing that the UK paid the EU £350 million a week, ignoring another interpretation that the sum was only £250 million a week. Ancient Greeks knew all about advocating one side of an issue, as a law suit exemplifies. Euphiletus was the defendant in a homicide case brought against him by the relatives of one Eratosthenes. The relatives claimed that Euphiletus had murdered Eratosthenes after luring, or even forcing, him into his house as part of a premeditated plan. But Euphiletus’s defence (we do not possess the prosecution’s case) was that Eratosthenes had been seducing his wife.

The MPs wishing to replace Theresa May as prime minister have policies — but do they know what their electorate makes of them as human beings? In one of his many essays, Plutarch (fl. ad 100) analysed how your enemies could help you see how you came across to others. He began by stating that all governments had to put up with malice, jealousy and the desire to come out on top. But as early man learned that wild animals, his natural enemies, could in fact be a most agreeable source of food, clothing and medicine, so politicians could learn how to turn their mortal enemies to advantage.

After the sacking of Gavin Williamson, a former No. 10 insider said of Theresa May: ‘One of Theresa’s big faults is that she basically doesn’t trust any other elected politicians. She places her trust in advisers and officials, because they are loyal to her.’ The Roman emperor Claudius (r. 41-54 ad) too found it hard to know whom to trust. He turned to an adviser of the previous emperor. Claudius, nephew of the emperor Tiberius, was born in 10 bc but because of some disability (his mother Antonia called him a monster) he was never taken seriously by the imperial family. However, when the emperor Caligula was assassinated in 41 ad, Claudius was made emperor by the army. Since the senate strongly disapproved, Claudius could hardly trust them.

Since comedians these days seem to be the authorities on all matters spiritual and temporal (puts on funny voice, knife-crime ends), who better than the comic playwright Aristophanes to show us how, despite our feckless MPs, we can leave the EU? In 425 bc Athens had for six years been locked in a grinding war against Sparta. Because Pericles had persuaded the assembly not to take on Sparta by land, the people of Attica (Athens’s territory) had abandoned their farms and crops to the enemy and withdrawn inside Athens’s long walls, where a dreadful plague had killed about a quarter of them (including Pericles).

The petition calling on the UK to remain in the EU has garnered 8,000 votes from Jacob Rees-Mogg and 700 from Idi Amin. Ho-ho, what wits these Remainers are, could be one response. But Romans knew all about this sort of game-playing, and there could be a different explanation. We have records of about 180 jobs of one sort or another across the Roman world. These include tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, entertainers, artists, designers, clerks, lawyers, engineers, cobblers, shoemakers, weavers, lace-makers, porters, dye-sellers, launderers, plasterers and butchers to teachers, builders, cooks, farmers, merchants, fish-sellers, goldsmiths, muff-makers, labourers, carters, hairdressers, and more.

The problem with Brexit is that parliament is not designed to do what the people have commanded it to. MPs feel their job is to construct their own manifesto and deliver on that, not on something foisted upon them by an ignorant public in the name of ‘popular sovereignty’. Unlike MPs, however, Cicero understood the importance of that sovereignty, and discussed it in detail in his On the Republic (De re publica). At the heart of the res publica, he argued, was the notion of the public interest, which he defined as ‘people coming together to form a society by agreeing about what justice is, and mutually participating in its advantages’. Of these, freedom (libertas) was the most important.