Peter Jones

Dr Armand D’Angour (Jesus College, Oxford) has composed a brilliant Ode in ancient Greek to welcome the Olympic Games to London. It is called a ‘Pindaric’ Ode, but as Dr D’Angour knows very well, the ancient Greek poet Pindar (518–438 bc) wrote very differently.  Pindar was commissioned to compose Odes that celebrated winning: not the winning athletes but those wealthy patrons who had sponsored them. The Odes were sung after the event, by a choir to musical accompaniment. They celebrated the patron’s family, wealth and other wins; unfolded moral or proverbial reflections on the meaning of victory; and introduced a myth of some relevance to the occasion, often with a moral point.

‘Olympism’ is, according to the 2011 Olympic charter, ‘a philosophy of life which places sport at the service of humankind… exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind… Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.’ The great Greek doctor Galen, who knew a bit about athletes, took a slightly different view. He wrote: ‘All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed of mental blessings.

It is a basic principle of international diplomacy that one does not interfere in the internal affairs of other sovereign states. These days it seems more honoured in the breach than in the observance, Syria being the latest target. The ‘democratic human rights of the oppressed’ is usually the reason (or excuse). In the ancient world, it was ‘freedom’. The Romans were masters of the tactic. Philip V of Macedon (i.e. Greece) had supported Hannibal against the Romans, and in 200 bc the Romans moved against him. To gain a foothold in Greek politics, they decided to appeal to Greeks’ traditional love of ‘freedom’.

Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, has resigned because of Libor rate-fixing among his traders in 2005–9. He once defined the ‘culture’ of a successful bank as ‘how people behave when you think no one is watching’. Plato knew all about that, as the story of Gyges’ ring in his dialogue Republic (c. 370 bc) explains.  Glaucon, challenging Socrates to demonstrate that behaving morally is intrinsically good (whatever the consequences), tells how a Lydian shepherd Gyges found a ring which rendered him invisible when he turned it to one position on his finger, and visible again when he turned it back. As a result, he seduced the king’s wife, with her help killed the king and took the throne.

The Chancellor is desperate to get more cash into his wallet. Why not try the old trick — a tax on luxuries, or rather, an even greater tax on luxuries? True, it might not bring in much, but it plays well with the voters. Suppressing luxury was always a big hit in the ancient world. In 115 bc the Roman consul Scaurus fixed his beady eye on the yummy dormouse and, at a stroke of his pen, passed a sumptuary law banning them, together with shellfish and imported birds, from the menu at banquets. Not that there had been any campaigns to save them. The ancients had been doing this sort of thing for a long time.

During the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, every Polly in the world chanted dispraise of Her Majesty, who is personally responsible (one claimed) for Trident, public schools, income difference, lack of job opportunities and tax havens. What they want is a Republic. The Republic was invented in 509 bc (traditional date) by the Romans to replace a tyrant king, who ‘ruled neither by decree of the people nor authority of the Senate, had no right to the throne bar force ... instilled fear by executing, exiling, and confiscating the property of, many ... and governed the state through a private circle of advisers’. The parallel with the power of Her Majesty is obvious.

Culture minister Jeremy Hunt’s special adviser Adam Smith landed the minister in the soup by his too-cosy texts to News Corp about the proposed BSkyB takeover. He resigned, and Labour smells Hunt’s blood. What can Hunt do? The buck stops with him, but Cicero would argue that if Smith had had no criminal intent, but just became over-excited, Hunt is in the clear. The Murena defence shows how. In 62 bc Cicero was defending Lucius Murena on a bribery charge. He concentrated his fire on the prosecutor Cato’s refusal to compromise his Stoic principles and acknowledge human weakness.

So: Angela Merkel proposes a Greek referendum on the euro, David Cameron says the forthcoming election there is the equivalent of a referendum. But as ancient Greeks knew, what is needed at this point is an ostracism. An ostrakon (pl. ostraka) was a piece of broken pottery. It cost nothing (unlike papyrus) and was widely available. On it, Athenian citizens wrote the name of the individual whom they wanted removed from the political arena in Athens and sent into honourable exile for ten years. It worked like this. Once a year, Athenian citizens in Assembly were asked if they wanted to hold an ostracism. The reason for it can be understood only in the context of real democracy, i.e.

The Royal Mint has just released some gold coins to celebrate the London Olympics. John Bergdahl, who designed them, explained the source of his ‘inspiration’ as ‘the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece, where the first athletes pledged their allegiance to the gods of Olympia.’ Really? That ‘gods of Olympia’ will have set the alarm bells ringing for most readers, because there were no ‘gods of Olympia’. There were gods of Mt Olympus, but it is unwise to stage events like chariot races on mountains, and Olympus was 140 miles from the place where the Games were actually held every four years for nearly 1,000 years from 776 bc, i.e. Olympia in the north-west Peloponnese. And why was it called Olympia?

In Aesop’s fable, mother frog threatened to explode by puffing herself up to a size big enough to take on the ox that had accidentally trodden on one of her young. It’s all so Alec Salmond, puffing himself up to save tiny but heroic Scotland (5 million) and its plucky welfare dependents from being crushed by its tyrannical neighbour (52 million). In a Politeia pamphlet, Lord Fraser has proposed that it would be better for Scotland to become something like a Roman ‘client kingdom’. Such kingdoms were monarchies or their equivalent, on the edge of the Roman Empire, serving mutual interests.

With the life and literature of the whole ancient world spread before us for our pleasure, we ­classicists can be said to lead lives of unparalleled hedonism. But the secret is leaking out. The whole world seems to want a taste, and we cannot blame it in the slightest. History has its Schama, maths its Du Sautoy and ­environmental studies the grand-daddy of them all, the great David Attenborough. So who will risk themselves and their reputation in the hands of the producers with the 42-inch mentality to satisfy this growing appetite?

The trial of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik might have met with Plato’s approval — for the time being. In his last work Laws, Plato provided a detailed description of the vision that would inform Magnesia, his unchanging, perfect utopia, covering everything from size, population, occupations and education to religion, laws and government. In his discussion of the justice system, Plato laid down the principles that lie behind almost every humane theory and practice of punishment. Plato takes for granted the Socratic doctrine that every unjust man is, in fact, unjust against his will, on the grounds that he has welcomed evil into his soul, the most precious part of him, and no one would willingly do that.

As local councils seize more power from central government, with more to come if Osborne’s plan to link salaries to location comes good, Labour MPs are already giving up on the Miliband Miracle and deciding to satisfy their control instincts by seeking election as mayors or police commissioners. This is no surprise. Power, on any terms, is in MPs’ DNA, as it was in Julius Caesar’s. The essayist Plutarch (c. ad 100) provides two telling stories about Caesar that neatly make the point. In 67 bc, while serving in Spain, ‘He was reading some part of the history of Alexander when, after sitting for a long time lost in thought, he burst into tears. His surprised friends asked him the reason.

The principle of the Royal Mail is far older than our youthful version, which was founded in 1516 by Henry VIII’s ‘Master of the Posts’ and made publicly available in 1635. When Xerxes, king of the Persians, realised the extent of the disaster he had suffered at the battle of Salamis (481 bc), Herodotus tells us that the Persian equivalent, the angareion, was put into operation to take the news back home. Nothing human is faster, he said, and ‘neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’ [rather, ‘course, race’] — words running along the frieze that fronts New York’s General Post Office (1914).

Any appeal to the electorate that the coalition may once have had seems to be fading fast. If the decision to put VAT on a hot pasty turns out to have been the turning point, the Gang of Four who run the Cabinet have only themselves to blame for not paying enough attention to Plutarch, the great Greek essayist (ad 46–120), whose ‘Tips on Statecraft’ would have kept them straight. Entering public life not for gain but out of honourable conviction, Plutarch argued, the politician must make it his first task to understand the character of the citizens with whom he was dealing. So he had to start by working with the grain of public opinion in order to win a good reputation and public confidence.

As vicars, traditional or trendy, assert that God is or is not in favour of something, one is reminded that there were cultures for whom divinely inspired scriptures did not exist. Poor old Greeks and Romans! How on earth did they get by? The 5th C bc thinker Protagoras argued that men must by definition possess a sense of standards, otherwise they could not live in communities at all. In the absence of holy books, tradition played the main role in determining what those standards were, which is why attacks on tradition from radical thinkers like Socrates and Diogenes generated such mistrust.

Nick Clegg’s idea of taxing tycoons sounds very ‘modernising’, but tycoons need a pro quo for their quids, sorry, quae, as the Roman historian Livy knew. For Romans, there was no such thing as a tax on income. Bar money raised from e.g. harbour dues, sales and inheritance taxes, the Senate got its money from the proceeds of empire. So Romans did not pay tax: they got others to pay it for them. (Come on, Ed. It’s a winner.) Before the Romans gained an empire, however, the Senate taxed to pay for the army. This system divided citizens into seven classes (whence our ‘class’) by wealth. The top group, the equites, were the richest men in society. They were liable for the most tax. Then came five numbered classes, from first classis to fifth.

Though our ‘democracies’ are designed to prevent any popular involvement, there are times when the situation becomes so critical that only the people have the authority to make the final decision. Modern Greeks face that situation now, as Athenians did in 431 bc. Athens’ fleet ruled the sea, the army of its deadly rival Sparta ruled the land. When war broke out, Athens’ influential leader, Pericles — whose only power, in a real democracy, was that of persuasion — argued that they should not take on the Spartans by land, but abandon their farms and seek refuge within the long walls of Athens. These ran from the city all the way down to the harbour at Piraeus, providing total protection.