Peter Jones

Joe Biden, President of the United States, may not have any criminal charges on his record, but his son Hunter does. When ancient Greeks discussed whether aretê (‘virtue, moral excellence, goodness, bravery’) could be taught, or not, such examples came into play. Plato discussed the problem in a dialogue in which Socrates raised the question with the famous sophist Protagoras who claimed to be able to teach anything to make people better. Socrates’s example was Pericles: here was a man of supreme aretê, but his two useless sons simply ‘browsed randomly about like cattle, hoping to bump into it’. Protagoras answered as follows.

Donald Trump’s book on business Think Big and Kick Ass makes taking personal revenge a very high priority. Given recent events in a US court, it will clearly be a priority if he wins the forthcoming election. For ancient Greeks, it was taken for granted that, if you were harmed by someone, it was your duty to get your own back. So Greeks regularly took their grievances into the public arena. The orator Demosthenes told a jury that, because he saw a man who had wronged him injuring the whole city, ‘I proceeded against him in the belief that I had got a suitable opportunity for defending the interests of the city and at the same time obtaining revenge for what had been done to me.’ Rather Trumpian.

Has Humpty-Trumpty had a great fall, or a great bounce? That will depend on what the Great American Public thinks was at stake in his trial. It was ever thus in the democracy of ancient Athens. In the absence of a state prosecution service, all legal cases in ancient Athens were brought by individuals. But a jury trial often had to await the result of an attempt to settle out of court. This consisted of two mediation processes: one private and, if that failed, the other public under an appointed arbitrator. If there was still no agreement, the case went to trial before a randomly selected jury of between 200 and 1,000 Athenians, selected from an annually empanelled body of 6,000 male citizens in good standing, aged over 30.

As the party of the lost and the party of the losers square up to each other, the next few weeks bid fair to raise tedium to an excruciating new level. Still, one can always rely on the c. 4,000 epigrams of the Greek Anthology (7th century bc – 6th century ad) to provide some light relief. ‘We arrived at Apelles’ for supper./ He’d stripped his garden bare./ It looked as if he was feeding his sheep,/ Instead of his friends gathered there,/ With radish and lettuce and chicory too,/ And leeks, mint and onions, and basil and rue./ And fearing we’d soon be presented/ with a nourishing helping of hay,/ I ate some half-soaked lupins/ and made my swift getaway.

Owing to a rise in temperature in southern Europe and a reduction in rainfall, the production of olive oil this year may drop by nearly 40 per cent. For the Romans, who ensured that the olive spread all around the Mediterranean, it would have been disastrous. Olives were a food, and in its liquid form as oil it was used to light lamps, form a base for medicines and cosmetics, and as a skin moisturiser, cleansing agent, lubricant and contraceptive (Marie Stopes used it in trials and found it 100 per cent successful, whether virgin or extra virgin is not recorded). As an evergreen, it had great spiritual importance as holy anointing oil. Further, it could be extensively exploited, requiring little work – the tree is as tough as old boots – except in winter when it was harvested.

In his Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle (384-322 bc) sets about identifying the various headings under which you can be persuasive about any topic. One of the topics is the nature of the young, and as today’s students pick up their loud hailers to make demands about events more than 2,000 miles away in alien cultures which despise most of them, there is much of interest in the similarities and differences. In general, Aristotle says, the young, not having lived long, are inevitably ignorant and lack experience. So they are inclined to do whatever they feel like doing, and are easily satisfied because their wants are not overwhelming. They also lack guile and are trusting, because they have not experienced double-dealing; they tend to assume all men are honest.

Last week Mary Wakefield discussed the virtues of her ‘Victorian’ education, designed to stiffen the upper lip of the young and to ensure they understood that they were in second place to their elders and betters. She avoided the word ‘guilt’ and its associations with ‘shame’, which were taken to be the aim of such education. Ancient Greeks would have applauded her. Their word for ‘shame’ – aidôs – had very different connotations. The word plays an important part in Europe’s first works of literature, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. For example, when Andromache, wife of the Trojan hero Hector, suggests he retreat from battle, he says he would feel aidôs to do so, since he had been trained to fight: it was impossible for him to act otherwise.

A recent analysis has concluded that ‘British public opinion has got so used to things being bad/chaotic it’s hard to imagine anything else.’ But what ‘things’? Perhaps electioneering politics (always chaotic), but more likely the myriad social, legal and medical services the state claims to provide. No such services (let alone ‘rights’) were available in the ancient world. Family apart, you were on your own. Simple survival was the aim. The farmer poet Hesiod (c. 680 BC) came up with his advice on the issue in an attack on his lazy, disputatious brother Perses: a man can have time for arguments when he has a year’s worth of grain laid up in his barns. Straight-dealing men do not suffer famine or blight: they work hard and become rich in flocks.

The original Olympic Games established a basic canon of seven games unchanged over some 900 years: foot, horse and chariot races, boxing, wrestling, pankration, and pentathlon. This year’s Olympics feature 42 games, adding for the first time ‘competitive breakdancing, an urban sport that originated in the hip-hop culture of 1970s block parties in the US’. It has been ever thus since the Games were first revived in Wenlock in 1850, when soccer, cricket and quoits appeared. The first ‘Olympics’, started in Greece in 1859 – a minor, one-day event in the context of a huge agro-industrial exhibition – featured climbing the greasy pole.

Frescoes are always the lead story in reports of the latest finds from Pompeii, but they are only a part of a much bigger picture. Before it was destroyed in ad 79 Pompeii had been a flourishing port town (the explosion of Vesuvius altered the whole landscape) with a population of around 11,000, offering trading facilities to inland towns like Nuceria and Nola. It produced a huge variety of foodstuffs and far more wine than it needed, which it exported around the Mediterranean, as it did garum, a favourite Roman fish-based sauce, produced by the local Scaurus family. Plentiful foreign coinage testifies to the extent of its external connections (as does an ivory statuette of an Indian goddess).

The Sentencing Council, consisting of various legal authorities, has told judges and magistrates to consider, when sentencing the young, their ‘difficult and/or deprived backgrounds or personal circumstances’. To what end? To induct the young into proper moral behaviour, Aristotle thought that family discipline should go hand in hand with the community’s laws, customs and education. But it was also possible for the young to receive bad training, on which Aristotle thundered: ‘It makes no small difference whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, it makes all the difference.

What a song and dance about the end of life! Historians assure us that, among human beings, there is a long, well-established tradition of dying and if, after a life well lived, one feels enough is enough, what on earth is the problem? Seneca, the philosopher and adviser to Nero, took a duly stoical approach: birth was a death sentence. We were in fact dying every day. Since death would get us in the end – in his case, Nero ordered him to commit suicide – it was as pointless to fear death as it was useless to run from it (he suggested that would mean simply lengthening your death rather than your life). After all, one was facing hard reality. You could not but obey Nature: Nature would certainly not obey you.

What fun to mock the elite in the Garrick! But there were no Garricks in Rome: clubs were for those lower down the scale. They were called collegia and consisted of citizens, freedmen (ex-slaves) and in some cases slaves. All usually had some religious connection and were properly organised with presidents, treasurers and so on. Some were dedicated to maintaining ancient cults; others served the locality; then there were burial clubs, dedicated to appropriate gods, providing (for a regular fee) monthly group dinners and a guaranteed urn for their ashes in their private facilities (for their slaves and freedmen Augustus and his wife Livia provided buildings with 6,000 urns).

socrates: I was talking with some handsome young men in St Andrews University when the vice chancellor appeared, keen to discuss her new student ‘training module’. It would include ticking the statement: ‘Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias.’ socrates: I was talking with some handsome young men in St Andrews University when the vice chancellor appeared, keen to discuss her new student ‘training module’. It would include ticking the statement: ‘Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful start point in overcoming unconscious bias.’ Poor Bias! One of the seven Greek sages! He certainly knew his onions. But why ‘personal’? ‘Your guilt’ is all that is needed.

Accounting systems have apparently existed since the Mesopotamian period (c. 5000 bc). But what about ‘budgets’? Early Romans had no such concept because, in the absence of a welfare state, self-reliance was the order of the day. They did however pay an annual tax, fixed by the Senate and collected locally, to refund (for days lost on the farm) every Roman who was either fighting to defend Rome (and so his own property) or growing Roman power on campaign, conquering others for their land, their resources and their manpower.

Last week Athenian free speech was contrasted with a demand from some dons at Buckingham University to ban a ‘heterodox’ Social Science Centre questioning woke ‘culture’. The Centre should stage an Aristophanic comedy on the subject. In the 5th century bc Athens was a hotbed of controversial ideas being taught, for money, by people called ‘sophists’ (lit. ‘experts, teachers’) about the gods, the nature of the universe, how to win political arguments and so on.

Hardly a day goes by without another story of academics clamping down on free speech. Dons at Buckingham University are the latest to express outrage at a proposed ‘heterodox’ (i.e. not woke) social science centre. In democratic Athens (5th century bc), free speech in the citizens’ assembly and the courts was called isêgoria, meaning ‘equality of speaking’, granting every citizen the same freedom to give his opinion as any other citizen. Free speech outside those arenas was called parrhêsia and meant literally ‘saying everything [you wanted to]’ i.e. total frankness. Some expressed surprise at this licence, shocked that even slaves and foreigners could openly speak their mind.

After 14 years in power, the Tory party still does not seem to know how to serve everyone’s interests, even its own. After 14 years out of power, the Labour party’s one consolation is that, for all Angela Rayner’s best efforts, it could hardly do worse. Might a new model for selecting MPs help? After Brexit, ancient Greek democracy is a dead duck; but the Romans invented the republican system and that might have something to be said for it. To reach the top job as consul, one had to begin at the bottom, the posts lasting one year (there had to be a gap of a fixed number of years between posts).

Golden Globes, Baftas, Emmies – here we go again with the annual rituals of self-worship to which actors are so addicted. The ancient Greeks are to blame: they staged plays in competition, with awards for best plays, producers and actors. Their worldwide luvvies’ Guild, formed in the 3rd century bc, was called ‘Artists of Dionysus’ – some replaced ‘Artists’ with ‘Parasites’ – and lasted hundreds of years. Its last recorded title (under the emperor Aurelian) was suitably modest: ‘The Sacred Musical Travelling Aurelian Great World Guild of the Artists of Dionysus.’ They were very popular. One festival at Delphi attracted 251 Artists, including 40 from Corinth, 29 from Athens, 57 from Boeotia, 11 from Asia Minor and ten from the Black Sea. Big names flourished.

Ian Hislop’s genial radio series on the earliest English jokes got off to an odd start since the joke in question – Pope Gregory’s description of the Angli being more like Angeli – was a Latin one. Romans had much to say about humour, most of it cribbed from ancient Greeks. Cicero saw jokes as an important oratorical weapon: they win approval, mock an opponent, relieve tedium and show the orator to be a man of accomplishment and taste – though he warned against laughs for their own sake. Their main sources were diction, situations, the ridiculous (ugliness and deformity) and the unexpected. Among the most effective form of verbal witticisms he identified e.g. ambiguity, plays on words and well-known sayings, allegory, irony, incongruity, caricature and understatement.