Peter Jones

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.

Last week in a piece on populism, Pericles’ and Cleon’s methods of persuading the Athenian assembly to do their bidding were analysed: Pericles calm and persuasive, Cleon taking to court or viciously slandering his elite rivals for power. But Cleon did also have his moment of glory, in circumstances quite extraordinary even by the standards of Athenian democracy. It was described by the historian Thucydides, a contemporary but in exile for an earlier military failure. In 425 bc, in the lengthy war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenians – who ruled the sea – had trapped 400 Spartans on the island of Sphacteria. They wanted to take them hostage, but had been unable to do so, and with winter approaching, making sailing impossible, the situation was desperate.

As elections approach and arguments become more strident, the term ‘populism’ becomes more and more thrown about, as if it is a bad thing, a form of demagoguery. But what populists do is to represent themselves as champions of ‘real’ people whose interests are completely ignored by the elite. What can be wrong with that? Let the ancient Greeks help out. In Greek, dêmagôgos was a neutral term meaning ‘leader of the people’, and in this sense was used of Pericles (d. 429 bc). But it could be used to describe a rabble rouser. The most famous example was Cleon (d. 422 bc), described by the historian Thucydides (who hated him) as ‘very violent’ and, as a dêmagôgos, ‘very influential’, in a detrimental sense. But detrimental to whom?

Given the failure of all political parties to deal with the Post Office’s wrongful conviction of so many postmasters, ITV’s re-enaction of the story has been a triumph for democracy (Greek demo-kratia ‘people-power’) in rousing the people to force parliament to act. But will justice be done by the popular demand that parliament overrides past legal process by mass exoneration? Classical Athens (5th-4th century bc) saw the invention of the world’s first and last democracy, in which all citizens (defined as registered Athenian males over 18) met almost weekly to take every decision in the sovereign Assembly about how their city state should be run, while those over 30 also held sway over the courts.

The Baroness Mone-ing about allegations of fraud and bribery no doubt thinks everyone ‘has it in for me’. They do indeed. So would the ancients: it was standard practice to tar Roman merchants with infamia, a reputation that did them no good at all. The root of the problem for the ancient traders was the saying that ‘Profits in trade can be made only by another’s loss’. It was Aristotle who discussed how this came about. He argued that barter was a transaction that could be seen to be equal, i.e. did not involve profit, but when money came into the situation, everything changed, and transactions became unequal, involving profit for one and loss for another.

Cicero’s statement salus populi suprema lex esto (‘Let the security of the people be the ultimate law’) has been the motto or guiding principle of any number of institutions and thinkers from the state of Missouri to Hobbes and Locke. Benjamin Netanyahu is well aware of this and knows that, whatever action he takes, his failure to keep Israel secure from Hamas’s inhuman attacks on civilians will be the end of him. Cicero (d. 44 bc) was the first person we know of to produce a code of conduct for warfare. In it, he argued that battle should be confined to the military and civilians should have no involvement in it whatsoever. This particular ruling was all of a piece with his broader thoughts developed in his work On the Laws.

At this time of year the Romans, too, enjoyed a celebration, called the Saturnalia. It was a time of licence, the one day when slaves were free to eat, drink and be merry, and be served by their owners. One wonders what part such role-reversal played in Vedius Pollio’s villa on the Bay of Naples with its pond full of man-eating lampreys.  Once when the emperor Augustus was visiting, a slave dropped an expensive crystal glass, and Pollio ordered him to be thrown into the pond. Pollio dismissed the slave’s appeal to Augustus, at which the emperor asked Pollio to bring out all his other fine glass for him to use – and smashed the lot. A pity Pollio did not get the treatment he ordered for the slave, but a slave was legally an item of property.

Next year there will be an election, and all the talk is of strategies for winning power. But for the elite Romans who thought about politics, the debate was not so much about power as about the ethics of those seeking it: did they possess virtus, i.e. moral excellence? And did they practise it? That was how Cicero, philosopher and statesman, began his discussion of the best form of state in his dialogue On the Republic. In Rome’s ‘laws and customs’, developed over the years by men of virtus, he saw embedded ‘devotion, justice, good faith, fair dealing, decency, restraint, the fear of disgrace, and the desire for praise and honour’, together with ‘fortitude in hardship and danger’.

More and more people are giving up work on the grounds of their mental-health problems, allowing them to live off state benefits. That raises the question:  is there something about the nature of work today that makes it seem so unrewarding? In the ancient world there was no welfare system. The educated, wealthy elite apart (2 per cent), most had to survive off a plot of land or their manual skills (more than 340 occupations are recorded), hoping thereby to produce a surplus to meet other needs. What is striking is the pride in the work of their hands, especially by Roman freed slaves (freedmen), revealed on their grave monuments.

To judge from current events in the Middle East, the god of Israel appears to be battling the god of the Palestinians, even though they both seem to be the same god. But are they guiding events? And if not, why not? The Greek historian Thucydides (d. c. 400 bc) had no truck with the idea. In his account of the long war between the two most powerful Greek city states of their time – democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta (431-404 bc), each with their respective allies – Thucydides was the first historian we know of to discount divine intervention in human affairs. Naturally he reported on the widespread phenomenon of religious belief among the Greeks and the use to which it was put.

Street protests are all the rage at the moment. Among the crowds marching up and down in London, there are those holding up banners urging Palestinians to destroy Israel. When ancients protested, they did so to serve their own interests. Athenians did not need street protests. They invented democracy (508 bc), and all male citizens, meeting in Assembly, debated their protests there. The Roman republic, founded in 509 bc, was initially run by ‘patricians’, men chosen from a few select tribes by Rome’s earlier kings to advise him. Over the next 250 years, the rest of the Roman population (‘plebeians’), vastly outnumbering patricians, periodically withdrew their labour (especially from military service: there were no standing armies) to win political equality.

Elon Musk has predicted that AI will prevent anyone needing to work and will raise worldwide incomes at the same time. But will it rustle up a quick lamprey à la Bordelaise at a minute’s notice, to be washed down with a vintage Ch. Bruce Anderson? Greek comic poets had far more satisfying fantasies. Perhaps encouraged by philosophers like Plato who dreamed up visions of past times when, for example, birds and animals were tame and conversed happily with men on a wide range of topics, comedians took to constructing a fantasy derived from the almost universal ownership of slaves; the point being that, although slaves should do everything you wanted, they were so devious, incompetent or simply lazy that there was no guarantee anything would be done properly, or indeed at all.

This year, in its annual Supreme Court moot trial of a famous ancient figure, the charity Classics for All charged the consul Cicero with illegally ordering the execution of five traitors working with the failed politician Catiline to bring revolution to Rome (63 bc). In his history of that crisis, Sallust composed speeches for Julius Caesar in defence of the conspirators, and for Cato the Younger for their execution, followed by a character assessment. This package may prompt reflections on our times. Caesar argued that men facing difficult questions ‘should clear their minds of hatred, amity, anger and compassion… success is achieved by applying judgment; but your passions will rule you, if you let them, and your judgment will go out of the window’.

The Hamas charter does not mince its words: ‘The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”’ A return to the ancient pagan gods would surely be an improvement, but the modern world adopts the Hamas line. Consider the current deities of the bigots whose opponents, hiding behind a clearly sacrilegious belief in rational argument, must be condemned to eternal cancellation. The Greek and Roman gods of myth were far more accommodating. Take Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the first works of what we call western literature (c.700 bc).

To protect Gazan civilians (used as shields by Hamas), Israel has told them to leave their homes. When in 665 bc Romans forced the people of ancient Alba Longa (from which Rome had been founded) to leave and move to Rome, the historian Livy sympathised with their civilians’ plight as legions arrived to demolish their city: ‘They found none of the pandemonium associated with gates being smashed down, walls reduced to rubble, citadel captured, and armed men rampaging through the streets, killing and burning, but only a despairing silence and wordless grief, so paralysing that the populace had no idea what to leave or take with them; they just stood at the doors of the houses, asking each other what to do, or wandered through them, as if for the last time.

After the scrapping of the HS2 link to Manchester, private investment may be needed to build the Old Oak Common to Euston section. Romans would have invited private investment and construction, the bill paid on completion. Wealthy Romans formed a legal association called a societas when putting their own money into personal ventures, e.g. slave-trading, maritime ventures, the export of garum (fish sauce). But since Rome had no civil service to speak of, it needed wealthy individuals also to put their money behind state contracts put out for tender, when they were called publicani, ‘public servants’.

Scientists at Cambridge University have made the astonishing discovery that repressing your emotions might have something to be said for it. The ancients turned their analytical minds to that, and much else, long ago. In the 7th century bc the ancient Greeks invented natural philosophy, arguing about the physical world in rational terms, excluding gods. Socrates then got them wondering how best to lead one’s life: why not reason about its problems, including emotional ones? For example, Plato (d. 348 bc) argued that emotions such as distress, fear, and anger, but most of all insatiable pleasure – ‘the greatest spur to evil’ – were destructive forces:  reasoned reflection was required to control them. Epictetus (d.

Excited crowds of youth, encouraged by adults who should know better, take the view that opinions with which they disagree should not be debated but subject to control by the mob. In the ancient world we know of only a handful of examples. Socrates’s trial is the most famous: at a politically fraught time in 399 bc, he was executed on a charge of impiety, i.e. atheism (it was widely believed that if gods were unacknowledged, Athens would be in trouble). But thinkers long debated the subject quite freely: here are two from an extensive list. Assume the existence of traditional beliefs about the gods was of the same importance today and imagine what the mob would have to say about Xenophanes (died c. 475 bc).