Peter Jones | The Spectator columnists & writers

What Gary Lineker could learn from Herodotus

Gary Lineker has unfolded his thoughts on the World Cup in Qatar (Romans called them Catharrei). ‘It’s a delicate balance between “sports-washing” and trying to make change,’ he intoned. Actually, the issue is quite different. Let Herodotus (5th C bc), the first western historian and a man of inexhaustible curiosity and vitality, put you right. Herodotus’ aim was to discover the reason for the enmity between Greeks and Persians that led to the Persian Wars (491-479 bc). Researching Persia’s rise to power took him around the Greek East, Persia, Egypt, Africa and South Russia, and the different cultures he came across filled him with fascination and wonder. Of course he saw things through Greek eyes, but his open-mindedness and readiness to understand the experience of others gave him a rare breadth of sympathy with the different cultures of the people with whom he came into contact.

In defence of Alexander the Great

The charity Classics for All staged its annual moot in the Supreme Court on the question of Alexander the Great: hero or war criminal? (Search for ‘Classics for All Moot Trial’.) The prosecution drew masterfully on the Nuremberg trials (1945-6) for war crimes and crimes against humanity to condemn him; the defence thought this anachronistic and that Alexander’s reputation as a hero could be justified by Homer’s Iliad and many other examples of heroism in ancient eyes. The jury found for the defence. The case goes to the heart of the debate about colonialism, imperialism and slavery and raises the question: ‘Through whose eyes are you making your judgments – ancient or modern?’ The two positions cannot be reconciled.

Justice for Boris, ancient-style

Did Boris Johnson lie to the House about partygate? The Privileges Committee decided to investigate, but refused to take Mr Johnson’s ‘intention’ into account. However, Lord Pannick QC (now KC) has since claimed that ignoring ‘intention’ would be ‘unlawful’ in determining whether there had been a violation. The Committee disagrees. Could the ancients help? Argument about the nature of law and justice has ever been at the heart of western thinking. Some early Greek philosophers maintained that only a form of metaphysical ‘justice’ kept a chaotic universe, riven with competing forces, stable. When Socrates (c. 470-399 bc) shifted the emphasis towards the purpose of existence, debates about the meaning of human justice intensified.

The privations of Diogenes

Nine exceedingly passive ‘activists’ glued themselves to the floor of a Volkswagen factory in Germany and complained about being humiliated, left overnight in the cold and the dark and without ‘facilities’. Should they not have rejoiced at such deprivations to which the whole world ought, in their view, to accustom itself if it is to be saved? The ancient cynics could teach these narcissists a thing or two. ‘Cynicism’ derives from the ancient Greek kuôn, ‘dog’, the epitome of shamelessness. Diogenes (c. 410-320 bc) agreed, admitting that he lived in accordance with nature rather than custom and arguing that human conventions – marriage, family, politics, reputation, wealth, power, etc – stifled one’s true humanity.

Liz Truss and the art of rhetoric

Liz Truss was spot-on in arguing that the only way in which a state can flourish is by combining low taxes with economic growth. But she failed to persuade her audience that she knew how this could be achieved. If only Dr Kwarteng, a classicist, had drawn her attention to Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (4th century bc), the first full analysis of the means of persuasion, the day and her career would have been saved. First, Aristotle defined two general types of persuasive proof. One he called ‘artistic’, because it depended upon human ingenuity, the other ‘non-artistic’, because it derived from pre-existing evidence, e.g. witness statements, written contracts, etc. Then he identified three specific areas relevant to successful persuasion: first, the character of the speaker and the contribution his credibility could make (êthos, which he calls ‘the most authoritative form of persuasion’); second, the favourable emotional reactions (pathos) that the speaker could legitimately arouse in his audience; and third, the ‘true or apparently true’ arguments (logos) for his case that the speaker could invent.

How would the Romans have defined Meghan Markle?

Meghan Markle has been urging women to define themselves as they see fit, with ‘your full, complete, whole-layered, sometimes weird, sometimes awesome but always best and true self… you’re so much greater than any archetype’. But that all depends on the self-definition you come up with. Hers (if she had the slightest self-awareness) would clearly involve her thirst for power, status and revenge. That thirst is something Romans well understood. They took the view that all human beings were personally accountable for their actions and fully responsible for the outcomes. But coming out on top, which they all desired, earned the ultimate goal of it all, public respect, only if it was seen to serve the interests of public order and the common good.

A lesson for Rupa Huq from the ancient Greeks

The Labour MP Rupa Huq, of Pakistani heritage, has been suspended for suggesting that Kwasi Kwarteng, of Ghanaian heritage, was only superficially black and did not sound black on the radio. The ancients would have been baffled by her comment. They were fascinated by their world’s many different cultures, but colour held no significance for them. People’s beliefs, however, were a matter of great interest. The widely travelled Greek historian Herodotus (5th century bc) produced a fine example (among many others): while Greeks expressed utter revulsion at the Indian idea of eating their dead, an Indian tribe also did so at the idea of burning their dead. Conclusion: there was no right and wrong way to do it. It was simply a matter of custom.

Peta, Lysistrata and the comedy of a sex strike

The German branch of the ‘green’ organisation Peta (‘People for the ethical treatment of animals’) is demanding that, until men stop eating meat – apparently they cause 41 per cent more pollution than female carnivores – women must deny them sex. The same sanction had its origin, of course, in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata (411 bc), staged during the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), just after Athens had suffered a disastrous defeat in a failed attempt on Sicily. Naturally, an organisation like Peta might well think the play was in earnest. Was not Lysistrata proposing a noble, female-instigated sex-strike, by the women of both sides, to stop a war? Had she not organised the women to seize control of their state’s treasuries, ending any chance of military operations? All this surely represented a serious, female liberationist, anti-war agenda.

The police have learned to treat republican protests the Roman way

Public dissent, from riots to republicans objecting to homage to the Queen, is dealt with by the police, a force created in 1829. Romans too faced such problems, though many had no qualms about crushing free speech; and it took them some time to get a grip on them. During the decline of the Roman Republic (c. 130-27 bc), violent crowds supporting one political faction or another regularly fought it out on the streets of Rome. The city authorities could do little but muster whatever forces were at hand to deal with it. Augustus tackled the problem head on, locating his Praetorian guard within the city and backing it up with three Urban Cohorts and official night-watchmen (mainly on the lookout for fires). Later emperors expanded the system by drawing on the standing army to provide stationarii with specific guard and crowd-control duties.

Augustus and a lesson in self-publicity

The death of Her Majesty raises the question of a commemoration of her extraordinary years of service. Augustus ruled the Roman empire from 27 bc to ad 14 and was the longest serving of the roughly 70 emperors of the western empire (which ended technically in ad 476). He may have cracked a joke on his deathbed, asking those around him to applaud if he had played his part well in the comedy of life, but he was in deadly earnest about documenting in the first person a selective record of his own achievements (res gestae) for posting across the empire in both Greek and Latin. For example, he tells how he gave every Roman citizen 400ss. (nearly half a soldier’s annual pay) in 29, 24 and 11 bc and more than 1.2 billion ss.

Does Cincinnatus have anything in common with Boris?

On retiring from office, Boris Johnson described himself as a sort of Cincinnatus, returning to his plough. This famous story attracted two comments from the media, both missing the point. According to the historian Livy (c.59 bc-17 ad), when Rome’s last king, the tyrannical Tarquinius Superbus – ‘the arrogant’ – was ejected in 509 bc, those who had acted as his advisers (patricians, i.e. senators) assumed control. But conflict soon emerged between them and the plebians over problems of freedom, poverty and debt. By refusing to co-operate with the senators, especially by refusing to wage war, the plebs eventually won the right to appoint tribunes from among their number to try to solve the problems in the plebs’ interests, with mixed success.

The Roman roots of Tony Blair’s approach to education

Sir Tony Blair’s Tone-deaf suggestion that Stem subjects should dominate the curriculum of all schools would paradoxically take education back to the ancient world, when education was designed to benefit only the few. Take Rome. Wealth in the ancient world lay in land, which the rich exploited for all it was worth. Needing to protect their investment, Romans used their power to ensure that it was they who governed the state. The education system was designed to train them in winning arguments in the Senate and to protect themselves and their money in the courts. That left the remaining 90 per cent to fend for themselves, most trying to survive on a small land-holding, providing enough of a surplus to sell at market and buy what they could not themselves produce.

How the ancients treated gout

Medical problems come and go in the media, and at the moment the flavour of the month appears to be gout (from Latin gutta, a ‘drop’, seeping into a joint). For the Greek doctor Hippocrates, gout (Greek podagra, ‘foot-trap’) was the ‘fiercest, longest and most tenacious of all joint diseases’. But since the ancients did not know that excess uric acid, a natural product of the body, was its cause, their remedies were futile. Pliny the Elder claimed that wet seaweed was the answer. Scribonius Largus was at least original, the first to suggest electrification for medical purposes: he backed torpedo fish (an electric ray) for curing gout (some types put out 220 volts). But the ancients were at least aware that gout was associated with drink and high living, and therefore with the wealthy.

What Truss and Sunak could learn from Cicero

As Miss Truss and Mr Sunak spray policies around on a range of topics which they hope will appeal to Conservative members, Tory MPs agonise about whom to support, presumably with jobs in mind. The philosopher and statesman Cicero (106-43 BC) was more interested in a politician’s personal qualities. The Roman state was a res publica. At one point in his writings, Cicero rephrased that as res populi, which he interpreted as ‘the possession of the people’. By that, he did not mean a democracy – Romans disapproved of the Greek experiment – but a state in which the people did have an active and meaningful interest. Further, while Romans had duties and obligations to nations, citizens, family and friends, for Cicero it was their devotion to the res publica which counted more than anything else: ‘there is no relationship that is more close or more dear than that which ties each one of us to the res publica’.

The ancient problem of the man who threw away £150m in bitcoin

James Howells has spent years trying to persuade Newport council to allow him to spend millions digging up a rubbish tip to find a computer hard-drive, possibly containing yet more millions, which he threw away in 2013. The ancients, who found obdurate behaviour fascinating, often explored such human failings in their myths, many of which featured horribly appropriate outcomes. Erysichthon (‘one who pulls up the land’) provides a good example. Let the poet Ovid explain. Erysichthon, a man who never sacrificed to any gods, hacked away at and pulled down a much-venerated oak tree, hung with votive offerings and sacred to Ceres, goddess of the grain that feeds the world; further, he both beheaded a man who tried to stop him and ignored the tree’s threats of punishment.

Do we need a Roman-style Water Czar?

It is clear that the country will soon need a Water Czar. Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa would be the one to reshape the whole system, and Frontinus to ensure it all worked. Of Rome’s aqueducts, ‘cut-and cover’ masonry channels, following the contours of the ground, made up 80 to 90 per cent of their total mileage, with tunnels and arches only as necessary. Rome’s first three aqueducts, built between 312 bc and 144 bc, were ten miles, 40 miles and 56 miles long, the last with arches along the final flat seven miles into the city. But Rome was expanding fast by now and it was clear that, if the health, comfort and sanitation of the city were to be maintained (public baths were Rome’s key leisure facility and the main driver of demand), more were urgently needed.

The unflattering truth about the battle for No. 10

The battle to be PM raises the question: in a functioning democracy, how should arguments be won? Surely, by persuasion. But for ancient Greeks, too often it seemed to be by flattery. The Greek for ‘flatterer’ was kolax, and a comedian described a kolax’s lifestyle as follows: he would dress up in his best cloak, hire a slave and head off into town looking for someone rich and stupid, whom he would load with grotesque flattery. With any luck this would result in a dinner invitation, where he would make witty comments, turn the host’s vices into virtues and express delight at being the butt of his jokes. Aristotle described such a person as one who over-praised good qualities, glossed over failings and fulsomely sympathised with someone in distress, and made the point that, since everyone wanted to be loved and honoured, everyone in principle loved a kolax – and that gave the kolax his power over them.

The Roman roots of ‘colony’

The word ‘colony’ meets with a sharp intake of breath these days, but ‘province’ raises no eyebrows. How very odd. The ancient Greeks invented the western notion of the colony. But ‘colony’ is the term the Romans applied to it and is of Latin derivation, from colo, ‘I cultivate, inhabit’ and so colonia. The ancient Greek term was apoikia, lit. ‘a home apart, away’, or perhaps a ‘home from home’. Greeks established these apoikiai widely around the Mediterranean, mainly from the 8th to 6th centuries BC, clustering along the coasts of Turkey, northern Greece, all around the Black Sea, southern Italy, the eastern Adriatic, Sicily, parts of southern France and Spain, and Cyrene, as Plato said, ‘like frogs around a pond’.

The ancient Greek art of theatre criticism

Last week Lloyd Evans was wondering whether it was about time audiences started booing dramatic productions of which they disapproved. He was right to trace this happy practice back to the ancient Greeks. In Athens, trilogies of tragedies were put on in competition, and Plato tells us that the audience did not disguise its feelings about its choice of winner, though the judges had the final say (Plato disapproved of those who yielded to the ‘howling of the mob’). In general, disapproval of any aspect of a play was expressed by hissing and booing, and heels being kicked against the seats. Uncouth behaviour was also not uncommon. We hear of those who hissed while others applauded, those who applauded while others remained silent, those who belched during quiet passages (‘to draw attention to themselves’), and those who slept through the performances – and were left to sleep on after the theatre was cleared.

The ancient art of love spells

An Oxford don has raised the prospect of producing a cocktail of hormone pills that would help you to fall in love. What an appalling prospect! You might suddenly find yourself consumed with an irresistible desire for Ian Blackford. The ancients knew what was really required: a means of ensuring that the object of your passion fell in love with you. The ancients regarded an attack of lust as the same sort of experience as falling ill or being afflicted by madness. So a man in love with a woman would write a love spell asking a god or some unpleasant earth spirit to, for example, ‘burn, torch, the soul of X, her female body, her limbs, lay her low with fever, until she leaves her husband’s home and comes to me, now, quickly’.

How the Romans dealt with mutineers

The RMT union is threatening strikes to bring the country to a halt. Such activities have a long history in the West. The Romans got there first in 494 bc when the plebs – that is, most of the workers – won a degree of political power hitherto denied them, by withdrawing their labour. Using this mass communal strategy in the interests of the majority, but sparingly, they achieved political parity in 287 bc. The army too sometimes mutinied. This was dangerously different: the historian Tacitus saw it as a failure of leadership. In ad 14 Augustus died, and the legions in Pannonia (the Hungary-Balkans area) feared their terms of service, harsh already, would become yet harsher. Tacitus gave Percennius, the ringleader of the mutiny (once ‘a rabble-rousing cheerleader for actors’) a model trade union speech.

The true birth of communism

Nostalgia wars are all the rage at the moment, but an extraordinary example appears to have been missed: a hammer and sickle painted on the newly erected statue of Lady Thatcher. Communism was in fact invented by the Greek comic poet Aristophanes (c. 446-386 bc). For him, it was one long, uproarious joke. His Ecclesiazusae (‘Women Running The Assembly’) was produced in Athens in 391 bc. In it, he depicts the women of Athens disguising themselves with beards and taking total control of the male-dominated assembly. Their leaderene Praxagora then issues a programme of reform, which abolishes private property – land, goods, and money – and uses it to feed and clothe the whole citizen body, under female management. She also abolishes marriage, instantly destroying the whole Greek family and kinship system.

30,000 gallons of wine, 2,000 golden bulls and a three-month party: how the ancients celebrated

The ancients certainly knew how to put on a celebration. Let us hope the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee comes up to scratch. In 274 bc the Greek pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy II, staged a procession in honour of his father. It featured 400 cartloads of silver plate, 20 of gold and 800 of spices, 57,600 infantry, 23,200 horse, 2,000 bulls covered in gold, 2,400 dogs, 150 men carrying exotic trees with birds in them and 120 boys carrying saffron on gold platters. They were accompanied by elephants, goats, hartebeest, camels, ostriches, peacocks, a large white bear, three bear cubs, 14 leopards, 16 cheetahs, a giraffe and an Ethiopian rhinoceros. A vast bag stitched together out of leopard pelts poured 30,000 gallons of wine on to the streets and a cart-borne golden phallus nearly 200 feet long, draped with gold ribbons and bows and tipped with a star nine feet round, supplied the subtle finishing touch.

Putin is repeating Emperor Vitellius’s mistakes

Given Putin’s less than triumphant operation in Chechnya, where the Russian army suffered catastrophic losses, it is hardly surprising that his control of the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine does not seem to be a howling success. His inability to deal with the situation there bears a striking resemblance to that of the short-lived Roman emperor Vitellius. After the chaos that followed Nero’s suicide in ad 68, the year 69 is known as ‘the year of the four emperors’. Vitellius was the third to try for the throne, before falling to the ultimately successful pro-Vespasian forces. The Roman historian Tacitus was scathing about his military abilities. Vitellius in fact had some able generals and battle-hardened soldiers behind him, but they were well beaten at the crucial battle of Cremona in north Italy (24 October 69).

The ancient Greek ship that was too big for any harbour

The biggest cruise ship yet built has just been launched, but in like-for-like terms, it comes nowhere near the Syracusia, built c. 240 bc on the orders of the Sicilian tyrant Hiero II. A small ancient Greek freighter might be about 45ft long, a trireme 120ft, a large merchantman 130ft. The Syracusia was nearly three times longer, constructed out of enough material to build 60 triremes. It had three floors. The lowest contained the cargo. On the second were the 30 cabins, covered in multicoloured mosaics telling the story of Homer’s Iliad. The cooks’ galley came complete with a seawater fish-tank, with a 20,000-gallon freshwater cistern in the bow. The top level featured a gymnasium, promenades, gardens of ivy, grapevines, lilies and other plants, all watered, and a shrine to Aphrodite, paved with agate; its walls were panelled with cypress, ivory and cedar.

Putin’s emperor complex

Did Vladimir Putin ever use his infamous ‘historical’ account of Russia-Ukraine relations to consider how Ukrainians might react to his decision to attack them? Clearly not. The Roman historian Tacitus (d. c. ad 120) knew better what history was for. Tacitus acknowledged that Rome under the tyranny of the emperors had become corrupted. As a result, it had lost that moral compass evident in its early history. Discussing the tribes of Germany, for example, he commented on the laudable strictness of their marriage laws (one man, one wife) and a life free of vice: ‘No one thinks vice funny, no one calls corrupting or being corrupted “modern life”.’ The implied contrast with imperial Rome was obvious. Another German leader raised the same moral issue: Tacitus described how he urged a tribe to resume its ‘traditional way of life and throw off those luxuries that enslave Rome’s subjects far more effectively than Roman arms.

What Angela Rayner could learn from Hera

Whatever one thinks of her politics, Angela Rayner is clearly a pretty sporting party, and the joke she made about using her charms to distract the PM in the House is surely well in character. The ancient Greeks knew all about such crafty female tricks played on benighted males, never more delightfully exemplified than (surprisingly) in the West’s first work of literature, Homer’s Iliad (c. 700 bc). In Book 14, the pro-Greek goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, is furious with her husband for supporting the Trojans. So she decides to distract him – by sending him to sleep. She dolls herself up, persuades the goddess of sex Aphrodite to give her an irresistible sex charm, bribes Somnus, god of sleep, to make sure that when the moment comes, Zeus will stay properly conked out, and then sashays off to the top of Mount Ida, where Zeus is keenly watching the battle.

What makes a ‘just’ war?

What is a just war? Those who, from St Augustine onwards, have debated the question usually begin with Cicero, the Roman philosopher and statesman, who first attempted a definition in 44 bc. Cicero’s general understanding of the nature of justice, which was a central duty of those in power, went as follows: ‘Justice instructs us to spare all men, to consider the interests of the whole human race, to give everyone his due, and not to touch property which belongs to others.’ The foundation of justice was good faith, i.e. ‘truth and fidelity to promises and agreements’. There should be ‘a limit to retribution and punishment for wrongdoing’: much better to encourage repentance. On that broad basis, Cicero defined a ‘just war’ as follows: the only excuse for going to war was that one might live in peace, unharmed.

Ukraine, the Roman army and why morale matters

Commentators talk much about the morale of the Ukrainian troops and the edge that this has given them over the Russians, even in a technology-dominated conflict. Ancient warfare was a matter of hand-to-hand fighting, where morale is absolutely crucial – ‘defeat in battle always starts with the eyes’, said Tacitus – and the imperial Roman army offers a masterclass in how to generate it. That army was, uniquely, professional. The soldiers’ physical fitness, kit, mastery of weapons and technical training in battle tactics were second to none. Their loyalty to the group was reinforced by the closely knit units of eight in which they lived, ate and slept, training and fighting with similar units, all coming together to form the larger units – centuries and cohorts – of which the legions consisted, and under the same officers too.

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