Ancient & modern

9 May 2009

This is the recession, so we must spend our way out of it! So speaks Old Labour.

This is the recession, so we must spend our way out of it! So speaks Old Labour. No, no. ‘Thrift’ must be the watchword, insists New Tory. Talk about missing the point.

Aristocratic Romans knew all about the pleasures of spending vast sums of money. Lucullus (1st C bc) was a byword for it (hence our ‘Lucullan’). From a rich family anyway, he made a gigantic fortune during his campaigns in the East (Turkey, Syria, Armenia), duly rewarded his troops and made copious, magnificent benefactions in Rome (the manubiae discussed a few weeks ago), but then found political life did not suit him. So he retired, dedicating himself to a life of cultured excess.

Fishponds were the order of the day among the rich. Expensive to build, maintain and supply with water, they were spare change for Lucullus, who drove a canal from one of his villas directly into the bay of Naples in order to keep saltwater stocks. Wild-game reserves, oyster-beds, aviaries, fine wines and food; buildings with rare and expensive marble and extensive gardens; artificial hills and ramps leading into the sea; fine art and sculpture from Greece — that was the life! When Lucullus was served a modest meal because there were no guests, he told the butler, ‘Did you not know that Lucullus is dining with Lucullus today?’

Cicero was scornful anyway (‘our leading men assume they have scaled the heights of ambition if their mullet feed out of their hands’, he comments witheringly in a letter). But he specifically attacked Lucullus for not setting an example of restraint. When Lucullus protested that his neighbours constructed luxury houses, Cicero replied it was Lucullus’ example that egged them on. ‘We would all stop such greed, except that our masters are just as bad,’ he wrote. ‘The vices of our leading citizens are shameful enough, without them begetting hosts of imitators.’

And that is the point. For Cicero, thrift was a virtue, of absolute value, to be practised whatever one’s wealth or position. It is obviously not a virtue for the Prime Minister, while for David Cameron it is a regrettable, but he hopes temporary, expedient of whose end he will be delighted to boast when, thanks to him, the economy recovers.

Hold on. What was that word? ‘Economy’? What an exquisite irony.

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