Classic Spooks

In a fascinating interview for the Iris magazine, Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, talked about the value he placed on his classical education. He disclosed that he once received an important memo from a superior in ‘perfect ancient Greek’ and that his current private secretary speaks Greek and Latin, as did the man who gave him his first job in MI5. He mentioned in particular his interest in Suetonius, author of the lives of the earliest emperors, and the satirist Juvenal, both flourishing c. ad 120.

One can see why. Politics in Republican Rome had been a relatively open affair, the business of the Senate being regularly published in a sort of Hansard, the Acta Senatus. But then the Republic collapsed in bloody civil war. Julius Caesar’s nominated heir Octavian emerged as the first emperor Augustus (27 bc–ad 14), and politics took on a very different colour. Control passed from a relatively democratic system of senatorial proposals, passed into law by popular vote, to secretive imperial decision-making kept within the closed confines of the imperial court. This was an Orwellian world of informers and paranoid emperors, of rumour, scandal, intrigue and gossip, where a man (Junius Blaesus) could find himself condemned to death for going to a party while the emperor was ill. It is perfect material to capture the interest of the budding spy-master.

But there is a more important sense in which the study of a subject like classics makes demands on our capacity to understand similar to those faced by the spy-master every day. In a word, we are talking about Humint, human intelligence, defined by Nato as ‘a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources’.