Pericles for PM: Boris should forget Augustus and stay focused on his hero

Boris Johnson is a gung-ho classicist. He has supported the subject throughout his journalistic and political career, is a generous donor to the charity Classics for All, and has a bust of his hero Pericles in his study. Indeed, he says his reading of Pericles’s famous funeral speech (431 bc) when he was 12 or 13 had a powerful effect on him, especially Pericles’s statement that ‘Athens is called a demokratia because it runs its house in the interests not of the few but of the majority’.

Last week, however, he turned into the Roman emperor Augustus to explain his sacking of 21 rebel MPs. Augustus, emerging as victor in 31 bc in the civil war against Antony and Cleopatra,  did just this, killing potential rivals and ushering in a long and peaceful reign. The PM must be hoping that by ridding the party now of the Europhiles, the internal (and eternal) civil war in the Tory party will finally be resolved.

In respect of this practical classicism, the PM may be unique. Up till 1916, virtually all PMs had no option but to study Latin and Greek mainly as linguistic, not cultural, exercises at school. But those who suggest this education led them to see themselves as players in an epic battle, taking massive gambles to achieve greatness, would be mistaken. Take three of our most famous classicist PMs: Gladstone, Asquith and the other post-1916 example, Macmillan, all, like Boris, at Balliol.

William Gladstone (PM four times, 1868-94) was passionate about the epic poet Homer and wrote extensively about him. But he was no fan of Pericles. In his diary for 13 May 1826 he noted that he ‘wrote a speech on the politics of Pericles’ for a debating club, arguing that ‘they [Pericles’s politics] were neither useful nor justifiable’.