Ancient greece

This week we celebrated VE Day. When Pericles remembered the dead from the war against Sparta in his famous Funeral Speech of 431 bc, he was not celebrating victory – the war would end in 404 bc with Athens’s surrender – but doing something quite new: he was reflecting on what Athens stood for and why it was worth dying for. Pericles began by ticking off a number of important features of dêmokratia, ‘people-power’: the system ran in the interests of the many, not the few; men of distinction were given scope to win promotion on the grounds of merit (‘people-power’ was always thought to deny them that opportunity); but

Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement. Though the ancients would have employed oaths, the practical ancient Greeks often ensured there was a flexibility about them: the real world might intervene. For example, treaties between city-states were agreed between opposing generals. Hostages were exchanged, oaths sworn and the terms of the treaty widely inscribed on stone and bronze pillars, but it was citizens who oversaw the treaty’s maintenance. In a Greek democracy, however, there was no saying how, under the influence of different leaders, policy might change and annul a treaty at a stroke. Then again, though treaties could be sworn to last forever, ‘circumstances’ were very unlikely to remain

Boris Johnson’s Unleashed imagines him, like Cincinnatus, leaving his plough, saving Rome, and returning to it. But given that Boris is among the international elite, perhaps Alcibiades (c. 451-404 bc) would fit him better. Athenian elites had long had connections with the other power-brokers of the classical Greek world, Sparta and Persia. Born into such a family, the young Alcibiades, at the death of his father in 447 bc, was placed in the care of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, who chose Socrates as his mentor (we are told he tried to seduce Socrates but failed). A charismatic and handsome young man, he led a life of ‘lawless self-indulgence’ but,

Rachel Reeves seems to be promising us an initial Iron Age of misery which will mutate into a glorious Golden Age. How very classical of her. It is true that some ancient Greeks saw it the other way round. They argued that it was early civilisation that was the Golden Age, inhabited by men who lived ageless and free from hardship, while Nature poured forth its fruits, harvested by men at leisure (comic poets greatly enjoyed imagining a world in which it rained wine and pease porridge, hot sausage slices rolled down rivers and inanimate objects jumped to obey orders: ‘Table, come here! Cup, go wash yourself! Fish, turn over

However great the achievements of athletes at the Olympic Games – and even more so the Paralympics – there will always be those who have their doubts about their real value. Some ancient Greeks certainly felt like that about their Olympics. Complaints were made that an athlete’s physical fitness did nothing for the public health. No boxer would order the city better or stock her granaries, and surely it was valour in war that counted. A satirist pointed out that naked wrestlers covered in olive oil would not be much use in the front line of battle. Others expressed concern about the character of the Games’ founder, Heracles, the greatest

Riots are difficult enough for us to deal with, let alone for the ancients, who had neither police nor prisons; and only late on housed troops in cities. Since Athenian citizens – the poor – made all political decisions, and the state and the rich funded them, there was little for them to riot about. The two riots organised by oligarchs to destroy democracy failed. But in republican Rome, political tensions between the rich and the poor could produce serious rioting, often designed to disrupt the voting. Tiberius Gracchus’ Bill (132 bc) forbade anyone from owning more than 120 hectares of public land (50 soccer pitches), the excess being distributed

A lawyer who wished to serve on a jury but was no Christian was given permission to swear his oath in the name of a local river. He saw it as ‘his god’, as people did in the past, when the association between nature and divinity was widely taken for granted. Consider, for example, the ancient Greek understanding of the natural world. The farmer poet Hesiod (c. 700 bc), often drawing on Hittite and Babylonian myths, provided the West with its first account of how the world was made. First there was khaos, he said (that meant, ‘emptiness, void’, cf. ‘chasm’). Then there appeared Earth, Underworld and Eros (without which

As the party of the lost and the party of the losers square up to each other, the next few weeks bid fair to raise tedium to an excruciating new level. Still, one can always rely on the c. 4,000 epigrams of the Greek Anthology (7th century bc – 6th century ad) to provide some light relief. ‘We arrived at Apelles’ for supper./ He’d stripped his garden bare./ It looked as if he was feeding his sheep,/ Instead of his friends gathered there,/ With radish and lettuce and chicory too,/ And leeks, mint and onions, and basil and rue./ And fearing we’d soon be presented/ with a nourishing helping of

I had a good talk with my NBF, Owen Matthews, at The Spectator’s writers’ party, and we agreed on the two subjects we talked about: Russia and women. I won’t exaggerate the enormity of our aggregate knowledge – and the way we have deployed it in our service, especially where the fairer sex is concerned. Suffice to say that it is far beyond the comprehension of most individuals who concern themselves only with money. Speaking of loot, I have a gent’s bet with a friend that Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX infamy – accused of having stolen billions while attempting to recover his financial blunders – will get away with a

After much debate it was decided that the people would not be ordered to reciprocate the King’s oath of allegiance. This was wise. As ancient Greeks knew, oaths have serious implications. For them, to take an oath was in effect ‘to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it was false’. The Trojan war – the subject of the West’s first work of literature – happened only because Tyndareos, stepfather of Helen, compelled all her Greek suitors, on oath, to go to war on anyone who seduced her from her husband – which the Trojan Paris proceeded to

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

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;

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

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

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

The only good news, after the massacres in Ukraine, is that so many ugly behemoth super-yachts have been seized and will not be polluting the seas this summer. There is no more horrible sight than an oligarch’s super-yacht on the horizon, and that is before it disgorges its passengers, which is a horror show in itself. Arab boats, with their hookers on board, are even worse. The other good news is that Elon Musk has become the largest shareholder in Twitter, and in a Trojan War replication has challenged Putin to a duel. Oh, what a wonderful world this would be if those who started wars would duke it out

The Oscar frenzy spent, it is worth reflecting on how easy writers and actors have it these days. The ancient Greeks invented our idea of acted drama, and the conventions were tough. Here are the main ones. In myth-based tragedies, for example, all the speaking parts – young and old, male and female – were played, and occasionally sung too, by only three fully masked male actors (one play had 11 speaking parts – work that out!). There was also a ‘chorus’ – 12 or 15 actors, all masked, singing and dancing in unison between episodes, though the leader could converse with the main characters. Of low social status, they