Ancient greece

What Dominic Cummings could learn from Xenophon

On the subject of leadership, the Athenian soldier, historian, biographer and essayist Xenophon (c. 430-354 BC) had much to say, having led the retreat of 10,000 Greek soldiers from Cunaxa (Iraq) through hostile territory back to Greece. Had Dominic Cummings paid more attention to him when he studied ancient and modern history at Oxford, his time in government might have been more successful. The key to Xenophon’s thinking was that the good leader had a positive relationship with his men, calculated to be of mutual benefit to everyone: the image of friendship between leader and men was never far away. In his life of the Persian leader Cyrus the Great,

A fantastic online show of Euripides’s take on Helen of Troy

Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris, which triggered the ten-year Trojan war. The Greeks were victorious but after sacking the city they went straight home again. So what was the point? Euripides’s play Helen takes a radically different approach in this Zoom production by the Centre for Hellenic Studies at Harvard. The script is crammed with enough twists and turns to make an entire Net-flix series but the running time is barely 60 minutes. Euripides opens with a narrative bombshell by revealing that Helen was absent from Troy throughout the conflict. The gods had spirited her

The ancient Greek approach to mediation

Divorcing couples are being given vouchers worth £500 to settle their problems by mediation rather than going to court. It was the ancient Greeks who produced the first examples of mediation in the West. Since the ancients had no police force or Crown Prosecution Service, all prosecutions were brought privately. There were no barristers or judges or witnesses — just the two litigants, giving a single speech of fixed length (with witness evidence read out), after which the jurors voted, with no further discussion. But since jurors (201, 401 or 501 depending on the case) were paid by the state, it was an expensive business. So every effort was made

Homer is a hard read – made easy with earbuds

Mention Homer now and most people will picture yellow, rather than bronze. But Homer Simpson’s comic status as a modern anti hero only makes sense with a knowledge, however vague, of the heroes in The Iliad and The Odyssey.  They underpin the last three thousand years of western culture. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus and Helen… these are the chess pieces that poets, painters and sculptors have been playing with ever since. Odysseus, the Trickster, is there at the dawn of classical literature – and then again, Romanised as Ulysses, at the dawn of Modernism. What a gift. Trust the Greeks. Still, there is a reason no-one reads them anymore – at

From ancient Greece to TikTok: a short history of the sea shanty

Many things are now normal that would have seemed unlikely a year ago. But even in this strange new world the sudden rise of the sea shanty is, perhaps, strangest of all. It all started in December when Nathan Evans, a postman from North Lanarkshire, posted a video of himself online — a lone figure filmed in no-frills close-up, hoodie high under the chin, beanie pulled down to the eyes — singing the 19th-century whaling song ‘Wellerman’. A trickle of views became a storm, thousands turning to millions (now billions) and just like that sea shanties went from kitsch, Last Night of the Proms novelty to global phenomenon. The song

The ancients were defined by actions, not attributes

Diversity is ‘about empowering people by respecting and appreciating what makes them different, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education and national origin’. If this means making their differences the most important thing about them, it fails to answer the question about what such empowering will enable them to do. A famous story about Heracles illustrates ancient priorities. He was on the cusp of manhood and wondering what path in life to take. Vice and Virtue approached him and made their different pitches. Vice (‘but friends call me “Happiness”’) offered a life of endless pleasure, Virtue something very different. ‘Men will get no fine or noble

Modern historians take a Roman approach to history – whether they admit it or not

To what use does one put history? Romans thought it provided ‘lessons’. Modern historians rather sniff at the idea, but do in fact dance to the same tune. For Romans, the study of history was all about discovering exempla (‘models, examples’) applicable to current circumstances. Indeed, Valerius Maximus (1st C ad) composed his Memorable Deeds and Sayings entirely out of historical exempla, as ‘torches or spurs that make humans burn with desire to help others and win their respect’. This may seem charmingly naive, but consider two stories from the historian Livy. Manlius Torquatus, ordered by his father the consul not to leave his position, accepted a challenge from an

Should a Good Citizen snitch on neighbours?

If neighbours break whatever new Covid rules might soon emerge, it has been suggested that the Good Citizen might snitch on them to the authorities. Though not perhaps our cup of tea, it was certainly the ancient Greeks’. The Athenian lawgiver Solon (594 bc) was responsible. In the absence of a police force or a state prosecutor, Solon put the responsibility for bringing criminals to justice into the hands of citizens. They brought their complaints before legal authorities who established procedures for bringing them to court. This was all very well when litigants had been personally harmed, but it raised a problem when the state’s, rather than the individual’s, interests

How the Athenians would have handled the Lords

Arguments about the purpose or indeed very existence of anything resembling the House of Lords would have struck classical democratic Athenians as bizarre. But its Areopagus might prompt thought. This body had been in existence long before Cleisthenes invented radical democracy in 508 bc. It was made up of the wealthy aristocratic elite from whom alone the main state officials (archons) could be drawn. Their term of office completed, they joined the Areopagus for life. This body was the state’s legal guardian. The democratic reformer Solon (594 bc) slightly broadened its membership, and removed some of its political powers. Cleisthenes, whose reforms turned the Athenian people meeting in assembly into

How to fight a good war

Serifos There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of the past, and they sure make today’s bunch look puny. Philosophers, playwrights, statesmen, artists, poets, orators, sculptors; the ancients had them all. After 2,500 years, they’ve never been equalled. I was once walking around the Greek wing at the New York Met and I ran into Henry Kissinger, whom I knew slightly. He asked me what the population of ancient Athens was. ‘About 20 to 30,000 citizens,’ I answered. He shook his head in amazement. ‘And they produced all this,’ he said. When I first began learning about the Greeks —

Mixed messages about body weight are nothing new

Tackling obesity is the latest government initiative, universally condemned as nannying. Ask a Spartan. From an early age, Spartan children were taught not to be fussy: to eat up their food, and not to fear the dark or being left alone. At the age of seven, boys were taken from their homes and lived together in ‘herds’, exercising bare-footed and often naked, keeping fit and learning obedience. Food was sparse, because ‘overeating produces a broad, squat frame, and laboured breathing’. Lean features ‘defined the body’s true shape’, unlike obese ones. Competitive games were fostered, winners encouraged and a proud mental resilience developed. Now that’s nannying: the full Rees-Mogg. Other Greeks

Does classical Athens give us a clue to China’s next move?

In 1984, China agreed a ‘one country, two systems’ treaty with the UK, designed to control the relationship between Hong Kong and China for 50 years after Britain ceded control of the colony in 1997. It has now broken the treaty, for no other reason than that it can. So what next in that tinderbox? Classical Athens was at war three years out of four, and if arbitration had failed to solve the treaty problem, it would have gone to war. No Greek preferred war to peace, but fighting for life and territory was simply a given of the ancient world. Greeks felt war against barbaroi (non-Greeks) was an easy

Why stop at destroying statues?

The actor John Cleese has been wondering if we should destroy Greek statues because Greeks believed ‘a cultured society was only possible if it was based on slavery’. That was not a Greek belief, but might the existence of ancient slavery suggest that their statues deserve to be knocked down anyway? Two points: first, the ancient world was one in which there were laws, but no concept of human rights, or of the sanctity of life; second, slavery was simply a universal fact of life, rather like hunting. Anyone could be enslaved at any time — captured in war or by pirates at sea — and many were born into

Envy is the greatest blight of all

Gstaad Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’ during the Periclean period, in around 430 BC. He did not call it a virus, but a sickness of the brain. Some years later, Aristotle described micropoulaki syndrome as a disease but one that was not contagious, ‘no more than a fool can influence an intelligent fellow to act foolish’. Micropoulaki in classical Greek translates as having a tiny willy. Women should, by definition, be immune from the disease. But they are, strange as it may seem, known to suffer from it, although not as often and as badly as

Movie-makers should look to the Athenians before cashing in on this crisis

Covid-19 has not yet reached its peak but already the moguls of the small screen are plotting how to monetise, with exquisite sensitivity, of course, the tragic deaths of thousands of people. They would be wise to listen to the Athenian lovers of tragedy. In 499 bc the powerful Greek city of Miletus on the coast of western Turkey (Asia Minor) raised a revolt against its Persian overlords. It failed and in 494 bc Persia took its revenge: the city was sacked, its women and children sold into slavery, and most of its men slaughtered. Just a year or so later, the poet Phrynichus turned this historical incident into a

The way Greece has conducted itself in this pandemic is an example to us all

Aristophanes was a comic genius long before the Marx Brothers, but he also gave good advice to the Athenians: stop the war! In his play Lysistrata he had the women going on strike — no more nookie — until the men stopped fighting. During the plague that killed the greatest Athenian of them all, Pericles, Aristophanes advised the young to isolate, meditate and masturbate, advice still valid to this day. Greece, with roughly the same population as Switzerland and faced with a surge of migrants turned loose by the dreaded Turks, has handled the crisis well. The American media is using the virus crisis in order to attack Trump, but

Coronavirus and the lessons of the Athenian plague

The plague that struck Athens in the summer of 430 bc was a killer: it lasted for two years, returned after a year, and carried off a third of Athens’ manpower, including Pericles. From the historian Thucydides’ famous description, the plague — he caught it but recovered — bore certain resemblances to Covid-19 (allowing for differences in severity), but also invites reflection. He is the first Greek to mention two common illness-related phenomena: contagion — he says that, because of their exposure, there was a high death-rate among doctors and among those with the courage and sense of duty to try to care for the sick — and some immunity

Boris is taking an emperor’s approach to briefings

The PM is insisting that the briefings he finds in his red box every evening should be, well, brief, and has limited them to four sides of A4. That is three too many. Emperors too had in and out boxes and knew what hard work they could be. Seleucus, Greek king of Asia, was said to have complained that ‘If people knew what a burden it was reading and writing so many letters, they would not bother to pick up a discarded royal crown’. It was a common gripe of Roman emperors, too, who had a remarkably small secretariat — Julius Caesar famously annoyed the crowd at the games when

Ancient Athens would have been horrified by Trump’s impeachment

An impeachment trial is overseen by Congress and Senate, who both make the law and (in this case) sit in judgment on it, ignoring the modern legal principle of the separation of powers. Athenians would have been shocked, not because they believed in the separation of powers (their citizens too made the law in assembly and sat in judgment in the law courts) but because in democratic Athens it was citizens that decided verdicts, and in randomly selected and therefore unpredictable juries. By contrast, two elected oligarchic cabals decide impeachment trials, usually making acquittal a foregone conclusion. Athenians would have been appalled: what was even remotely democratic about that? Statistics

It’s science, not protest, that will save the planet

One might expect that the challenge of climate change would encourage many young people to take up Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects at A-level. Yet over the past ten years, with the exception of maths, numbers have risen only very slightly; and for ICT have dropped. Ancient attitudes to what then passed as ‘science’ may suggest a solution. Ancient Greeks were scrupulous about one fundamental breakthrough that remains the cornerstone of all serious research: supernatural explanations were impermissible. The reason was that no human could know the mind of a god. This did not mean Greek ‘scientists’ did not acknowledge the gods; they simply took it as axiomatic