Ancient greece

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

For the ancient Greeks, the only point in taking part was to win

The England team reached the final of the rugby world cup in Japan but they lost. As athletes, they knew that was failure. So did the ancient Greeks: only the winner was worth a prize. The poet Pindar (c. 518-440 bc) explored the consequences of this mentality. In one of his commissioned poems hymning victorious athletes, he described how Aristomenes defeated three wrestlers en route to winning the prize (a bay laurel wreath) at the Pythian Games at Delphi. Of those losers, Pindar said: ‘They were left no happy homecoming. As they ran back to their mothers they heard no joyous laughter to give them delight: no, they slunk furtively

Would the Athenians have held a second referendum?

The Athenians invented the referendum: after debate in the citizens’ assembly, they voted through all political decisions by a show of hands. They could also demand a revote, as happened on a famous occasion in 427 bc, after Athens put down the revolt of the city-state of Mytilene. Does this justify the proposed second Brexit referendum? The Athenian assembly, angered by the revolt, initially voted to execute all adult males and sell the women and children into slavery. A ship was sent to see to it. But next day, as the contemporary historian Thucydides reported, ‘the people began to think how excessively savage it was to destroy everyone, not just

Watching Stephen Fry was like being in the presence of a god

Stephen Fry lies prone on an empty stage. A red ball rolls in from the wings and bashes him in the face. He stands up and introduces himself as Odysseus, stranded on an island-kingdom as he makes his way home after the Trojan War. The ball had escaped from the hands of a clumsy maidservant who was playing on the beach with a local princess. Now Fry, as Odysseus, begs her help and asks for a petticoat to cover his nakedness. This tale comes from Homer’s Odyssey, Book Six, but Fry doesn’t quote the reference he merely plunges on with the story. Odysseus shows up at the palace of the

Boris is facing his Sparta moment

The PM’s hero is the Athenian statesman Pericles, and a Periclean crossroads is now approaching. According to the biographer Plutarch, Pericles’ influence begins during Athens’s golden age, when its power was expanding at the expense of Sparta, its rival city-state. Though an aristocrat, Pericles turned himself into a populist, but took care not become too familiar a figure. He was seen in public only when on political business and generally kept a low profile (as Boris was accused of doing in last week’s Spectator editorial). Pericles then began to ‘borrow’ money on various pretexts, pouring it into public festivals, fees for public services and fabulous major building works (one of

High life | 18 July 2019

Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to imagine if random political selection would be a good thing today. The answer is a resounding yes. Both Socrates and Aristotle questioned fundamental norms and values, and if they were alive today they would certainly question our acceptance of career politicians who have never had any other profession. (Corbyn, Biden… I could go on.) Socrates was sceptical about many things, especially the arts, because he believed they led us away from the truth. Yet nowadays so-called ‘artists’ influence public opinion as never before. The fact that even numbskull rappers have

Glimmers of hope

With parliament irretrievably deadlocked over Brexit and the EU intransigent, there remains little belief that either of the prime ministerial candidates can find an even remotely happy solution to the problem. All they can currently offer are the tender leaves of hope. The ancient Greek farmer poet Hesiod (c. 680 bc) told the story of this ambiguous commodity. The gods, determined that life on Earth should be one of suffering, fashioned an irresistibly beautiful woman, Pandora, and sent her down among men with a large storage jar, which she proceeded to open. Out from it flew all the ills of the world, but Zeus ensured that she put the lid

Tragedy and validity

Rufus Norris, the National Theatre’s artistic director, has revealed that all those tedious ancient plays will from now on be updated with a ‘modern twist’ to ‘bring in a fresh audience’. By way of example, he assures us that the forthcoming reworking of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 bc) will still be ‘a very valid Greek play’. Valid? What does he mean by that? The original was pretty ‘valid’, with its chorus and three masked male actors playing all the parts, speaking and singing in complex metrical forms in high linguistic register; and it was a serious, elevated medium, inhabited by high-status characters. Most tragedies were drawn from myth. That too was

The perils of popularity

So: Boris triumphans, ready to deliver a 140-seat majority for the Tories and lead the UK out of Europe and on to greater triumphs? The shade of an Athenian statesman might offer a warning. Themistocles (c. 524-459 bc) came from an obscure family, but early on conceived a passion for politics. His father ‘pointing out some ancient triremes, mere hulks abandoned on the seashore, said that was what happened to leaders when the people decided they were irrelevant’. This merely spurred him on. Themistocles flourished in the direct democracy invented in Athens in 508 bc. He built up a following among the poor, was said to know every citizen by

Rebuilding Artemis’s temple

As soon as the blaze that nearly brought down Notre Dame was extinguished, two questions were asked: how did it catch fire? And how will it be rebuilt? So too with a famous Greek temple. In 560 bc in Ephesus on the west coast of modern Turkey was built a massive temple to Artemis (Roman Diana), the largest building we know of from the Greek world and the first to be constructed out of marble. It was sponsored by Croesus, king of Lydia, a man so rich you could commit suicide by jumping off his wallet. But it was intentionally burned down in 356 bc by a man called Herostratus,

The comedy and the crisis

Since comedians these days seem to be the authorities on all matters spiritual and temporal (puts on funny voice, knife-crime ends), who better than the comic playwright Aristophanes to show us how, despite our feckless MPs, we can leave the EU? In 425 bc Athens had for six years been locked in a grinding war against Sparta. Because Pericles had persuaded the assembly not to take on Sparta by land, the people of Attica (Athens’s territory) had abandoned their farms and crops to the enemy and withdrawn inside Athens’s long walls, where a dreadful plague had killed about a quarter of them (including Pericles). In the comic festival of that

Acropolis now

‘My Acropolis,’ Auguste Rodin called his house at Meudon. Here, the sculptor made a Parthenon above Paris. Surrounded by statues of ‘mutilated gods’, he cast himself as the Phidias of the age. His collection was part cabinet of curiosities, part charnel house. He bought Nile crocodiles and Peking ginger jars, painted sarcophagi and chipped red-figure vases. Crowded among his 6,000 Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese and Japanese objects were his own plasters, bronzes and clay models: hands by the hundred, legs vast and trunkless, arms beckoning, fidgeting, reaching. Isadora Duncan set up her ‘Dionysian’ dance school nearby to teach Hellenic rhythms. In the catacombs of the Rodin Museum of Meudon

O tempora! O mores!

Most of the history I know and remember comes from my inspirational prep school teacher Mr Bradshaw. History was taught so much better in those days. It was all kings and queens, battles and dates, with no room for any of that nonsense like,‘Imagine you are a suffragette going to protest the oppressive male hegemony at the races. Describe how it feels to be crushed by the king’s horse.’ Nor was there any question that you were participating in some kind of collaborative learning experience. Your ‘master’ taught; you listened and learned — and occasionally made distracting jokes and got bits of chalk chucked at you. That was the deal

Losing the plot | 22 February 2018

ITV’s Marcella (Monday) represents another triumphant breakthrough in the portrayal of female cops on television. Of course, thanks to more or less every other crime show around, we already know that women in their forties can be senior police officers. But what Marcella makes even clearer than, say, Vera or No Offence is that so can women in their forties who are entirely unsuited to being senior police officers. For a start, the eponymous heroine suffers from regular mental collapses during which she often turns violent before handily forgetting — and forgiving herself for — anything bad she may have done. She also seems to specialise in cases where she

Les Troyens

Grade: A-   Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is quite often performed. The vast reputations of the most popular operatic composers seem to grow ever larger with the years, but Berlioz somehow always needs defending. Listening to this latest CD set, ‘live’ from Strasbourg, I was struck as always by the magnificence of much of the music, and the characteristic lurches into banality or irrelevance that account, I suspect, for the work being so often underrated. But when you get to the last half-hour, Aeneas’s departure for Rome, and Dido’s rage, misery, curses, sudden accesses of calm, fresh outbursts,

An appeal to the masses

As the Tories struggle to find a policy which might appeal to their traditional supporters and not simply ape those of Jeremy Corbyn, how about a reprise of Solon’s law against idleness? In 594 bc Solon was made arkhôn in Athens to deal with a number of problems, including debt. Solon ruled, for example, that if fathers did not find a trade for their sons, their sons would not have to support them in old age; and to boost trade and jobs, encouraged foreigners to settle in Athens with their families, and facilitated Athenian commerce abroad. He also passed a law (we are told) against idleness: every year every family