Ancient greece

Thursday

Taki

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

Thursday

Peter Jones

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

Thursday

Peter Jones

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

Thursday

Peter Jones

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

Thursday

Peter Jones

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,

Thursday

Peter Jones

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

Thursday

Laura Freeman

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

Thursday

James Delingpole

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

Thursday

James Walton

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

Wednesday

Michael Tanner

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,

Thursday

Peter Jones

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

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

The icemen cometh

You wouldn’t want to stumble upon the Scythians. Armed with battle-axes, bows and daggers, and covered in fearsome tattoos, the horse-mad nomads ranged the Russian steppe from around 900 to 200 BC, turning squirrels into fur coats and human teeth into earrings. At their mightiest, they controlled territory from the Black Sea to the north border of China. They left behind no written record, only enormous burial mounds, chiefly in the Altai mountains and plains of southern Siberia. Chambers that weren’t looted in antiquity were preserved in the permafrost only to be discovered millennia later. It is thanks to Peter the Great and the expeditions he launched that so many

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Silent films

On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the literary supplement of Le Figaro. This described a purple house in the middle of a garden, the paths of which were made of yellow sand. The walls were glass bricks ‘in the shape of purple eggs’. Such aesthetic dwellings were all the rage; Van Gogh dreamed of having one himself in Arles. But as one learns from an exhibition at Leighton House, it was another 19th-century Dutch artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who actually inhabited two such establishments — one off Regent’s Park, the other in St John’s Wood. On paper, Van

Thursday

Peter Jones

Property’s not theft

Sir Trevor Nunn is directing a play called ‘Dessert’. It seems to be a virtue-signalling riff on the evil of possessions. Doubtless Cicero and Aratus will not feature. On the face of it, the Roman statesman Cicero (1st c bc) was a passionate upholder of property rights. He said ‘it is the proper function of the state and its citizens to ensure for everyone the free and undisturbed guardianship of their possessions’. But that did not mean ownership of property overrode the state’s central purpose and therefore duty — the maintenance of social cohesion and so social harmony, that concordia to which Cicero returned again and again. His whole point

Thursday

Peter Jones

The post-truth is out there

In a political ‘post-truth’ world, currently the subject of a slew of books, emotions and personal belief are said to shape opinion more than ‘objective’ fact. But as Aristotle pointed out in his Art of Rhetoric (4th century bc), there are facts only about the present and past; about the future, politics’ main concern, there are only interests and aspirations. Anyone who addressed the Assembly, he said, must know the facts about revenues — sources of income and expenditure, and where to spend and cut; about present and potential military strengths, and in what areas (and the same about other states, so as to know whom to attack and whom

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Music matters | 1 June 2017

The ancient Greeks had a word for it —katabasis, descending into the depths, to the underworld itself, in search of answers. To cross the threshold between life and death, innocence and knowledge, the everyday and what lies beyond, is an act woven through art, resurfacing in each generation. For Orpheus, and for Monteverdi, the journey may be a literal one, but for Bartok’s Bluebeard, imagined in the age of Freud and Jung, hell is not found outside, or even in other people, but within the darkest recesses of our own selves. When we speak of Orpheus it is of music, of birds and beasts beguiled, and men and women drawn

Thursday

Peter Jones

Thucydides on McGuinness

When Gerry Adams rose to announce at his funeral that Martin McGuinness was no terrorist but a ‘freedom fighter’, the historian Thucydides probably allowed himself a grim smile. He knew all about these sort of people. In 427 BC, Corcyra (ancient Greek Kerkura, now Corfu) was in the grip of a ferocious civil war between oligarchic and democratic factions for control of the state. The feature that stood out for Thucydides was the reversal of all normal, civilised values on both sides of the divide. Most striking of all, ‘men reversed the usual evaluative force of words to suit their own assessment of the situation’. The result was that ‘cowardice’ was now

Thursday

Peter Jones

How to make the rich love tax

Now that Philip Hammond is promising yet more tax hikes, he might consider how Athens managed it. During the whole period of their direct democracy (which ended in 323 BC), the decision-making assembly was dominated by the poor. Their empire made Athens a wealthy place, and the poor ensured that wealth came their way, not that of the rich, in forms such as payment for jury service, rowing the triremes (which kept the empire together) and much more. Meanwhile, tax was paid only by the rich. The 300 top richest every year paid property taxes to, for example, construct and maintain Athens’ triremes and fund state festivals for public enjoyment. Neither

Thursday

Peter Jones

Enemies of the people

Hardly a week goes by without someone applauding Thomas Carlyle’s objection to democracy: ‘I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ In other words, infinitely wise politicians should tell the unenlightened mob what to think, not vice versa. Such feelings have been common ever since the Athenians invented direct democracy in 508 BC, which lasted till 323 BC and handed to citizens in the assembly (the dêmos) the power to decide all Athenian policy. One anonymous writer described the dêmos as ‘ignorant, ill-disciplined and immoral’, ascribing it to their ‘poverty and lack of education’. The philosopher Plato thought a state could be well governed only by Platonic philosophers. The historian Thucydides

Thursday

Peter Jones

Socrates on expertise

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, raises his growth forecasts and suddenly everyone believes the ‘expert’. So is it wrong to say that people ‘have had enough of experts’? Yes, totally wrong. Expertise exists: the question is, with what scope? Socrates dissected the problem. In debates in Athens’ democratic Assembly, he pointed out, topics such as building or ship construction were taken to be the business of builders and shipwrights, and anyone who, though no expert, attempted to give advice in those areas was jeered off the platform. But when the debate moved on to deliberation about a course of action, then ‘any builder, smith, cobbler, merchant or