Ancient rome

Thursday

Peter Jones

Tiberius and the ‘phantoms of liberty’

Word has it that ministers already do not bother to argue their corner with the government’s inner ring, while a slimmer, streamlined cabinet office threatens to disempower them still further. Ministers could soon resemble senators under Rome’s second emperor Tiberius (ad 14-37). The historian Tacitus painted an extraordinary picture of Tiberius’s early days in office. The fact was that his stepfather Augustus had exercised autocratic power after he ‘restored’ the republic that had collapsed in 31 bc. The question for senators, therefore, was what change to expect under the new man in power. Their experience suggested precious little. They already knew Tiberius as a cryptic, devious and heartless character, whose

Saturday

Peter Jones

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

Thursday

Peter Jones

Death and the Romans

World Mental Health day raised again the issue of suicide, still regarded as happening only among those ‘whose balance of mind is disturbed’. Not necessarily, Romans would have argued. For Romans the manner of one’s death was as important as that of one’s life. As Seneca said, ‘Like a story, the important thing about life is how it is played out. It does not matter where you stop. Stop wherever you want to, but just attach a good ending.’ On his deathbed the emperor Augustus invited those gathered round him to applaud him for acting well his part in life’s comedy. The key was to face death like a man,

Thursday

Peter Jones

On good authority

Forget David Davis, Boris, the cabinet, the commentariat. It’s time to concentrate on the big picture and the central question: where does final authority lie in the UK? The ancients grappled with this problem too. In the direct, radical democracy of 5th and 4th c Athens, it lay with the male citizens meeting in assembly. Appointed officials were under constant scrutiny by the assembly, and could pay a high price for failure (including execution). Indeed, any citizen who proposed a course of action to which the assembly agreed but which turned out to be a disaster could be impeached for ‘deceiving the people’. It was no defence to say that

Thursday

Peter Jones

Madman at the helm

Whatever one makes of the accuracy of the journalist Michael Wolff’s depiction of President Trump, it cannot all be the product of an overheated imagination. What makes it so interesting is that his picture of total dysfunctionality is typical of Roman historians’ accounts of many emperors. Suetonius (d. c. ad 125), for example, was a high-ranking imperial secretary to the emperor Hadrian. In his Lives of the Caesars, he covered the period from Julius Caesar, Augustus and all the other early emperors — most notoriously Caligula and Nero — through to Domitian (d. ad 96). Take his portrait of the viciously self-indulgent Caligula. His desire to humiliate senators and officials

Thursday

Peter Jones

When armies take over

While the military is running Zimbabwe, there is no hope of anything resembling a functioning democracy replacing the tyrant Robert Mugabe after 37 years. But at least there is one small mercy — the army in Zimbabwe appears to be united. The end for the Roman republic was in sight when wealthy individuals with powerful backing raised private armies to impose their will upon the state. Sulla was the first person to attack Rome in this way in 87 bc and then make himself dictator in 83 bc. Once that precedent was set, it was open house for others to try. It is an irony of history that one of

Thursday

Peter Jones

The feminist courtesans

Some MPs have been exploiting their power by their sexual fumblings with the lower ranks. The result is that when the fumbled finally pluck up the courage to reveal all, or are eventually believed, the situation does no one any favours. It should all be quite different. The MPs could up their game. As Rome’s finest love-poet Ovid made clear, sex was supposed to be fun, and mutual fun too. No one gets that from groping and lunging. His Ars Amatoria, decorated with amusingly ironical examples from the gods and heroes of ancient myth, offered top tips about how to find and keep a lover, even a married one. It

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

The Nero in Trump

Donald Trump, whose word no one can believe and actions no one can anticipate, looks to blame anyone but himself for the chaos of his administration. The result is an inability to attract staff and a deep paranoia among those already in White House trying to work under him. But how to withdraw from serving such a man without recriminations? Seneca, the philosopher and adviser to Nero, took the view that entering politics was honourable as long as there was no good reason not to, and suggested that no state could be so bad that a man could not serve it at some level or other. But when the Trump in

Thursday

Peter Jones

Friends, Romans and Russians

President Vladimir Putin, who still supports Bashar al-Assad in Syria, needs help if he wishes to be seen as a member of the civilised world. Rome might provide it. From 509 bc Rome had been a republic, controlled by a senate, consuls and people’s assemblies, all (it was argued) balancing each other out. During that period Rome mastered all Italy, defeated the powerful state of Carthage, and brought much of North Africa, France (Gaul), Spain, Greece and the Levant under its control. It did so not primarily because it was an aggressive, warlike state: so was every other state it faced in that dog-eats-dog ancient Mediterranean world. For all its

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Pleasure boats

There isn’t a luxury ship that wouldn’t look better for having sunk. Barnacles and rot bring such romance to the lines, like spider webs in the sea. Even the decay Damien Hirst has applied to his Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is quite appealing. It crawls over many of the objects that he claims to have salvaged from a shipwreck of the 1st or 2nd century ad. A mouldering Mickey Mouse. A bronze portrait of the artist encrusted in faux-coral. It’s Trimalchio meets Disneyland meets Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It so happens that Hirst’s exhibition at the Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi in Venice (until

Thursday

Peter Jones

Theresa May at the Rubicon

Last week many commentators drew on the Ides (15th) of March, the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s death in 44 BC, to reflect on the signing of Article 50 and Julius Caesar’s famous cry ‘The die is cast’ (iacta alea est) in 49 BC, when he crossed the River Rubicon into Italy and started the civil war against Pompey. But they got it wrong: it does not mean ‘no turning back’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Caesar-Pompey power struggle, Caesar knew the consequences of this moment. Our sources describe the build-up. Caesar is camped with his troops in Ravenna. Messages are flying back and forth between him and Pompey in Rome. When his

Thursday

Peter Jones

From Tacitus to Justin Welby

Many are still questioning the enthusiasm with which newspapers have implicated Archbishop Justin Welby, as a young man, in the abusive activities of a Christian camp leader for whom he was working. This line from the Daily Telegraph is typical: ‘Archbishop Welby is said to have gained much of his early grounding in Christian doctrine from the Iwerne holiday camps, where boys were recruited for John Smyth’s sadomasochistic cult.’ The Roman historian Tacitus (d. c. AD 117) was a master of this sort of insinuation, in which ‘is said’ (as used above) exculpates the writer from responsibility for the statement, and the relative clause ‘where…’ associates the young Welby with a cult

Thursday

Peter Jones

Nero’s tips for Trump

A Washington Post interview with ‘senior officials’ in the Trump White House reveals that ‘Trump… feels demoralised that the public’s perception of his presidency so far does not necessarily align with his own sense of accomplishment.’ Diddums! Nero could have taught him a trick or two. Unlike Nero, Trump will not kill his mother, murder political rivals, indulge in drunken orgies or marry a boy, though he entertains the same sort of feelings about Muslims as Nero did about Christians; and he would doubtless love to turn central Washington into a vast, private, ruinously expensive 300-room Golden House, complete with fields, vineyards, pastures, woods and wildlife, fronted by a 120ft

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Order, order | 10 November 2016

The catalogue to Pallant House Gallery’s latest exhibition features a favourite anecdote. It is 1924 and a competition is being held to find the woman with the most pleasing vital statistics. As a paradigm, the judges choose the Venus de Milo. Thousands of women queue up to find out whether their measurements — not only bust, waist and hips, but thighs, calves, neck, wrists even —approximate closely enough to those of the ancient sculpture to earn them the prize of £5. No one thinks to mention that the Venus is missing both arms. Classical myth was all the rage after the first world war. When the world felt like chaos,

Thursday

Tanya Gold

No place like Rome

Roma sells ancient-Roman-style food near Fenchurch Street station at the east end of the City, near Aldgate. It is, therefore, a themed restaurant in a conventional, ebbing financial district, a cursed place in need of Windolene; and this is something to applaud, at least theoretically, because it is ambitious. Who remembers ambition, which is more interesting than greed? The last themed restaurant to open in these parts was Fable, a repulsive fake library and fusion destination for lawyers on Holborn Viaduct which I hope has burnt down, or at least been sued for copyright infringement by-makers of fairy tales everywhere. It was as magical as date rape, and the fairies fled.

Thursday

David Hockney & Martin Gayford

Shady past

David Hockney: It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting. It is an invention, in that he quickly worked out how to light things dramatically. I’ve always used shadows a bit, because that’s what you need below a figure to ground it, but mine are more like Giotto’s than Caravaggio’s. I use shadows that you see in ordinary lighting conditions; you don’t find ones like Caravaggio’s in nature. But there are other varieties of Hollywood lighting. The ‘Mona Lisa’ is one of the first portraits with very blended shadows. That face is marvellously lit, the shadow under the nose, and

Thursday

Peter Jones

Augustus vs Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn has been re-elected leader of the Labour party not by MPs but by his teenage ‘fans’ in Momentum. So what does Corbyn need to do when he wins power? Follow the example of the emperor Augustus, that’s what. When Rome was a republic, its monuments and military banners proclaimed it as SPQR — Senatus Populusque Romanus, a combination of the senate, mostly consisting of Rome’s elite families, and the people. The Greek historian Polybius greatly admired its clever balancing of powers between senate, people and office-holders. In the course of the 1st century BC, this system collapsed in bloody civil war. From that final conflict in 31 BC

Thursday

Peter Jones

Let the right ones in

As the UK prepares for Brexit into the big wide world outside, it has been pointed out that the Foreign Office is sadly lacking in people with hard experience of that world, and even more lacking in people from that world. But if the Romans can do it, surely we can too. Whatever else the Romans were, they were not hung up about race. That did not mean they admired all foreigners. The satirist Juvenal was cynical about the Greeks, who would happily turn into anything you wanted them to at the drop of a hat; and doctors observed that different environments produced not only different physical make-ups but also different mentalities

Thursday

Peter Jones

Nero’s scandalous spads

Theresa May has brought her own advisers with her into No. 10, and as usual the knives are out for them: they are parasites, and what are the civil service and the cabinet for anyway? Romans had the same trouble with freedmen. A ‘freedman’ (libertus or libertinus) was someone who had been a slave but been freed by his master. The emperor had hundreds of such slaves at his service, many with valuable skills, and any who were freed could be invited to retain their position in the imperial entourage, a duty they had to fulfil if their master asked them. While such a man was a slave, whatever his position,