Ancient rome

Is the Labour leadership hopeful Owen Smith, who longs to reverse the obviously undemocratic outcome of the recent referendum, aware of the company he is keeping — artists, writers, pop singers and other riffraff? Plutarch would not have rated these know-alls as especially useful allies. Plutarch (c. AD 100) mused on whether classical Athens gained its reputation more from its military or cultural achievements. He agreed that Athens was the ‘mother and well-disposed nurse’ of many arts, inventing some and burnishing others. But it was all a matter of priorities. Take historians and painters: since they lifted their subject matter from military leaders’ famous victories, they had little to add.

Last week it was suggested that the questions asked of London mayor Sadiq Khan had nothing to do with racism, but more with multiculturalism. As St Ambrose could have said, ‘If you live in Rome, live in the Roman way; if elsewhere, as they do there.’ Until the large-scale irruption of Germanic tribes fleeing the Huns in the 4th century AD, eventually ending the Roman empire in the West, Romans had been fairly relaxed about immigrants, temporary or permanent. Many came under compulsion: hostages, prisoners of war and slaves, this last group keeping wages low across a range of service industries. Rome itself actively welcomed foreign doctors and teachers, while lawyers, diplomats,

‘Racism’ refers to the belief in racially determined inferiority, most often recognised in body-type, about which, by definition, nothing can be done. It is hard therefore to see why accusing London mayor Sadiq Khan of sharing platforms with terrorists was ‘racist’. It was simply a comment on the company he kept. The ancients are often accused of racism. The Roman architect Vitruvius, for example, said that southerners living in hot climates were intelligent but cowardly, while northerners were mentally slow but brave to the point of foolishness. Obvious racism? Far from it. A Greek doctor, following the same train of thought, gave the game away. He asserted that in Asia

In order to deter poachers, hundreds of tons of elephants’ tusks are being incinerated in Kenya. But even for Romans, elephants were special: of all the animals cruelly slaughtered in the Roman arena, it was only the elephants that, on one occasion, moved the crowd to pity when they were put up against 20 armed gladiators. In Book 7 of his encyclopaedic 37-book Natural History, Pliny the Elder (killed in the explosion of Vesuvius in AD 79) turns from describing the physical world to the animal world and, first and foremost, man. His account is by no means an encomium — of all creatures, Pliny remarks, none ever shows more cruelty

The papers are full of top stories about important people who cannot get into important parties because the doorman does not recognise them and tells them to shove orf, and other stories about the wizard wheezes that various nobodies employ to bluff their way in. The Stoic Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65), multimillionaire adviser to Nero, has stern words to say on these piffling urges. Seneca’s basic point is that there are indeed things that will hurt the wise man — infirmity, death of loved ones, the ruin of his country — but he will be able to deal with them. When it comes to trivial rebuffs, the truly wise man will exhibit

There was something admirable about the spirit of careful mockery behind the doggy bags on offer to the finalists in this year’s Oscars and Daftas. The chance to hire a car or visit a New Zealand winery (pay your own airfare) cannot be very high on even the most grasping star’s list of ultimate desiderata. That said, the organisers are missing a trick here — the element of chance. The Roman emperors can come to their aid. Apophoreta, literally ‘takeaways’, were standard features of Roman dinner parties (the satirical poet Martial wrote a book of 221 couplets about them, celebrating everything from bras to nail-scissors and food for dealing with stretchmarks).