27th November 2010

No one yet has the remotest idea what the Big Society actually is. Had you asked a Roman, he would have told you: it was the rich spreading their largesse among the poor, as Pliny the Younger did (c. AD 61-112).

In a letter to his friend the great Roman historian Tacitus, Pliny describes a project he has set up which he wants Tacitus to support. He says ‘I was visiting my native town a short time ago when the young son of a fellow-citizen came to pay his respects to me. “Do you go to school?” I asked. “Yes”, he replied. “Where?” “In Milan.” “Why not here?” To this the boy’s father (who had brought him and was standing by) replied: “Because we have no teachers here.” ’

Pliny is shocked and determined to do something about it. He points out to the father the importance of raising children at home (strict upbringing, less expense) and invites him to work out how much it would cost to hire teachers for the town, remembering that they could add in the money they currently spent on travel and lodgings in Milan.

Now comes the offer: Pliny is ready to contribute a third of whatever they decided to collect. He does not want to offer all of it, he says, because he wants the parents themselves involved. He says to the father “People can be careless with other people’s money, but you can be sure they will be careful with their own. If their own is in the pot with mine, they will be sure to appoint a suitable recipient for it”. He urges them to appoint really good candidates so that local towns will send their children to them, instead of the other way round.

Pliny now tells Tacitus what part he hopes the historian will play in this venture. It turns out that it is not money he is after, but recommendations: ‘From amongst the many students who gather round you because they admire your abilities, please keep an eye open for likely teachers we can invite here. But do understand I am leaving the decision to the parents. All I want is to help with the arrange­ments and pay my share. So if you find anyone who has confidence in his ability, do send him along to us—but I make no guarantees.’

If that is not the Big Society, it is hard to think what might be.

13th November 2010

Poor old Stephen Fry says that he feels sorry for straight men because, unlike gays on Hampstead Heath, women do not actually like sex; it is merely the price they pay for a relationship. What a Silly Willy!

It was an assumption of much ancient Greek literature that sex between the older male and the young boy was the ultimate experience—for the older male. But since the hunt for this nirvana was bound to end in failure, the advice was to forget it. You would just make a complete prat of yourself. Those who fell into the trap—especially elderly males yearning hopelessly after beautiful young boys—were the subject of endless mockery from friends and enemies alike.

As for women, well, that was something completely different. The story was told of Teiresias who, as a young man, was walking in the countryside one day when he saw two snakes copulating. He gave them a stout blow with his stick, and was promptly changed into a woman. Seven years later he was out walking and again saw two snakes copulating. A swift whack with his stick and, lo and behold, he was restored to his former state.

Zeus, suffering the after-pangs of having given birth to Dionysus from his thigh, naturally began to muse on the whole business and wondered whether the male or the female got more pleasure out of sex. So he summoned the only known expert. Teiresias stated that, if there were ten units of pleasure involved in the act, the woman got nine. Zeus’s wife Hera, furious that he had given away woman’s great secret, blinded him. To compensate, Zeus gave him the gift of prophecy.

6th November 2010

Last week, Livy was invoked to rally the top 15% of earners to a bit of wholesome belt-tightening. Not that Livy had anything against the filthy rich. Far from it. But he did expect them to use their wealth wisely—no showing off, no power-grabbing—and if the state did interfere with it, he expected there to be an acceptable quid pro quo.

According to tradition, Servius Tullius (the sixth king of Rome, 578-534 BC) divided the Roman people up into classes (same word as ours) by property. One of its purposes was to rank your ability to serve in the army. The top classis was the equestres, rich enough to provide a horse for the cavalry (a bit like owning a Ferrari or two); then came those able to provide a full suit of armour and weapons, each subsequent classis providing less and less till the sixth, with nothing to offer except children—proletarii (Latin proles ‘child’).

The second purpose was to divide the people into ‘colleges’ for voting purposes. The top two classes, divided into 88 voting blocks, therefore commanded 88 votes; the whole of the rest of the people, divided into 105 blocks, commanded 105! And the third aim was to determine your tributum, an irregular levy on property, decided annually. The higher your status, the more you paid.

Livy found this last demand baffling. He could not understand why the rich were willing to pay tax as a proportion of their wealth, and therefore much more than anyone else. His explanation was that it was a quid pro quo for the voting system. This gave the elite almost complete control over the decisions on what the state should spend public money. So not one man, one vote, but one (poor) man, one vote, one (rich) man, the equivalent of many votes. ‘No tax without representation’, we say. Livy might emend that to ‘No more-than-anyone-else’s-tax without more representation’.

Which raises the question: does the state offer the seriously rich anything in return for their vast taxes? And if they avoid them, what might encourage them not to?

23rd October 2010

Today’s top 15% of earners have been whingeing away at the belts they will have to tighten to deal with the financial crisis. Ancient historians like Livy would not have been impressed. In the Roman republic, crises were life-or-death ones, and it was those who concentrated on the battle and not its rewards (in the shape of often very lavish booty) who won his admiration.

Livy’s history is full of such, e.g. Cincinnatus who in 458 BC, ‘wiping the sweat and dirt from his face and hands’, answered Rome’s call from his little farm where he had been ploughing, defeated the enemy and returned at once to his three-acre site. Finding his plough and four oxen still waiting for him, he picked up where he had left off.

Perhaps most famous of all was the consul Manius Curius Dentatus (dentatus because, we are told, he was born with teeth). In 290 BC, when the Romans were expanding south and in conflict with the ferocious Samnite hill tribes, he was approached by some Samnites with a massive bribe of gold. They found him seated on a crude bench by his hearth in his farmhouse, roasting turnips, eating from a rough wooden dish. Slightly amazed, they invited him to take the bribe, but he laughed in their faces, calling them ‘ambassadors on a superfluous, not to say incompetent, mission’. He told them to take back their gift, ‘as noxious as it was costly’, and to bear in mind that he could ‘neither be beaten in battle nor corrupted by money’.

Further, when he had thrashed the Samnites and celebrated a triumph, the people wanted to give him a vast chunk of land as a reward. But he refused, and settled for the hand-out that the senate had decreed for the *plebs*, reckoning that ‘no one could be counted a suitable citizen of the republic who could not be satisfied with what everybody else was given’. It all bore out what he had said to the Samnites: that ‘there was no glory in possessing wealth, but only in controlling its possessors’.

Come on, you top 15%. Romans knew what they meant by cuts, and they were not financial ones either. Stop all this ‘moral despair’ tosh. Show what you are made of.

9th October 2010

So the Bruvvers have chosen the younger Bruvver Ed, and Big Bruvver has chosen to keep his powder dry and leave him to it. So, probably, would any ambitious Roman—for the time being.

Romans philosophers might have recommended getting out of government entirely and become an Epicurean, seeking ataraxia—the absence of physical and mental pain. The key lay in avoiding a desire for anything that might cause anxiety, especially anything that had no limits, like wealth, status or power, because these could never be satisfied.

Alternatively, Roman Stoics would have suggested, in Seneca’s words, that he ‘deal with his own ills, sift himself, see for how many vain things he is a candidate—and vote for none of them. How can you call it enjoyable, when a candidate promises gifts here, does business through an agent there, accepts the kisses of people to whom he will reject even a finger touch when elected ...seeking yearly honours, permanent power, triumphs and riches?’ That would not mean giving up labouring like Hercules for the common good. It would mean seeking and praying for nothing but what it is in one’s own power to do—and that primarily is to make a moral choice, broadly (in ancient terms) doing the right thing for the right reason without having to think about it. Just like his mentor Tony Blair.

But remaining in government and destroying his brother from within—ah! That’s show-biz. This hallowed tradition began with Romulus and Remus and was enthusiastically perpetuated; Roman imperial history is full of sibling rivalry of this sort. The emperor Septimius Severus (died AD 211) wanted both his sons, Caracalla and Geta, to succeed, giving the advice ‘don’t disagree, but enrich the army and ignore everyone else’. Caracalla was not having that. He invited Geta to a conference in their mother Julia’s quarters and had him murdered as he clung to her.

This is surely, too, what Big Bruvver’s father, the fervent Marxist Ralph, would have wanted. Families are (obviously) oppressive institutions, designed to maintain the values that support the dominance of the ruling class, and no one is now more ruling-class than little Bruvver. Away with him!

25th September 2010

It is not so much Hawking’s squawkings about God and science that are the problem—though one wished he did not appear to think that either phenomenon told one anything significant about the other—but rather the failure of our education system to engage with the ancient Greeks. Their finest thinkers sorted the matter out 2,500 years ago, long before Christianity ever appeared on the scene.

The first Greek philosophers like Thales (c. 580 BC) were really physicists, trying to describe, organise and explain the universe and all its contents. They gave accounts of natural phenomena like stars, planets, weather, plants, animals and man, and asked questions about whether and how the universe began, what it was made of, why it changed and so on. Thales apparently took the view that water was the first principle, from which everything sprang and to which it returned. For Anaximander, an abstract ‘infinite’ was the origin of all things, and the cosmos a conflicting cycle of ‘coming-to-be’ and ‘perishing’ according to laws of nature. Heraclitus saw the world in terms of constant change, but not conflicting change. Opposition was built into the natural order of things. Anaxagoras was the first to argue that whatever the basic substance was, it was below the level of perception and never changed, merely grouping itself in different ways to form the world as we see it (the beginnings of an ‘atomic’ theory of matter).

What is so striking about all this is the absence of the divine. Greeks acknowledged that gods existed, of course, but were the first to argue that the world did not run on some irrational, divine whim but was logically ordered, systematic and therefore fully explicable in *human* terms. To invoke the supernatural in order to explain the physics was as much a cop-out for them as it would be today if a doctor were to claim that a disease was incurable because it was divinely ordained.

A few weeks ago the Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ website ran a poll on whether inner-city primary schools should be given an introduction to ancient Greek, as Dr Lorna Robinson’s ‘Iris Project’ is now doing. The vote was 80-20% in favour. Academies? Free schools? Just give everyone a taste of ancient Greek.

18th September 2010

Thought-crimes mainly refer to what we all think about those stupid laws and bossy official directives only designed for your benefit, sir. Romans did not face these but rather what George Orwell in 1984 understood by thought-crime: wholly innocent activities interpreted as threats to state security. The historian Tacitus is full of them.

When one of Rome’s best-loved sons, Germanicus, mysteriously died, many suspected the jealous emperor Tiberius was involved. So in AD 28, when a distinguished Roman, Titius Sabinus, started helping out the widow and family, some ambitious public figures saw a chance to prove their loyalty to the emperor by stitching up Sabinus good and proper. One of them, Lucanius Latiaris, started privately sympathising with Sabinus, while attacking the emperor. Sabinus responded in kind, and ‘these exchanges of forbidden confidences seemed to cement a close friendship. So Sabinus now sought out Latiaris’ company and unburdened his sorrows to this apparently trustworthy friend.’

The schemers now had to find a way to publicise this obvious threat. So they hid three senators in the roof of Sabinus’ bedroom. There Latiaris engaged him in their usual conversation, Sabinus unfolded the usual grievances—and they had their man. The reaction in Rome was one of pure terror. ‘People avoided all meetings and conversations, shunned friends and strangers...when Sabinus was led away, there was a stampede, and all roads and public places were immediately evacuated. But then people returned to them, alarmed that they had displayed alarm’. Sabinus was never heard of again.

This, for Tacitus, was symptomatic of the world of the emperors, where, in the satirist Juvenal’s words, ‘men’s throats were slit by a whisper’. As Tacitus brilliantly comments, ‘Rome of old explored the limits of freedom, but we the depths of slavery, robbed even of the exchange of ideas by informers. We would have lost memory itself as well as our tongues, had it been as easy to forget as it was to remain silent.’ Orwell would have understood.

Nowadays it seems to be everybody’s democratic duty to subvert the state. But question an airport security official? Down you go, mate.