23rd April 2011

The public razzmatazz surrounding the royal wedding is not the sort of thing Romans went in for on such occasions, but their approval for marriage was unconditional.

It was military triumphs and generals returning loaded with gold and silver that triggered the great public celebrations. Marriage in the Roman world was, for the most part, a private affair. A legal digest defined it as ‘a joining together of a man and a woman, and a partnership for life in all areas, a sharing in human and divine law’. So whatever family interests may have been in play—and Roman aristocratic marriage often looks like a business deal—marriage ultimately depended on the personal will of the couple involved, affectio maritalis bringing and keeping them together. Naturally, marriages broke down, but the ideal was there.

Further, the family home was a holy place, generating strong emotional feelings. The god Limentinus protected the threshold, Forculus the doors and Cardea the hinges (!). The continued worship of the family gods was of prime importance, centred round each household’s Lārēs (guardians), Penātēs (penus, ‘provisions’), and Genius locī (the male spirit of the family’s tribe, gēns, personified in the head of the family).

In this the household reflected its close ties with the state: for Rome too was a ‘family’, with its state Lares and Penates, and the emperor its Genius loci. But though the state never intervened to ratify marriage, it did define the conditions under which children were deemed legitimate—through citizen marriage alone. Further, in the absence of children, it encouraged adoption to keep lines going—not of babies either, but of adults, usually males. The first emperor Augustus, himself adopted by Julius Caesar, had great trouble lining up a suitable successor. It was finally his adopted son Tiberius who took over.

So while Romans would applaud the forthcoming marriage—what could be more important than the head of state’s line?—they would think it an insult that it conferred no greater legitimacy on its offspring than any other union.

16th April 2011

The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001. Its purpose was to clear the land of Al-Qaeda and Taleban and establish a democratic state. Last week’s Spectator questioned the current military strategy. Alexander the Great could have expanded on the matter.

When by 329 BC Alexander had dealt with the Persian king Darius—the main object of his mission—he pushed on into Bactria/Sogdia, a tribal area roughly equal to northern Afghanistan and its borders, to pursue Darius’ successor Bessus. He met with immediate success, and Bessus was captured and executed. The Americans too in 2001 soon drove the Taliban into Pakistan.

But an insurgency then developed behind the Americans’ back, and in the last ten years only marginal progress has been made, despite a surge. So with Alexander. He too found it very difficult to handle tribal guerrilla warfare, he too tried a surge, throwing in 22,000 extra troops, and in the event spent more time and lost more men in settling this one area than anywhere else in his conquests to date.

Alexander did have one advantage, in that borders meant nothing to him. He could attack across them at will, though it did not help him much. For the western allies this is not possible, except by aerial drones. This, however, does nothing for the west’s international reputation.The point is that the war is being fought against a people whose capacity for endurance is matched only by their hatred of foreigners, in tribal territory where no alliance can be guaranteed.

Alexander ‘settled’ the place by leaving 30,000 Greeks there and departing. But at his death, Bactria was the first place to revolt. When the Roman emperor Augustus was told that Alexander, having conquered the world at 32, had no idea what to do next, he expressed surprise that Alexander thought it was more important to win an empire than to organise it once it had been won.

A settled, unified, democratic Afghanistan is a pipe dream. Afghan tribes and the west share no common vision. When we depart, what will we have actually done for them—or to them?

5th March 2011

After 40 years of a culture of tyranny, what hope for Libya’s future?

Plato describes how the tyrant comes to power: he is smiling, affable and promises much. Some enemies he does away with, others he conciliates. The courageous, intelligent and wealthy he eliminates, and appoints a cabinet of creeps. Aristotle pinpoints the general strategy from there on: keep the people demoralised, mistrustful and weak. In that condition they lack the spirit of enterprise, the confidence to put their faith in each other and the sheer manpower needed to force a tyrant out.

The problem is that, from that position, the tyrant leaves himself no alternative but to continue. As Pericles argued before the Athenian assembly, Athens had to maintain a stranglehold over her empire ‘because of the danger from those whose hatred you have incurred in gaining your empire … which you now possess like a tyranny. It may be thought wrong to have acquired it, but to let it go would be extremely dangerous.’

When the first Roman emperor Augustus defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra in 31 bc, he did not bring about a revolution: senate, consuls, praetors etc remained. Rather, he changed the terms of the game: power, which in the republic had been up for grabs between the great Roman families, would now reside in one man: himself. The day of his death, therefore, was a key moment: what next? Would there be a succession? Or would the system collapse? When his stepson Tiberius took over, the answer was given. Imperialism was now ‘legally established’ and would soon become ‘ancestral’. Farewell, freedom, unless someone was prepared to strike the emperor down. But would that change the system or merely lodge power somewhere else?

There was a further problem. Under the tyrant-emperor, only the obedient could climb the political ladder. This culture became so ingrained that bodies like the senate effectively gave up their authority. So when e.g. Caligula was murdered in ad 41, the senate flapped, and the army imposed Uncle C-C-C-Claudius.

None of this bodes well for Libya.

19th March 2011

Recent cases over Christians refusing gay couples hotel accommodation and Christian couples wanting to adopt have brought Christian belief into conflict with the law.

Recent cases over Christians refusing gay couples hotel accommodation and Christian couples wanting to adopt have brought Christian belief into conflict with the law. The Christians have lost. Lord Justice Laws, arguing in 2010 that Christian belief was ‘subjective’, laid a marker for those judgments by drawing a distinction ‘between the law’s protection of the right to hold and express a belief, and the law’s protection of that belief’s substance or content’.

In classical Athens, a number of charges could be brought against individuals on religious grounds, under the general heading of asebeia (‘impiety’). These included perversion of ritual, desecrating religious property, revealing ‘mystery’ cults, entering holy places when disenfranchised, introducing new divinities and expressing certain opinions about the gods.

What, then, was Greek religion’s ‘substance or content’ that was felt to need such protection? Despite the absence of any divinely inspired texts for guidance, it was the virtually universal belief that gods were unpredictably hostile or benevolent, and that the listed infractions guaranteed their hostility. Since the state subscribed to those beliefs, it was a matter of simple self-protection to uphold them in law. Plato in his Laws reached the same conclusion. For him, gods were the benevolent upholders of moral virtue. So anyone who tried to persuade people otherwise had to be punished, for society’s general well-being.

Lord Justice Laws’s judgment applied to beliefs which he characterised as ‘subjective’. Since Athenian society did not regard its beliefs on asebeia as subjective, an Athenian Laws would presumably have ruled differently. But is the real legal distinction between an individual’s beliefs, which (whether subjective or not) must by definition be private, and their application to justiciable public situations, e.g. when you own a hotel or want to adopt? If so, Christians might console themselves by accepting the judgments, and reflecting on the behaviour of early Christians. On the ‘Render unto Caesar’ principle, they argued that Christians obeyed the law far more rigorously than pagans ever did.

26th February 2011

The point about crowds, as Gaddafi is now learning, is that there are more of them than there are of him. Romans knew this only too well and, like Gaddafi, went out of their way to prevent large gatherings. Time, therefore, for Libyans to take radical Roman action.

In 494 BC, the Roman poor were in conflict with aristocratic landholders because so many of them had been placed in bondage through inability to pay their debts. The Senate refused to move on the matter and, in the face of riots and disturbances, threatened to bring in the army to quell incipient mutiny spreading among the ordinary people (the plebs). So in order to protect their interests, they moved as a body to the Sacred Mount, overlooking the Tiber a few miles upstream from Rome, where they constructed a fortified camp and refused to move: a potential ‘state within a state’.

The result in Rome was panic among the whole remaining citizen body. If they were attacked by enemy forces now, and the plebs refused to fight, they would be in serious danger. So Menenius Agrippa was sent to appeal to the plebs to reunify the state. He used the analogy of a body which, fed up with the lazy belly that did nothing but enjoy all the goodies it received, went on strike: the hand would carry no food to the mouth, the mouth would not accept it nor the teeth chew it. The result was that the whole body started to waste away. The plebs saw the point and agreed to return, as long as concessions were made.

The final result was the formation of the plebs’ own corporate organisation—a legal assembly with its own officials, the tribunes of the plebs. These tribunes were designated as inviolable, and could therefore bring force to bear on anyone who threatened a pleb in any way. In time, these plebeian tribunes were given seats in the Senate, where they could veto any business. Plebeian ‘aediles’ were also created, probably to oversee the grain supply and in time to run the markets, protect Rome’s fabric and put on games—good, popular moves.

Pleb power worked then. Intelligently organised, it will work again.

19th February 2011

The Egyptian people want power in the face of government intransigence. So what happens next? Ancient Rome went through this phase, and very destructive it was too.

For five hundred years, Romans from aristocrats to plebs had broadly agreed that the final say on all major political matters should be the Senate’s (senex, ‘old man’), an oligarchy consisting of current and retired executive officials (consuls, praetors etc.). But after the defeat of Hannibal in 202 BC and the expansion of Roman power into North Africa, Spain, Greece and Asia Minor (western Turkey), the gap between rich and poor widened radically, and the soldiers who had done the fighting did not feel they had been satisfactorily rewarded for their efforts.

In 133 BC, the disillusioned aristocrat Tiberius Gracchus saw this as a chance to win power. For hundred of years, those appointed as ‘tribunes of the plebs’ had acted as the voice of the people in the Senate. Tiberius stood for and won that position. He then laid before the Senate proposals to divide up land in Italy more fairly between rich and poor. The Senate, owning most of that land, naturally turned it down. Previously, that would have ended the matter. But Tiberius took the proposal straight to the plebs’ assembly, whose decisions were technically binding on all the Roman people. Naturally, they passed it.

The floodgates opened. For the next hundred years, Roman politics – the world of Pompey and Caesar - was dominated by men seeking power by these radically different routes, traditional (senatorial) and popular. It led to rioting and bloodshed (Tiberius and his brother Gaius were both killed in this way). When soldiers joined in, enticed by the rewards on offer to support one side or the other, vicious civil war ensued. The final result was the end of the Republic in 31 BC and the emergence of Octavian/Augustus (Caesar’s adopted heir) as the first Roman emperor: a monarchy, or dictatorship as some saw it. Entrenched oligarchs, popular revolt, the army - throw Islam into that volatile mix, and one does rather tremble for Egypt’s ‘democratic’ future.

5th February 2011

Romans would have regarded Hosni Mubarak as effectively the emperor of Egypt. But they would not have thought he had played a very intelligent hand.

The Roman emperor held supreme authority. As head of state (princeps), he ruled the Treasury, controlled all the top political appointments, passed all laws, was final arbiter in all legal cases and selected provincial governors. As pontifex maximus, he led all the major state rituals in honour of the gods. As commander-in-chief (imperator), he ruled over the armed forces, chose all generals and determined military policy, often leading the army himself. To help him he had a circle of hand-picked, trusted advisers and a remarkably small civil service.

But life was far too busy to spend his days indulging in orgies. Petitions, for example, poured in from all over the empire—requests for citizenship, repayment of tax, legitimisation of children, a portion of an inheritance, and so on. It looks as if they were personally dealt with, too. And that was just the private business.

Further, there were the people of Rome to keep happy. Romans knew all about that. In the republican period, the billionaire Crassus once paid the grain supply for every Roman in the city for three months; Julius Caesar put on games featuring 320 pairs of gladiators, equipped with ornate silvered armour. So important were such spectacles for generating popular support that the emperor Domitian ruled they could be staged only by members of the imperial family. After his triumphs in AD 108 in Dacia (N. Romania), Trajan staged 117 days of entertainment at which ten thousand gladiators fought and eleven thousand animals were killed. This was not just about keeping the people sweet, either. The emperor himself was on display on such occasions, and if the crowd had reasons to vent its feelings against him, they did. Emperors paid attention.

Most Roman emperors understood that they would survive and prosper only by persuading most of the people most of the time that they ruled in their interests, not in those of the imperial household and its chums. It does not seem too much to ask of today’s equivalents.