5th November 2011

The title of Boris’s forthcoming book on the people of London claims that it is ‘the city that made the world’. Whoa back, steady on, now. Surely Boris means Rome, centre of a vast ancient empire, not to mention the worldwide Catholic Church?

When the poet Martial described the opening of the Colosseum in ad 80, he observed the vast throng gathered in it and wondered if there was any race so remote, so barbarous that it was not represented — Thracians, Sarmatians (from the Danube), Britons, Arabs, Sygambrians (a German people), Ethiopians, ‘their voices a babel, yet one, when they call you, emperor, true father of the fatherland’. The emperor indeed had the whole wide world in his hands, and the peoples of the world knew it. So did the animals from all over the empire on display for their pleasure — bears, rhinos, lions, tigers, elephants.

The city used the world’s materials — Aswan granite, Numidian and Phrygian marble — and the poor enjoyed its produce: bread baked with wheat from North Africa, fish from Gibraltar, utensils of copper mined in Spain, wine from France. Wives of the rich, seated on Indian ebony or teak inlaid with African ivory, adorned themselves in silks from China, diamonds and pearls from India and cosmetics from southern Arabia.

It was not just Romans like Ovid who claimed that ‘the world and the city of Rome occupy the same space’. The Gallic poet Rutilius said that Rome offered the vanquished a share in their justice, thus ‘making a city out of what was once the world’. The Greek Aristides argued that all you had to do was to look at the city to understand how the world was ruled by it; indeed, you could visit the whole world simply by visiting Rome. Rome not merely made the world (cosmotrophos was sometimes applied to it, ‘nurturer of the cosmos’); it was the world.

A final, glorious conceit: roads out of Rome marked only the distance from the city, not to anywhere. All that counted was how near or far you were from it. Not even Boris would dare to do that for London. Would he?

12th November 2011

It seems most odd to become so agitated about the (very few) filthy rich when the (large numbers) of very poor should be the centre of the welfare state’s concerns. But if one wants to fleece the rich, a quid pro quo always helps, as the ancient Greeks knew.

Every year in Athens, the richest 300 citizens could be instructed to carry out a leitourgia, lit. ‘work for the people’, i.e. a personal obligation in service of the state (origin of our ‘liturgy’). The wealth in property that qualified a man for such a duty was 3-4 talents (18-24,000 drachmas). This duty could involve anything from equipping a trireme for a year to underwriting dramatic productions. These did not come cheap. A working man’s wage was 1 dr. a day. One of the cheapest liturgies was staging a choral show at 300 dr.; putting on a stage production could cost 3,000 dr.; and running a trireme for a year 5,000 dr. and more.

The rich, however, are a hard-headed lot, and Athenians were no different. What if old X down the road had more money than Y, but Y was landed with the leitourgia? Y could choose to challenge X to an antidosis, an exchange of property. If X agreed, Y would carry it out; if not, X would carry it out (if, that is, he lost the court-case he would bring, disputing Y’s claim).

But there was a competing, even more powerful, emotion involved: desire for public acclaim, with all the kudos and political benefit that brought. Greek literature is full of examples of the rich citing the number of leitourgiai they had carried out, and at what expense, to demonstrate the fine service they had done for the community.

If the adult male citizen population was 60,000, the top 300 would account for one 1 in 200. Today’s taxpayers number 30 million. The top 300 would equal 1 in 100,000 — about right for the really stinking rich? And what endless hilarity the antidoseis (pl.) would provide! But, as an ancient orator said, ‘The greatest leitourgia that one can perform for the city is to live, day by day, a life of orderly self-restraint’. Or fund Classics for All...

19th November 2011

The French justified Greece’s entry into the EU by claiming that they ‘could not say no to the country of Plato’. You bet they couldn’t.

In the Republic, Plato outlined his utopia. This was not a practical construct, but a vision of an imaginary, ideal community whose purpose was to act as a model for how things might be. He did this by sketching a picture of the educational and moral underpinning that went into making a good human and extrapolating from that an institutional programme that would create the good state.

The consequence was twofold. First, Plato had to show up the deficiencies of existing constitutions, to demonstrate there was no future in them. Democracy in particular, the system under which Plato lived in Athens, came in for special contempt. The EU could not agree more.

Second, Plato assumed it was worth any price to impose his vision of the perfect state, because it represented the best that humans on earth could ever achieve. But the noble vision of ‘goodness’ at its heart was ultimately tyrannical, because it denied freedom. Moral purity was to be imposed by Plato’s indoctrinated Guardians.

The EU too had a noble political vision — Europe at peace — but put economic progress at its heart. The result was the imposition by indoctrinated EU Guardians of a regulatory/financial tyranny invented by economists and controlling all the main economic levers. Such a system, as many pointed out at the time, could not work, as we are now discovering to our multi-trillion euro cost. Thanks a lot.

Yet, locked in its own make-believe shadow-world, the EU still clings to its own hype and is currently trying to solve the economic catastrophe of its own making by putting in power in countries that it has destroyed the very people who created that catastrophe in the first place — EU economists! Plato would be laughing his himation off. His famous allegory of men locked into the shadow-world of an underground cave, dogmatically refusing to open their eyes to the real world above, could not have been more exquisitely realised.

15th October 2011

Last time Pericles showed how a real politician dealt with the severe austerity measures he had persuaded the Athenians to adopt if they were to win the battle against Sparta in 431 BC (i.e. abandon their lands and come to live inside Athens’ protective walls): he pointed out these measures meant that he and the rich would lose their vast properties and the income they generated. The Greek parliament, which obviously reads the Spectator, promptly slapped on a property tax. Politicians especially will be very keen to pay it to prove they are not the cushioned shysters Athenians take them to be.

But in summer 430 BC it got worse. Athens was hit by a terrifying plague which, in the crowded conditions, killed thousands and led to a breakdown in law and order. It was every man for himself, rich and poor alike. Pericles again rallied them in words relevant to Athens today, where law and order are equally in the balance. As Thucydides makes clear of a man ‘who was even prepared to anger the people’, he did not mince his words.

A man may be personally well off, Pericles says, but if his country is ruined, he is ruined too; so you must rally to the state’s defence, otherwise you will lose grip on our common security. Again, he is a man who, loving his country and being above corruption (as Athenians knew), would never speak up for sectional interests; for ‘if a leader is corrupt, this one fault puts all his other qualities up for sale.’

The fact is, he goes on, you have failed the test of endurance when the going gets rough. You run the risk of being doubly inferior to your forefathers, who both made Athens great and kept it so – all of which you are now throwing away; ‘those who encourage such a state of mind have no place here’.

Today’s Athenians are fighting (as they see it) their own corrupt governing class for its abject servitude to Brussels. If any modern Pericles is around to rally them, he will first have to prove his own incorruptibility and willingness to make sacrifices, before he can risk angering the people by telling them, as he must, that they too are part of the problem.

29th October 2011

The Great Debate about whether people of the same sex should be allowed to ‘marry’ would have bewildered the Romans, and not because they had any hang-ups about that style of sexual behaviour either.

For legal purposes, Romans defined the familia (‘household’) as Roman citizens, joined in lawful marriage, producing legitimate children and with some property to transmit by inheritance. But as the Latin matrimonium (our ‘matrimony’) makes clear, the main point about marriage is that it is all about the mater, ‘mother’. The family gives its daughter into matrimonium, the husband leads, receives and keeps his wife in matrimonio. The Latin for ‘wife’, uxor (cf. our ‘uxorious’), seems to be etymologically related to a Sanskrit word meaning ‘sprinkle with seed’.

‘[Marriage] was ordained for the procreation of children’, says the Anglican Prayer Book, and a Roman would have agreed: ‘the state cannot survive without numerous marriages’, says Aulus Gellius. The production of legitimate citizen children was the basic purpose. This was the only way to continue the family blood-line, its traditions, its worship, its privileges and (as Romans stress) its support for the old. Romans were well aware of these wider advantages. As the first century ad Stoic Musonius writes, there must be ‘perfect companionship and mutual love... both in health and sickness and under all conditions, since it was with desire for this as well as having children that both entered upon marriage’.

We live in a world where marriage is no longer seen as essential for the production of children. Legitimacy is not the serious matter it was in the ancient world. Citizenship, again, is a matter of residence almost as much as of blood-line. The main question, then, is how far we need any more the term ‘marry’ to define the sort of institution the Romans described. If we do, then by definition the production of children will be at the heart of it; and whatever else one may want to say about same-sex relationships, the production of children can hardly be said to be their purpose.

1st October 2011

The Greek people face serious austerity. How can their corrupt politicians (ask any Greek) possibly win them round?

In 431 BC, the ‘Peloponnesian’ war broke out between the marine super-power Athens and the almost invincible land-based Sparta. Athens knew it could survive a siege (thanks to its encircling ‘Long Walls’ down to its harbour Peiraeus, built in 457 BC) but would not be able to prevent the Spartans ravaging its territory of Attica.

So Athens’ leader Pericles set about persuading the citizen assembly (which took all decisions) that the only course of action was for those in Attica to abandon their homes and farms and take up residence within the city walls. His argument was that they should think of themselves as islanders, ready to abandon homes and land, but keeping close guard on sea and city. ‘Property is the product, not the producer, of men. If I thought I could persuade you, I would tell you to destroy your property now and show the Spartans you will never surrender on that score.’

And to make the point, he promised that if his guest-friend the Spartan general Archidamus did not ravage his country property as well as everyone else’s, he would hand it over to the state. Pericles won the argument, and the country-dwellers, ‘distressed and resentful at having to leave their age-old homes and shrines, tantamount to exile’, relocated in the city. Talk about austerity!

Pericles, master of persuasion, always ‘knew what needed to be done’ (Thucydides) — in this case, sharing the burden. And what sacrifices will his ‘give us the money’ successors make, desperate to cling to the feather-bedded comfort of the eurozone? Not to mention the Eurocrats, determined that everyone else but they shall pay the price of their irresponsible fantasy?

ERRATA: In my piece about classics last week, the YouGov sample was taken from a cohort of 10,000 who had done something classical, out of a total of 80,000; and the figure for those who had benefited or greatly benefited from their classics, having studied it up to age 16 and no further, was 77 per cent. See www.friends-classics.demon.co.uk for the full survey report.

17th September 2011

Too big not to fail

Commentators bang on endlessly about the desirability of a ‘global world’, with every economy linked seamlessly to every other. But when it goes wrong, as it has done in the last three years, the painful consequences are equally global. Ask the Romans.

The Roman empire stretched from Britain to Iraq and from the Rhine-Danube to the northern edges of the Sahara desert. At its largest extent (c. ad 117) it probably comprised about 50 to 60 million people and covered 2.5 million square miles. When Rome took over a province, the local elites continued to run the show, as they had always done, but now under the ultimate jurisdiction of Rome’s governor and his remarkably small staff. The one fixed condition was that Rome got its taxes and could station its army there, when needed (in fact, only Britain required a constant legionary presence). Otherwise Rome applied no unitary control. It was up to the governor to lay down the ground-rules. Not even Rome’s legal system was imposed, let alone its coinage, or anything else.

But even under such a loosely centralised regime, the consequence, intended or not, of 700 years of Roman provincial government was a prosperous economic network stretching across the whole empire: flag-makers from Syria worked for the Roman army in South Shields; high-quality pottery from southern Gaul found its way to Africa, Spain, Italy, Britain, Germany and Denmark; and as ice-cap pollution levels show, metal-working (lead, copper and silver) was on a scale to be matched only from the 16th century onwards.

But in the fifth century the empire in the West collapsed. Germanic tribes, harried by Huns, poured into Europe, and Rome was unable to stop them. They established their own kingdoms, taxes stayed local and Rome, starved of money to pay its army, could no longer enforce its authority. The wider consequence was the complete breakdown of the empire-wide economic links that had brought such prosperity to the West. This dramatic economic collapse lasted some 200 years.

As we too are now finding, the bigger the structure, the more catastrophic and wide-ranging the disaster when it all caves in.