tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84466729204250541012024-02-08T02:42:59.755-08:00Friends of Classics Ancient and Modern ArchiveClick <a href="http://www.friends-classics.demon.co.uk"><b>HERE</b></a> to go back to Friends of ClassicsJAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-64678185902598456152010-04-07T11:00:00.000-07:002010-04-07T11:02:47.002-07:00A&M: 2003 May<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">3rd May 2003</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Americans say they have no plans to attack any other foreign power - at the moment. To judge by the Iraq conflict, however, it will not be St Augustine's concept of the 'just war' that controls that decision, but the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero's. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In his de officiis ('On Obligations', 44 BC), Cicero discusses how justice should be applied in a range of cases, including war. Arguing that there are laws of warfare which must be strictly observed, he continues 'since there are two ways of settling a dispute, by discussion or by force, and the former is characteristic of man, the latter of animals, we must resort to force only when discussion is no longer possible. The only excuse for going to war is that one may live in peace, unharmed'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That principle established, Cicero starts laying down various conditions. First, no war will be just unless an official demand for satisfaction has been submitted, or a warning has been given and a formal declaration made. Second, Cicero distinguishes between wars fought for the sake of survival, and wars fought for the sake of imperium ('rule, control') when gloria is at stake. Both must be justified in accordance with his original principle, but wars of imperium must be fought 'with less bitterness'. Third, the victors have a duty to treat the vanquished mercifully, as long as the vanquished have themselves acted without cruelty or barbarism. In particular, those who lay down their arms and throw themselves on Roman mercy must be protected, 'even though the battering-ram has hammered at their walls' (this, presumably, refers to a convention that the besieged could generally expect no mercy once the rams had been brought up, since this was an indication that they had refused to surrender). Fourth, only legally enlisted soldiers can fight. Fifth, all promises must be strictly observed. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is noticeable that Cicero sees the interests of Rome as the sole justification for war, and sees both self-defence and expansion of empire as a sufficient motive for action. Such a vision suited the most powerful state in the ancient world. Cicero's call for mercy for those of the enemy who decide to agree with Rome is equally self-serving. As he goes on to say, Rome's ultimate aim is 'peace without treachery'. Rome needed all the friends it could get. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Virgil talks of Rome's mission as 'pardoning the defeated and warring down the proud'. Rome, however, decided who fell into which category. All very von Rumsfeld. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">10th May</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Two British commandos from the Special Boat Service (motto: 'Not by force, but by guile') escaped capture in Iraqi by trekking some hundred miles across mountainous terrain, by night, to the Syrian border. Who were they? Nobody knows, or will know - a unique form of heroism. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the ancient world it was public performance, and so public acknowledgement, that counted. In Homer's Iliad, Sarpedon, a Trojan ally from Lycia, gives the classic statement of the heroic 'contract' to his second-in-command Glaucus, that in return for the best of material rewards, 'we are obliged to take our places in the front ranks and fling ourselves into the flames of battle. Only then will our Lycian men-at- arms say of us: "Well! These are no dishonourable lords of Lycia that rule over us and eat fat sheep and drink the best sweet wine: they are indomitable and fight in the front ranks of the Lycians." ' Sarpedon concludes: 'My friend, if, after living through this war, we could be sure of becoming ageless and immortal, I should not fight in the front line nor send you out into the battle where men win glory. But the world is not like that. A thousand demons of death hover over us, and nobody can escape or avoid them. So in we go, whether we yield the victory to some other man, or he to us.' </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even 'resourceful, much-enduring' Odysseus, for all his tricks, cannot escape this need for acknowledgement. In order to trick his way out of the ferocious Cyclops' cave, he calls himself 'No one' and, when he succeeds, he laughs at the way 'my guile deceived him'. The word for 'guile' is mêtis - but split mê tis, it means 'no one'. 'Notion' is probably the closest we can get to the double entendre in English. But after he and his men have escaped, he cannot resist stopping to taunt the Cyclops and telling him his real name - a disastrous mistake, since Cyclops can now call the god's curse down on him. A man like Odysseus could not endure that anyone should think of him as a 'no one' - that would be the ultimate heroic humiliation. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Force or guile? We hear, in one epic tradition, that Achilles and Odysseus wrangled over which tactic should be deployed to capture Ilium. Odysseus prevailed, and Ilium fell to guile - the trick of the Wooden Horse. But Odysseus still demanded, and got, the public credit for it. He would never have cut it in the Special Services. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">17th May</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The footballer David Beckham has had new tattoos imprinted on his arms, complete with Latin tags. One reads perfectio in spiritu, 'perfection in spirit' the other ut amem et foveam, 'to love and to cherish', translated into Latin from the Solemnization of Matrimony in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. What is going on? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Tattoos have a long history going back to Eleventh Dynasty Egypt (c. 2000 BC). They were especially popular in Britain - Britanni, originally Pretani or Priteni, meant 'painted/tattooed people' (cf. Latin Picti). These days they have become a form of heraldry, marking the body rather than the shield with one's personal 'coat of arms', for sexual as well as social purposes. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When the idea of heraldry first emerged from the Crusades in the twelfth century, mottos tended to be in French, usually battle cries (Dieu et Mon Droit!). Latin, however, came into favour from the sixteenth century. One can perhaps identify three broad reasons. First, over the centuries, Latin had acquired claims to a sort of universality. It had been, after all, the common European language of politics, religion and education from the fall of the Roman empire onwards. It was therefore neutral and could be universally applied. One notorious example is the use of the model of Latin grammar to describe modern languages, however little the language in question actually resembled it. English, for example, has no inflected case system, but that did not prevent generations of schoolchildren saying 'O table'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Second, as the Frenchman Ferdinand Brunétière said, 'there are languages that sing, others that draw or paint. Latin engraves, and what is engraves is ineradicable. One might say that something that is not universal or ineradicable cannot be Latin'. Latin, in other words, surviving in countless bronze and marble inscriptions, established a claim to being the eternal language: put it in Latin and it will last for ever. No wonder twentieth-century fascist Italy, with its will to power and immortality, revived the Roman epigraphic tradition. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Latin was not only a language with a vocation to state the universal and eternal. It was also the language of cultural aspiration. A Latin motto bestowed an indefinable class on a family, business or football club - and now on a footballer? The fact that Beckham chose to have words in English from the Book of Common Prayer translated into Latin makes his case all the more interesting.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">24th May</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Apologies for singing a very old song, but with the debate on a referendum over the European constitution in full swing and the term 'parliamentary democracy' being bandied about by New Labour to repel the notion, it is time to remind readers again how meaningless the term 'parliamentary democracy' actually is. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">'Democracy' derives from dêmokratia, 'people-power' (Greek dêmos 'people' + kratos 'rule, authority, power'). This term was invented to describe the system put in place in Athens by Cleisthenes in 508 BC. The result was that all the decisions which our MPs take today were taken in Athens by the majority vote of the people (male citizens over 18) meeting in the Assembly. Dêmokratia was destroyed by the Macedonian conquerors of Athens in 322 BC and has never been tried since. What we have in its place is 'democracy', a term with virtually no meaning in itself, as can be judged from the fact that every state these days has claimed to be 'democratic' - Saddam's Iraq, Stalin's Russia, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, all glorious democracies. The term 'parliamentary democracy' is notably fatuous: a transparent contradiction in terms. 'Partycracy' would be more like it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If 'democracy' means anything these days, it is 'voting'. It has nothing to do with power, let alone of the people. If one wants an accurate description of our constitution, it is (as Aristotle would have called it) an elective partycracy: we vote to put in power a party to take decisions without reference to us. There is nothing wrong with this system, but it has nothing to do with people-power. Indeed, even the Roman republican system, controlled ruthlessly by cliques of aristocrats, was more democratic than ours. Every decision taken by their de facto ultimate authority the Senate (an élite consisting of all those who had held executive office, e.g. consul, praetors etc.), had to be referred back to the people for ratification before it could become law. It is undeniable that the people voted in a sort of American 'college' system, organised so as to favour the élite vote. But the Roman people could, and did, reject proposals put before them, whereas we get no chance to vote on anything our partycrats decide. Further, the Roman people even elected their own 'tribunes of the plebs', who sat in Senate meetings with the right to veto any business they did not think to be in the people's interest. How we need one today! But then we have one, at least on this issue. All hail Boris, tribunus plebis extraordinarius! </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">31st May</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">As the forces returning from duty in Iraq know best of all, important though amazing technology is, the camaraderie and morale of the unit make the crucial difference. The Romans knew this too and took steps to nurture the right frame of mind in their soldiers. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">First, punishments and incentives strongly affected personal behaviour. The penalty for sleeping on watch, failing to obey orders or abandoning weapons in battle was to be clubbed to death. But the soldier who performed well was congratulated and rewarded by the general in front of the whole army, while victory usually meant a distribution of booty among the men, often worth a very great deal (a prospect that always did wonders for recruitment). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Second, high-quality leadership brought out the best in the men. Plutarch talks of the respect gained by the leader who shared his men's hardship and dangers. Julius Caesar was never slow to set an example in the front line when his men were in trouble, though it was not a tactic to be repeated too often; a general's death or wounding ran the risk of creating panic in the ranks. Likewise, the successful leader knew how to inspire his men. While it is hard to believe in the great set-piece speeches, delivered to vast armies, 'reported' by all ancient historians (how many soldiers could possibly have heard them?), the likelier practice of delivering brief, individual exhortations to separate units before battle is on record (the emperor Julian did it). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Finally, and most importantly, soldiers were encouraged to develop a strong sense of solidity with the unit in which they were serving. Swearing-in ceremonies had impressive religious connotations; constant drilling instilled in men the discipline of obedience to orders and made them not only look but also feel like soldiers (the Jewish historian Josephus said it prepared body and soul); a unit's gear with its distinctive markings, especially its standards, generated a sense of cohesion and esprit de corps (to lose the standards in battle was a terrible disgrace); and one's own mess-mates became a focus of especial loyalty (Livy talks of a soldier's tent becoming his 'hearth and home'). Personal honour, pride and shame, confidence in the leadership, and emotional commitment to the unit created the 'All for one and one for all' mentality that service in the legions was designed to generate. For all the high-tech weaponry that western armies wield today, these are still the qualities without which no army can function. </div></div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-5094781827448985262010-04-07T10:58:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:59:57.525-07:00A&M: 2003 April<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">5th April 2003</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Commentators are complaining that the Iraqi army is refusing to confront the coalition forces head-on. Very sensible of them. Quintus Fabius Maximus (charmingly known as Verrucosus, 'covered in warts') would have applauded. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 218 BC Hannibal brought his Carthaginian army (complete with elephants) from north Africa, across Spain and southern France, and over the Alps down into Italy. His purpose was to take revenge on the Romans for the Carthaginian defeat in the first Punic War (265-241 BC). In battles at Ticinus, Trebia and Trasimene he thrashed the Romans in open field, at a cost to the Romans of about 50,000 casualties. The Romans were appalled at this turn of events. It was time for them to re-think their strategy against an inspiring and innovative general with a superbly trained and highly flexible army, and Fabius was the man to do it. His proposal was not popular, but it was their only hope: to fight Hannibal where Hannibal was not. Consequently, Fabius started to dog Hannibal's steps, following him wherever he went as if he were 'Hannibal's paedagogus' (i.e. the slave who followed the young master to school, carrying his books), as those contemptuous of the policy put it. Fabius camped on high ground, where Hannibal would not dare to attack, and engaged in a war of attrition, harrying his foraging parties so that they could not collect food or fodder ('kicking the enemy in the stomach', as Romans later called it). He upset Hannibal's lines of communication, attacked his allies, launched swift guerrilla raids and generally did everything he could to lower enemy morale by causing maximum disruption, but without ever engaging in the open. On one occasion he even had Hannibal trapped, but let the chance slip. When Fabius returned briefly to Rome to supervise some religious rituals, his colleague Minucius won a skirmish against Hannibal and foolishly decided to take him on properly. Only Fabius' intervention saved Minucius' army from a very severe mauling. Even so, the Romans did not learn their lesson: they fielded a gigantic army to confront Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC, and lost some 50,000 dead. They learned it then. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">So Romans went back to harassing. They denied Hannibal reinforcements and attacked Carthage in Spain and Africa, and Hannibal was finally forced out of Italy. Fabius earned the nick-name Cunctator, 'delayer', for his strategy (an improvement on Verrucosus). His tactics stumped Hannibal. Will they stump von Rumsfeld? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">12th April</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Wilfred Owen is always quoted in times of war, especially his poem ending '...you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori'. But Owen's understanding of the 'old Lie' is not quite fair to the ancients. They were no keener to die in battle than Owen was. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Owen's quote comes from Horace's Odes (III.2), but Horace is not preaching the virtue of dying. He goes on to say 'death also chases down the man who runs away and does not spare the back or hamstrings of young cowards'. His point is that, if you must die in battle, better to die gloriously: even a coward can make the best of the situation and lessen death's bitterness. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Likewise, Homer's Iliad is regularly seen as the prototype heroic epic glorifying warfare and a martial death. But, with one exception, no hero seeks out death. The hero's desire is to win, and to die is to fail. At the same time, when death does come, it is construed as inevitable. Indeed, Homer's word for 'destiny' usually means 'the moment you die', which (the poet tells us) is fixed the moment you are born. In these cases, the hero does go for glory at all costs. Thus Trojan Hector, pursued by Achilles round the walls of Ilium but deceived by Athene into stopping and fighting, when he realises that he has been tricked and that the gods have deserted him, reflects 'So now my destiny confronts me. Let me at least sell my life dearly and not without glory, after some great deed for future generations to hear of' - precisely the point Horace was making seven hundred years later. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The one exception is Achilles. As a direct result of his own refusal to return to the fighting, his beloved companion Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector. Achilles' mother Thetis tells him that, if he takes revenge on Hector, he will die next. Achilles bursts out 'Then let me die immediately, since I let my companion be killed when I could have saved him'. Achilles proceeds to win what immortal glory he can with the single-handed rout of the Trojan forces, culminating in the slaughter of Hector; but, as the Odyssey shows, that is cold comfort. Odysseus in the underworld says Achilles 'lords it over the dead'. Achilles retorts that he would rather be a labourer for a landless peasant, and at once asks after his living son, Neoptolemus. Life is what counts. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">19th April</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">What will be Middle Eastern historians' judgement of Saddam's regime and its enforced collapse? Is there a Tacitus among them? In his Histories, Tacitus describes the traumatic 'Year of the Four Emperors' (AD 69) that followed the death of Nero, a year when general after general attempted to seize power by force, and the Roman world seemed to fall apart. There is an especially dramatic description of the fall of the third brief tenant of the imperial throne, Vitellius - an end which may yet mirror Saddam's. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When Rome was captured by the troops of his successor, Vespasian, Vitellius was taken by chair through the back of the palace to his wife's house. His aim was to lie low and get away by night to his brother's home, sixty miles to the south in Tarracina. But unable, in his terror, to make a final decision, Vitellius returned to his 'vast, deserted palace. Even the lowest of his menials had slipped away, or avoided meeting him. The solitude and silence of the place terrified him. He tried locked doors, and shuddered at the emptiness around him. Eventually, exhausted by his miserable wanderings, he crept into some shameful hiding place, where he was discovered and hauled out by a tribune of the guards called Julius Placidus. His hands were tied behind his back, his clothes torn and he was led away, heaped with insults, a disgraceful sight, evoking not a single tear of pity.' (Other sources describe his hiding-place as the janitor's room, or a dog-kennel.) </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Forced to watch as statues of him were pulled down, Vitellius was taken to the place where a previous emperor, Galba, and a city prefect had been murdered. As the jeering mob abused him, Tacitus records a comment showing true nobility: 'Whatever you may say, I was your emperor'. With that he was cut down, 'and the mob reviled him in death as viciously as they had flattered him while he was alive'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Tacitus has a number of targets in his sights here. The first is the degradation brought on the highest office in the Roman world by people like Vitellius (hence Tacitus' comment on one sign of nobility in him); the second is the behaviour of the brutal, fickle, value-free mob, happy to be swayed by whatever pleasure and advantage they could extract from a situation. It all makes for a dreadful vision of the perversion and degeneracy of a world about which Tacitus felt so deeply. There will be room for Middle Eastern historians of similar passion and honesty when it comes to assessing events in Iraq. </div><div><br /></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-52955816451304256222010-04-07T10:55:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:57:16.533-07:00A&M: 2003 March<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">1st March 2003</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The debate grinds on about whether to bid for the Olympic Games to be staged in London. It is time to apply a little ancient wisdom. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The youthful Alcibiades, darling of the Bright Young Things in fifth-century BC Athens, was very proud of his achievements in the prestigious chariot race at the Olympic Games (he entered seven teams, finishing first, second and fourth). He argued that, since his performance generated tremendous regard for Athens' power, it could hardly be regarded as a 'folly', as some had said. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Alcibiades was talking not about staging but winning the Games, something Brits rarely do. And even winning was pooh-poohed by the poet and thinker Xenophanes, who pointed out that, however much the victor at the Games was honoured, 'the city would not thereby be better governed, nor its granaries filled'. Aristotle thought 'the athlete's style of bodily fitness does nothing for the general purposes of civic life, nor does it encourage ordinary health or the procreation of children. Some exercise is essential, but it must be neither violent nor specialised, as is the case with athletes.' Cicero was even more contemptuous: when Milo, a famous wrestler grown old, saw young men practising and lamented that his own arms were now dead, Cicero said 'No, you fool, you are dead, since your nobility came not from yourself but from your arms and legs'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Greek doctor Galen, who practised in Rome, raised another issue. 'Perhaps it is because they make such huge sums of money, much more than anyone else, that athletes put on airs. And yet you can see for yourself that they are all in debt, not only when they are playing but when they retire.' </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Roman emperor Augustus' confidante Maecenas lamented the expense of it all: 'the cities should not waste their resources on number and variety of games, in case they exhaust themselves in futile exertions and quarrel over unreasonable desire for glory. They should not ruin the public treasury and private estates thereby.' </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Which is exactly what happens today, as cities compete to stage the Games. The ancient Greeks knew better: the original Olympic Games were held every four years in exactly the same place, a sanctuary of Olympian Zeus in a backwater of the western Peloponnese. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unproductive, unhealthy, ignoble, pauperising: just about sums up the whole Olympic Games manifesto.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">8th March</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The EU has recently proclaimed that, for the purposes of its statistical analyses, Britain is not an island. That poses an interesting question: when did it become an island? It has recently been argued that it became one, in Roman eyes at any rate, on July 21st 54 BC, at 9.21pm. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The historical and archaeological record shows that, in the first century BC, Britain enjoyed very close commercial and political ties with Europe. This, indeed, is probably what attracted Julius Caesar to it in the first of his expeditions here in 55BC, for which he was officially thanked by the Senate in Rome. But it did not work out at all well. As he admits in his Gallic Wars, he was caught out by fierce storms and high tides caused by the full moon, which damaged his transports that were at anchor and the warships which had been beached. The date was August 31st, high tide at 3.36am. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Caesar had a second go at Britain in 54 BC, crossing from Gaul in July, using the currents to land near Deal or Sandwich and then setting out on a night march to Canterbury. Consultation of nautical tables tells us that the date of the landing was July 20th. But then, Caesar tells us, dispatch riders brought news of a great storm on the night of July 21st which again caused havoc with the fleet. Caesar immediately returned to camp, had the boats repaired, won a few victories and sailed back to Gaul. Interestingly, however, Caesar fails to admit to a significant event: that there was a full moon on the evening of July 21st, at 9.21pm. In other words, he tried to cover up the fact that he had forgotten the lesson of the previous year. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was this second disaster, it is argued, that was the turning point in Rome's perception of Britain. Nearly a hundred years were to pass before they tried again, and still the soldiers were very reluctant to make the crossing. Caligula's refused outright in AD 40, and in AD 43 Claudius' army baulked to start with, 'believing that they were sailing beyond the limits of the inhabited world', before they were finally persuaded and did indeed take the island. Even so, in AD 61 Boudicca could still argue to the troops she was stirring to revolt against the Romans that the Britons 'possess a world of our own, so separated from the rest of mankind that we have been believed to dwell on a different earth and under a different sky, and that some of the outside world, even their wisest men, have not known for certain even by what name we are called'. That's the spirit.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">15th March</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">In his already classic sociological study of the Hoorah Henry in last week's Spectator, Professor Oborne did not have space to explore in full the ancient precedents for this style of behaviour. Herewith, then, a humble footnote to his marr-sterful overview, together with a forward-looking proposal. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Professor was right to mention the importance of the drunken riot, kômos. This took place in the context of a symposion, symposium or drink-in, in which vast quantities of wine (up to c. 18% alcohol content) diluted with water, were hoovered up. The comic poet Euboulos describes the stages through which the occasion went. After the first three mixing-bowls, when the wise man was recommended to leave, 'the fourth leads to violence, the fifth to uproar, the sixth to riots (kômos), the seventh to black eyes, the eighth to summonses, the ninth to vomiting and the tenth to madness and throwing things about.' </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All very St Edmund's, Oxford. But that is the point. The symposium was a private occasion, on which aristocrats linked by status, age, wealth and common interests drank, talked, plotted, recited poetry and shagged the night away within their own four walls. But it regularly reached its climax in the kômos, when the plastered young komasts spilled out onto the streets in a display of exhibitionist public behaviour designed to show how unconventional they were, demonstrate their power and lawlessness and generally thumb the nose at ordinary citizens. It was on such an occasion, as the Professor remarks, that Alcibiades and his gang rampaged through Athens damaging the herms (statues of the protector Hermes) that stood at every front door, a typical piece of aristocratic vandalism. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Military Sparta offered a different model. As Plato's uncle Critias said, Spartans at their tables 'drink only enough to lead the spirits of all to joyous hope and the tongue to friendliness and moderate mirth'. To judge by the number of occasions on which his heroes eat and drink together, Homer too knew that commensality could foster a life-saving sense of fellowship and personal loyalty among soldiers. Influenced, perhaps, by all this, Plato specifically recommends in his last work, Laws, that training in sensible drinking be a part of the school curriculum. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Time for St Edmunds to found a Hoorah Henry Chaise Longue in Komastic Studies with entry restricted to private school pupils with Ds at A- level and Professor Oborne as its first incumbent.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">22nd March</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">George Bush wishes to see democracy - he means, of course, elective oligarchy - imposed all over the middle east, whether middle easterners want it or not. Alexander the Great had the same sort of idea, but his way of doing it was not quite what Mr Bush has in mind. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alexander set out from Macedon in 334 BC, he said, to take revenge against the Persians for attacking Greece in 490-479 BC (the 'Persian Wars'). His formidable army drove the Persians out of Asia Minor (Turkey) and marched into Iraq; and on October 1 331, Alexander defeated the Persian king Darius at the climactic battle of Gaugamela. When he took Babylon (Baghdad), Susa and then Persepolis with their fabulous riches (he never needed to raise another penny), the job was effectively done. But the prospect of further conquest was irresistible, and he marched relentlessly on through Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush and then down into the Punjab (325). Here his men finally called 'Enough'. He turned back for Babylon, where on June 10 323 he died, evidently planning further conquests of the Persian Gulf, Arabia and the Mediterranean as far as Carthage and southern Italy. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alexander saw himself as the sole monarch of the vast regions he conquered. All the way to India he planted cities, controlled by possibly reluctant Greek elites thousand of miles from home, and supported off the land by equally reluctant locals - beacons of civilised Greek language and culture to some, oppressive imperial outposts to others. But he was not afraid to elevate locals to positions of power, introducing Persians even into his elite 'Companion' cavalry. Loyalty to Alexander was the key to success. He adopted Persian dress and customs appropriate for an eastern monarch, and encouraged inter- marriage between Macedonians and locals, setting an example himself by marrying Roxane, daughter of a noble from Bactria (north of the Hindu Kush) in 327. There was talk of a complete fusion of power between Persians and Macedonians - under the one monarch. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Men will judge Alexander a fanatic or a visionary, a civiliser of the benighted or power-mad fantasist. But in his will, he seems to have envisaged a new order in which 'cities should be merged and slaves and manpower exchanged between Asia and Europe, Europe and Asia, in order to bring the two greatest continents to common concord and family friendship by mixed marriages and ties of kith and kin'. Not quite Bush's vision, perhaps, but his daughters could set an example.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-9019679739795812072010-04-07T10:53:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:55:02.285-07:00A&M: 2003 February<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">1st February 2003</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">What is it in our interests to do about immigration? The ancient Athenians came up with an interesting answer.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The reason for Athens’ control of immigrants (metoikoi, ‘those who change their habitation’, metics) was suspicion of aliens (war being endemic in the ancient world) and paranoia about the purity of their own citizenship. Any non-Athenian who wanted to take up residence in Athens, temporary or permanent, had to fulfil certain conditions. First, they registered with the state authority; then they registered with the local authority (the ‘deme’, roughly ‘parish’) where they were living. These registers were kept for administrative purposes. They also had to pay a unique monthly tax, and were liable for military service, but they could not own land or take any political role. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But there was another requirement, too: intending metics had to find themselves a citizen sponsor (prostatês), both to support their application for metic status in the first place and (possibly) to continue to ‘sponsor’ them in some way or other when it had been granted. Indeed, a specific case could be brought against any metic thought not to have a prostatês, the penalty for which was enslavement. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The purpose of all this was to ensure that metics did not get ideas above themselves. It was a privilege for them to live in Athens, and they were welcome enough, but on strictly subordinate terms. That, however, did not prevent them from coming. Athens was a powerful, flourishing, ‘international’ city: there was money to be made from being part of it. Since metics could not own land, they started up businesses in Athens and especially its harbour area, Piraeus, a prolific trading centre. Success combined with decent, orderly, law-abiding behaviour reaped its rewards in social mobility. The renowned orator Lysias was a metic who made his money writing speeches for others; his father, Cephalus, a Syracusan by birth, made a huge fortune from arms-manufacture in Athens (Plato’s famous dialogue The Republic was set in his house); intellectuals like Protagoras flocked to Athens to make money there as teachers. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The purpose of the ancient state was to protect and advance the interests of its own citizens, not anyone else’s. It dealt with aliens purely on the basis of the advantages they could bring, which could be many. The concept of a sponsor, perhaps to go bail for good behaviour, is particularly interesting. Might the mosques oblige? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">25th February</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Whether war against Iraq is justified or not, hardly a day goes by without someone condemning it because (a) the enemy will be crushingly defeated and (b) the West will seize control of Iraqi oil-supplies. And these are reasons for not fighting? On the other hand, proponents of the war argue that we have a humanitarian mission to save Iraq from itself. On both counts the Romans would have thought we had lost our senses. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Though, as Cicero said, 'taxes are the sinews of the state', from 167 BC Romans paid no direct taxes, only those demanded in the course of certain sorts of activities (e.g. harbour dues). Lucrative foreign wars were the reason, increasing state revenues dramatically during this and subsequent periods. In 62 BC, for example, Pompey returned in triumph to Rome after sorting out the Eastern empire, not only depositing vast quantities of gold and silver in Rome's treasury but almost trebling Rome's annual income. Plutarch tells us that Julius Caesar captured and sold more than a million slaves during his conquest of Gaul. Octavian (Caesar's nominated heir) inherited this fortune, and when he defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 BC, seized Egypt, a stupendously wealthy territory, before re-naming himself Augustus and becoming Rome's first official emperor. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When the Roman emperor Trajan finally ended the trouble on the borders of Romania in AD 106, he lost a lot of men but the result was that Romania became a province (Dacia) and Trajan returned to Rome with five million lbs of gold and ten million of silver - about thirty times Rome's total annual revenue. Coins were struck throughout the empire to celebrate the occasion. When Trajan returned to Rome in AD 107, foreign embassies from as far as India were waiting to greet him, keen to avoid a similar fate. Hand-outs were given to the Roman people, and an unprecedented five months of games put on. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Romans conducted foreign policy in terms purely of their own self-interest. To risk Roman lives because a foreign people could not sort out its own affairs would have struck them as little short of criminal. The interesting question, though, is why fund-raising through war of the sort conducted by Pompey, Caesar and Trajan, commonplace throughout human history till the early twentieth century, is frowned upon these days in the west. What generated the change in attitude? The disastrous economic consequences for the winners of the first and second world wars? The United Nations? </div><div><br /></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-48372443729845499742010-04-07T10:48:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:53:27.037-07:00A&M: 2003 January<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">4th January 2003</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">‘Prepare for war, Blair tells army,’ announces a newspaper headline, stirring the ghost of the Roman military historian Vegetius in its grave. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The civil servant Vegetius composed his Epitome of Military Science — the sole surviving Latin treatise on war — in the late 4th century ad. His only memorable utterance is qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum, ‘let him who desires peace prepare for war’, better known in its slicker form si vis pacem, para bellum. He reinforces it later on by saying that the Romans always keep their fleet at the ready ‘since no one dares to challenge or harm a people they know are fully armed and ready to fight’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This saying sounds like the basis of one theory of deterrence. It is, presumably, the message which the Americans and British are now trying to get over to Saddam. Vegetius goes on, ‘He who wants victory, let him train his men diligently.’ The Americans are. Is Saddam? Then, ‘He who wishes a successful outcome, let him fight with a strategy, not at random.’ Does Saddam have a strategy? And finally, ‘No one dares challenge or harm one who he realises will win if he fights.’ Are you listening, Saddam? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is, however, another theory of deterrence, and this one is available to Saddam: the ‘pre-emptive strike’ theory. In 424 bc, the Boeotians were expecting an attack from their neighbours, Athens, and the contemporary Greek historian Thucydides makes their general, Pagondas, say to his troops, ‘When one has to think about the safety of one’s own country, calculations about what is prudent do not come into it. Prudence is for those whose country is secure and who are attacking someone else. But the Athenians are the most dangerous of all people to have living next door, and such people will always march out boldly against those who make no move against them but merely defend their own territory. But when someone goes out to meet them and takes the initiative, their enthusiasm for battle wanes.’ Saddam would, of course, be mad to adopt the pre-emptive strike theory, such would be the overwhelming American response. But is he mad? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If the Americans are not mad too, they will be preparing for peace even more keenly than for war. As the 5th-century bc Greek historian Herodotus puts in the mouth of the defeated King Croesus of Lydia, ‘No one is so foolish that he prefers war to peace. In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers their sons.’</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">11th January</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mrs Samira Ahmed, an ex-university professor in Sudan, has launched a sex-strike in an attempt to end the nineteen years of (un)civil war that have torn the country apart. The newspapers went into their usual routines about Aristophanes' Lysistrata (411 BC) - and, as usual, got it wrong.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Lysistrata, we are regularly told, the women of Greece are persuaded to refuse to sleep with their husbands in an attempt to end the Athens-Sparta war that had begun in 431 BC; as a result, the sex- starved men, sporting huge erections all day, give in and the war ends. This is true as far as it goes, but in fact the sex-strike is only the half of it. The women of Athens also seize the Acropolis, where the financial reserves were kept, and 'manfully' protect it against counter- attack from the elderly chorus (the only men left in Athens); and the women of Sparta repeat the trick there. Thus deprived of cash, the two sides are unable to prosecute the war anyway, sex-strike or no. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then we are told that the comedy is really about 'the liberation of women'. But this is not true either. It is about the destruction of family life. The frustrated males do not immediately resort to prostitutes, nor the equally frustrated women to any passing potential lover. It is their spouses they all long for, and at the end of the play there is a celebration of restored family life and conjugal love. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Finally, we are told that Lysistrata is a deadly serious 'anti-war' play which comments on 'the futility of war itself'. As one would expect, there is a major problem about how exactly one derives 'serious comment' from the illogical fantasies of comedy. The situation with which Lysistrata deals derives from contemporary political life, but that does not mean it is supposed to feed back into it (cf. Yes, Minister). But even aside from that debate, there is not one word in Lysistrata about 'the futility of war itself'. Lysistrata's aim is to force an end to this war, on equal terms for both sides, and a sex- strike was a good comic device for achieving this. It was, however, an impossible dream in real life, since Athens in 411 was pretty much on its beam ends, and Sparta would never have agreed to any peace except on terms that would have been wholly unacceptable to the Athenians. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Good luck to Mrs Ahmed, but to end the civil war in Sudan will require more than a comic sex-strike (which can hardly work anyway if the men are away all the time fighting a war). On the other hand, if she could gain control of Sudan's finances ... </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">25th January</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Every week professionals such as teachers and doctors express their desire to get out of their jobs. Why? Because they have lost their independence. Greeks and Romans would have richly sympathised. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When Cicero was discussing the problems of old age, he said, ‘The old will be respected only if they fight for themselves, maintain their own rights, avoid dependence, and assert their authority over their households as long as life lasts.’ His point is that in old age one tended to yield one’s grip on that independence and control over one’s own affairs that gave one a sense of purpose. This was why satirists like Juvenal could be so contemptuous of the people and their ‘bread and circuses’, happy as they were to be locked by the state into servile dependency with free grain, festivals, banquets and games. Indeed, ancients valued their independence to such an extent that even working for someone else was felt to be the equivalent of slavery, since it made one dependent on the payer. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This determination to remain in control surfaces in all sorts of unexpected contexts. In his old age Sophocles is said to have welcomed escaping from his sexual urges ‘like a slave from a cruel and savage master’ (those in thrall to such urges were a constant butt of jokes in Athens). When Seneca writes to the emperor Nero to discuss the meaning of ‘mercy’, he distinguishes it from ‘pity’. For Seneca, ‘pity’ is ‘akin to wretchedness’ since it involves helplessly ‘succumbing at the sight of the ills of others’; but ‘mercy’ involves rational decisions of which one is in full control. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But independence did not mean refusal to co-operate. When, for example, vast silver deposits were found at Laurium on the southern tip of Attica in 483 bc, there was a considerable faction urging the Athenian assembly, the decision-making body consisting of all Athenian males over 18, to split up the surpluses among themselves to spend as they wished. But Themistocles persuaded the assembly to think of long-term advantage and to use the money to construct a fleet — the beginning of Athens’ maritime empire and greater prosperity than they could ever have imagined. Persuasion was the key. The assembly took the decision freely, seeing it was in their best interests. No one forced them into it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Pride in one’s work and loyalty to one’s employer are generated by the feeling that one is trusted and valued. A government whose ever-rising stream of bossy demands makes it clear that it regards its public servants as slaves cannot expect to retain them. </div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-42269914493595934872010-04-07T10:45:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:47:52.154-07:00A&M: 2002 December<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">7th December 2002</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Talking about wills, St Augustine remarked on the paradox that ‘while the dead man lies, insensible, under his tombstone, his words retain their full legal validity’. Time, surely, for New Labour to ‘modernise’ this transparent absurdity at a time when the Chancellor is desperate to grab money from any source he can to do what he does best and pour it into his latest, shiniest drain. But he had better watch out if he does. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Romans adored wills. ‘I hear that Sextus is dead. Let me know who his heir is, and when his will is to be opened,’ says Cicero in a letter, one of many such requests; and Seneca the Younger talks of the time one spends drawing up a will, the internal debates about how much and to whom one shall give, and the pleasure yielded by the thought of enriching this or that person and adding lustre to their position. The reason is that Romans saw wills as an essential means by which family and society reciprocated, and a man’s social networks constructed in life could be duly acknowledged and assured of continuing after death. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, naturally, everyone wanted to know what those networks were, and that is why the contents of a will were so eagerly awaited. They gave the dead man the chance to tell the truth. As Pliny said, ‘Wills are commonly believed to be the mirror of the man’, since the dead testator (being dead) now had carte-blanche to reveal what he really thought about those who imagined they were his chums. The testator regularly declared who were his dearest and least dear children, who his rarest and most obnoxious friends. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One grande dame caused a stir by commending all the great and good of Rome, but passing over the emperor Tiberius in silence. Others went further. One will savagely indicted Tiberius and accused his prefect Macro of terrible crimes; Petronius, the ‘arbiter of taste’, ordered to commit suicide by Nero, listed Nero’s debaucheries. Not surprising, then, that, for example, the emperor Augustus was paranoid about the last judgment of those friends he considered he had helped, downcast if they did not praise him enough, delighted if they talked of him ‘gratefully and piously’. That latest judgment really counted. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If, therefore, the surly Scot does start ransacking the graves of the dead in his next Budget (after all, what could be more elitist than personal networks of chums; who knows how to spend money better than he?), those with the most money to lose might suddenly find an incentive to use their wills to unfold what they really know about him and the government he works for. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">14th December</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Tragic fun for all the family: the Fall of the House of Archer</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Christmas is the time for stimulating educational games round a roaring open telly. This year’s is a real festive winner: construct your own Greek tragedy, on any subject of your choice. The rules, observable in Sophocles (496–405 bc) and Euripides (485–406 bc), are strict: </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">1. The tragedy lasts about two hours and is played in real time: i.e., it represents an unbroken two-hour period in the characters’ lives. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">2. It takes place in a single location, out of doors. Since Greek tragedies were frequently about kings, that meant outside his palace: i.e., in the palace front garden, or on the roof — a stimulating location indeed. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">3. Only three actors are allowed, though they can play as many parts as the tragedian wishes. In one tragedy the three actors played 11 parts between them. So crowd scenes, assemblies and battles are impossible; nor must anyone die on stage because that leaves you with only two actors. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">4. One of these actors must be the main centre of the play’s dramatic attention, even if he/she is not actually on stage for the whole time; there may also be a secondary main character, acting as a foil to the first. This could leave the third actor with a lot to do (give him time to change costumes). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">5. After the first ‘act’ (epeisodion, cf. ‘episode’), a chorus consisting of 15 men or women comes on stage to do a song-and-dance routine relevant to the unfolding action. It remains on stage for the rest of the tragedy, doing its routines between the acts. It has a collective identity, which remains constant throughout the play, and its leader may engage in conversation with the actors. Its main purpose is to bring a collective and communal dimension to the individual tragedy being worked out before it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">6. Characters can enter and leave only via the palace (i.e., the backdrop) or the side exits, one leading to the city, the other to the country. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">7. Because of the limitations of ancient technology, monsters and miracles can only be reported. On stage, generally, strict realism is the rule. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The big question the ancient tragedian faced was: whose two hours? The point is that Greek tragedy linked the present with the deep past. But that deep past could not be shown on stage; it could only be dredged up from the characters’ or chorus’s memories (‘Yes, I do now recollect...’) or reported by someone else (‘Surely you must remember when...’). Know-all prophets, able to pinpoint the significance of past events and hint about the future, came in handy here. Likewise, deaths, wars and journeys could not happen on stage. They, too, needed to be reported. As a result of this knowledge, characters then made things happen (wisely or unwisely) in the here and now; these tended actually to happen off stage, with results reported later. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Greek tragedy, then, is structured round the protagonists uncovering the past and taking action in relation to it in the here and now, but slowly discovering the ghastly consequences of their decisions. ‘At last! Now I see’ is the climax. That is why Greek tragedy is nearly all talk. The ‘action’ is in the past, or off stage; the ‘action’ on stage is the emergence of the true meaning of it all, with its terrifying consequences. The poet’s main structural job, then, is to sort out what is to be ‘here and now’, what is to be ‘past’, and what is to be done off stage and reported back. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So much then for general dramaturgy. But we now hit problems: what will be our subject matter? The important point is this: once the truth is out, Greek tragedy’s inescapable conclusion is that it is better never to have been born, or, if born, to die soon. As Kafka says, ‘There is an abundance of hope, but none for us.’ People being randomly unhappy, or badly treated, or dying unexpectedly, mere violence and horror, are not a sufficient condition to warrant the title ‘tragic’ in any sense that Greek tragedy would understand. Greek tragedy is not random; there is a terrifying inevitability about it all. Happy Christmas. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, this does not scupper the proposed game. Parody, after all, is a noble art and can teach us much. If Housman can parody tragedy — ‘O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots/Head of a traveller’ and all that — so can we. Let us, then, by way of example, take on the BBC’s recent plodding satire, and attempt an Archereia, or ‘Jeffrey Archer: The Tragedy’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As soon as one starts thinking about the big question — whose two hours? — it immediately becomes apparent that the tragedy has to be Lady Archer’s (M). She is the real victim in all this. But to what effect? Is the tragic moment to be that (a) her life has been left in ruins by J’s misfortunes, or (b) she is a wronged woman who will take brutal revenge on her husband for betraying her? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If scenario (a), the two hours will cover the court case which sent J to prison. The mise-en-scène would therefore be the pavement outside the Old Bailey. M will receive regular messenger-style reports from inside about how the case is going, while figures from J’s past — Monica, various MPs, judges, editors, share-dealers, etc. — come on to tell her their version of events, before disappearing into court. A chorus of taxi-drivers comments on proceedings. M heroically resists all their urgings, and, in a tear-jerking closing scene, J at last emerges on stage to be carried off to prison, calling on the gods to witness how unjustly he has been treated, while M bewails her fate. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The ‘wronged woman’ mise-en-scène (b) would be set outside the Archer home in Grantchester, with a chorus of sympathetic secretaries. M is awaiting her husband’s arrival, but various incomers hint at their misgivings about him, increasing her suspicions, till finally he enters — with Monica. A Clytemnestra routine follows. M ushers them warmly in, murders both (screams from the house) and emerges, bloodstained and triumphant. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A Women of Trachis scenario might also work. Deianeira/M, hearing her husband Heracles/J has fallen in love with Iole/Monica, decides to win back his love by giving him the shirt of Nessus/some equivalent. But this, in fact, is a killer garment, slowly consuming the wearer who dies in agony (good messenger speech). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Or how about a Medea? In this case, the play would open with M, already alerted to her husband’s feelings for Monica, chewing over what to do about it. She attempts a reconciliation with him, but he can see nothing wrong in what he has done. She therefore swears the secretarial chorus to silence and plots a hideous revenge which will leave him abandoned and ‘devastated’ (one must remember tragedies can have happy endings too). But here one hits a brick wall: is there anything that really would leave J ‘devastated’? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Problems, problems. But they only go to show what superb masters of the conventions the Greek tragedians were. One hardly notices the conventions at all. This is the virtue of the game, even if it is only a technical one. ‘The arts’ today reject the idea of restrictions. That is why they are so dire. It is the restrictions that create the masterpiece. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">How about the House of Windsor...? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">28th December</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">As the argument over firemen's pay and conditions rumbles on, Mr John Scorer reminds me of the correspondence on the subject of a fire service between Pliny the younger, governor of Bithynia-Pontus in north-western Turkey, and the emperor Trajan. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Pliny asks if it would be a good idea to establish one in the province, but Trajan advises that such collegia can cause political trouble; people should be provided with their own equipment and, if a fire starts, call on help from the watching crowd. The fire-service in Rome offers more helpful parallels with the current situation. Prevention was originally in the hands of a committee of three, in charge of a body of public slaves stationed around the gates and walls of the city. But they were in the wrong place and ineffective. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The emperor Augustus got a grip on the problem in AD 6. With a 4% tax on the sale of slaves to fund the operation, Augustus put a praefectus with his own headquarters and office staff in charge of seven cohorts of fire-fighters (vigiles). Each cohort consisted of 500 men, commanded by a tribune and divided up into seven 'centuries' (i.e. c. 70 per 'century'). Each cohort looked after two of the city's fourteen administrative regiones, and were housed in barracks. They patrolled extensively at night when the danger was greatest, since (in the absence of matches or other instant sources of fire) householders kept fires burning unsupervised. Owners of houses were required to keep a supply of water available and other instrumenta for fighting fires - vinegar, mats, poles, ladders, sponges, buckets and brooms. In the absence of hoses, man- and bucket-power was essential; the brigades brought pumps, hooks, mattocks and axes, and ballistae to knock down nearby houses and create fire-breaks. Four medici were attached to each cohort. On average there seem to have been about a hundred fires a day in the city, twenty large, two serious. There were probably no more than four large fires at any one time, and, given their size and careful distribution, the patrols could deal with them. The secret was to get in </div><div style="text-align: justify;">early (smell was very important). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Today's fire-brigade is right: keep fully-staffed night patrols. So is the government: military organisation for the whole force; fire-engines to be re-located at specific times to places where they are most needed; and property owners to take preventative measures. And Gordon Brown is evidently planning to charge 5% VAT on house sales too - another real winner from the surly Scot. </div><div><br /></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-2795709533199194742010-04-07T10:43:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:45:42.761-07:00A&M: 2002 November<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">2nd November 2002</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Julian Horn-Smith, second-in-command to Sir Chris Gent at the mighty Vodaphone, has been extolling the virtues of being vice-admiral rather than admiral, on the grounds that a major defeat might cost the admiral his job. The ancient Greeks knew all about that argument. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus has good reason to believe that his second-in-command Creon has been plotting his downfall and claims his wealth, power and ability have excited Creon's envy. Faced with this accusation, Creon does a Horn-Smith. Would any man, he argues, merely to increase his authority, choose the fears and sleepless nights that go with kingship? Like any man, he would rather have the substance, not the show of authority; and that he has, because he is a confidant of Oedipus, with all the power but none of the worries. So every man greets him warmly, and he them, since he can make or mar them. He would be foolish to surrender this happy position to take on Oedipus' load of cares, let alone have himself known as a traitor. 'Heard that one before', sniffs Oedipus. 'String him up'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When the all-powerful Persian king Darius hears that Sardis, his principal city in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), has been captured and burnt by an alliance led by Aristagoras from Miletus, he summons Histiaeus, tyrant of Miletus, for an explanation. Darius had been holding Histiaeus at his court for some time, and Aristagoras was his deputy. Histiaeus hornsmiths away very convincingly: 'Master, is it likely I should do anything, great or small, to harm your interests? I have all I want. What motive could there be for treachery? Is not what is yours, mine too? Do I not have the honour of sharing all your counsels? If Aristagoras is guilty as you say, be sure that it is entirely his own doing. Of course, if you had not been keeping me here in your court, none of this would have happened. So the best thing you can do is to let me return to Miletus, where I shall hand over Aristagoras to you and sort everything out.' The historian Herodotus continues 'The purpose of this was to deceive to Darius, and it worked. The king believed Histiaeus and let him go, telling him to return when he had done what he promised.' </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The style of argument deployed by Creon and Histiaeus was classified by Greeks as an argument from 'likelihood'. It depended on successfully constructing yourself as the sort of person who would just not do that sort of thing. Since Horn-Smith has been not doing it for many years now, perhaps Sir Chris can sleep easy after all.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">16th November</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">How delightfully Roman the Tory party seems at the moment! One would hardly know a 'party' exists at all. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Despite Michael Portillo's recent assertion that 'no democratic system has found a way to be without [parties]', the ancient Greeks got on spiffingly without them, as did the Romans. Politics in ancient Rome had nothing to do with adversarial debates between established 'parties' with 'policies' wielding power in a 'House of Commons' on behalf of 'constituents'. The Senate consisted of all those who had served as executive officials (e.g. consul, praetor etc.) and a Roman reached those positions of power and authority by gathering round him the Great and Good who would support his candidature before the People's assemblies. This involved all sorts of alliances, with reciprocal obligations and duties attached, but they were all temporary, and membership of a party never came into it. The Roman was out for himself. Over a career he would build up an extensive personal network of supporters (amici and clientes), and if he was successful, a large part of his political life would consist in nurturing those relationships. Cicero, for example, defended friends at court, spoke for interest-groups (e.g. tax-gatherers), recommended friends for loans, and even represented whole communities (on one occasion, those who felt land-allotments had been unfairly distributed). Senate membership alone did not give him that authority. As for 'policies', in the absence of tax-raising and social services, they hardly existed. Executive officials argued out issues of war and peace, taking them to the Senate if they felt like it (which they usually did). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Partes, as they were called, did exist, but only in times of crisis, when the political world itself had become polarised. Thus when Pompey and Caesar were scrapping for power in the late 50's BC, people talked of two partes in Rome. As for a factio, this was a term of abuse which you directed against political opponents who had banded together for (in your eyes) nefarious purposes. When Pompey, Caesar and Crassus formed a coalition in 59 BC, those outside it saw it as a factio. Indeed, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy in 49 BC, he claimed it was to free the people from just such a factio, led (surprise, surprise) by his old coalition partner Pompey. As the Tiny Beasts of the Tory party creep about constructing allegiances and to hell with all this 'party' nonsense, the IDS of March suddenly seems all too imminent.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">23rd November</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The prime minister has been sounding off about the importance of 'respect', which he does not define but clearly thinks is a vote-winner. In fact, as ancient Greeks saw, 'respect' - aidôs - is the other side of a far less cuddly emotion, 'shame'. Aidôs in Greek is to do with the judgement one makes about one's self- image in front of other people - either positively recognising someone else's status ('respect'), or acknowledging a sense of inhibition at the way one has oneself performed ('shame'). Feeling 'abashed' about oneself before others might cover both usages. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In Homer, aidôs tends to be generated by external sanctions, i.e. by what other people will say about you if you behave in a certain way. When Andromache begs her husband Hector to defend Troy from behind its fortifications, Hector replies that he would feel nothing but aidôsbefore Trojans and their wives if he slunk like a coward from the fighting; besides, he adds, 'my heart forbids me, since I have trained myself to be a good warrior, to take my place in the front line and try to win glory for my father and myself'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When near the end of the Iliad, however, Hector admits that he has destroyed the army by his stupidity in leading them out to confront Achilles, he says he feels nothing but aidôs before Trojans and their wives in case some second-rater says of him 'Hector trusted in his might and destroyed his people'. He concludes 'better to waste no time but to get to grips [with Achilles myself] and find out to which of us Zeus hands the victory'. Driven by aidôs to perform heroics in battle, Hector is also driven by it to realise that he has made a wrong judgement and then to shoulder the responsibility of trying to put it right. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Aidôs is clearly a powerful force for good, but later Greeks wondered whether the external sanction was enough. What, for example, of the criminal who could always escape detection? Aidôs would have no effect on him. It awaited the fifth-century philosopher Democritus to think of aidôs as a form of internal sanction, rooted in some concept of conscience, when he argued that one should feel aidôs first and foremost not before others but before oneself - the only way to ensure that one's behaviour corresponded with one's ideals. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One can see why respec', man, should appeal to a politician. How they would love a little. They might get some if they occasionally showed some of its other half, shame.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">30th November</span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">What a fuss everyone is getting into about the funding of universities! If ministers would only sit back with their Aristotle and Plato and think about results, all would become clear. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Aristotle is very keen on the telos - the goal or end of things - and when he discusses the state, he decides its telos is 'the sharing by households and families in the good life, for the purpose of a complete and self-sufficient life'. This result being of supreme importance, state control over education is required. As he says in his Politics: 'since the whole city has one goal, it is evident that there must also be one and the same education for everyone, and that the superintendence of this should be public and not private...Public matters should be publicly managed.' </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So far, so Blairite. What, then, should be the telos of a university education? Here Aristotle becomes very cagey, pointing out that 'there are no generally accepted assumptions about what the young should learn, either for virtue or the best life, nor is it clear whether education ought to be conducted with more concern for the intellect than for the character of the soul...for things useful in life, or those conducive to virtue or directed at exceptional accomplishments'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Here Plato comes in. In his Seventh Letter, he distinguishes between two sorts of education: 'sun-tan' education, where the student just rolls over occasionally if he can find the time and work up the energy, and real education, where the student is admitted only if he is alerted to what the education entails - 'the nature of the subject as a whole, and all the stages that must be gone through, and how much labour is required' and sees it as 'so wonderful that he must follow it through with all his might'. How does one tell? By results, 'truth flashing on the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark'. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">From Aristotle, then, any subject can be studied, but the education must be 'the same' for all. So there must be a common standard - all exams set and marked to that standard in all subjects. Only the best being good enough in Blair's Britain, Oxbridge standards apply. From Plato, only those absolutely committed to study should be allowed in. But Blair wants everyone to have the chance. Impasse? No. Let all pay the full price, wherever they go to study - after all, they will all be following an Oxbridge standard course. Then let the results decide. Those who graduate get their money back; those who don't, don't. Good market economics, that. Degrees might be worth something, too. </div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-27118648413658906692010-04-07T10:41:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:43:09.148-07:00A&M: 2002 October<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>5th October 2002</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Stinker Pinker’s latest book has caused a furore by arguing that nature has a much greater effect than nurture on human behaviour. Or was it the other way round? Not that it matters. It has been argued over for millennia, in slightly different terms but with equally little effect.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ancient Greeks thought of the problem in terms of nomos (‘custom, convention, law’) or phusis (‘nature’). Were nomoi (plural) part of the natural, immutable order of things, or merely a human imposition whose purpose was to restrain natural instincts? If the former, one could argue that they were necessary for the survival and reasonable functioning of society; if the latter, that they were a destructive force, designed (as Plato’s opponent Callicles argues on one occasion) to keep weaklings in power and constrain the naturally stronger and better. But then Greeks wondered where ‘unwritten law’ fitted into the antithesis, which, as Antigone famously argued, was the gods’ ‘unfailing rules, not of today or yesterday, and no one knows when they first appeared’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Another way to construct the problem was in terms of fate or free will. Stoic philosophers, for example, reckoning that the divine pneuma, a sort of fiery air, pervaded the whole universe, argued that the divine will must therefore hold sway at all times: this was a deterministic universe. But in that case how could human action be free? In particular, how could one make choices (a crucial part of Stoic doctrine)? Stoics had recourse to analogy to explain how. One example was that man is like a dog attached by a long leash to a wagon travelling remorselessly from A to B. The dog ultimately has no option but to go along with it, but its leash allows it a certain amount of leeway in which to express its free will; in particular, it can struggle against the wagon and be miserable, or follow it and be happy. It is up to the dog. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ancient Greeks invented argument by antithesis — mind or matter was another favourite — but it is a tool of limited use since its terms define the argument before the argument has ever begun. The nature–nurture antithesis, then, is crippled from the start. But if one must use it, Homer’s view of the matter solves the problem, as he expressed it in relation to another famous antithesis dealing with the same issue: who is responsible for man’s decisions, man or god? Homer’s answer was that they both were, in exactly the same proportion (100 per cent). So with arguing whether nature or nurture is responsible for human behaviour — which is why it is a pointless exercise.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>13th October</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">British youth has every right to be angry about the A-level grading fiasco, but their self-pitying sobs — ‘What of the effect on our future careers, income, quality of life and happiness?’ moans one tragic whinger — have not impressed. Is taking a year out really that awful? But then, they have been raised in a victim culture. Even more disgusting has been the chorus of sympathy from adults encouraging them. Seneca has the answer.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In about ad 60, Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius about their mutual acquaintance Liberalis, who had been much downcast at the news of a great fire that had completely wiped out the proud Roman colony of Lugdunum (Lyon) in two days. Seneca starts by observing that fires, like earthquakes, damage but rarely destroy a whole town at one go, as had happened on this occasion. So this event has been, he goes on, a serious test of Liberalis’ usually steadfast will, especially as it was so unexpected, ‘for the unexpected exacts the heaviest toll on us’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Therefore, Seneca concludes, ‘We must ensure that nothing is unexpected by us. Our minds must look ahead at all times and think about not what usually happens, but what can possibly happen.’ He points out that Fortuna is able to strike in any number of ways; she can turn our own hands against us or produce disasters out of top hats; one is never safe from her, especially at times of greatest hopes and happiness, and when she strikes, it is with terrifying rapidity. Cities, like mountains, casurae stant, ‘stand but to fall’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The consolation in all this is that reverses often lead to a more prosperous outcome. Seneca quotes a friend of Augustus with such a grudge against Rome that the only reason he felt aggrieved when buildings there burned down was because he knew far better ones would replace them. But at all events the mind must be disciplined to understand and endure a human’s lot: ‘Into such a world have we entered, under such laws do we live.’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Plato pointed out that in democracies the old are always tempted to suck up to the young because they do not want to be thought tyrants. The young could extract some good out of this whole mess if they read their Seneca, took the lessons on board, and then expressed their feelings about those politicians and commentators who fell over themselves to outdo each other in their ever more lurid assessments of the magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen ‘our young people today’ — the patronising creeps. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>27th October</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lord Archer, now serving four years for perjury, has been shocked to find that jails are full of criminals, living in cells fitted with bars and steel doors. So he is writing a diary to inform the Home Secretary of this appalling state of affairs. What he really cannot understand, however, is why he is there, having to mix with these people. The Romans would have sympathised with his predicament. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Under the Roman empire it became standard practice for the law to discriminate between different classes of people when it came to handing out sentences. Two social classes are commonly referred to, though it is difficult to be precise about who fitted into which category: the honestiores and the humiliores (slaves made a third class). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Take, for example, the Cornelian law on wills: ‘Anyone who knowingly and with wrongful intent forges ...a will is liable under the lex Cornelia testamentaria. Honestiores are to be deported to an island, humiliores are either sent to the mines or are crucified.’ Or take the Cornelian law de sicariis, ‘on murderers’: ‘Capital punishment is usual these days, except for those whose status is too high to sustain the statutory penalty. These are deported to an island, while humiliores are usually either crucified or thrown to beasts.’ For the crime of removing boundary stones, we learn that slaves were condemned to the mines, humiliores to hard labour and honestiores to temporary expulsion with one-third confiscation, or full deportation. The lex Julia de maiestatis, ‘on treason’, laid down that humiliores should be thrown to the beasts or burnt alive, honestiores capitally punished. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The issue here is public degradation. The honestior does not evade punishment, but expulsion, deportation and/or confiscation of goods do not propel him into the popular limelight, let alone humiliate him there. Even if he is sentenced to capital punishment, an execution is a comparatively quick and clean death, in the face of which he could win credit by exhibiting proper stoic fortitude. The humilior, on the other hand, is sent to the mines, crucified, thrown to the beasts or burnt at the stake, the first a slow death-sentence, the last three carried out in public, before mocking crowds in the arena. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Doubtless Lord Archer will soon be proposing revolutionary distinctions of this sort. How proud, but humble, that other prison-reformer and novelist Charles Dickens would be to find himself linked with such distinguished company in working for change.</div><div><br /></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-64070774103451381422010-04-07T10:39:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:41:10.077-07:00A&M: 2002 September<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>14th September 2002</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is, apparently, a problem for many males that when they retire they feel dissatisfied because ‘society’ does not value them any more. It is hard to see what ‘society’ as such can actually do about this, but it raises the question why anyone should want to be valued by society, especially one of the sort described week after week by, for example, that sober judge of human nature, Dr Theodore Dalrymple. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">From Diogenes the Cynic (4th century bc) living in his wine-jar (not barrel) to the ascetics of the late Roman world atop their pillars, many ancients argued that not being valued by society was the only way to live. Diogenes rejects the concept of ‘society’ tout court, seeing true values and moral standards only in animals, primitive man, barbarians and the gods. The Epicurean Roman philosopher Lucretius (1st century bc) points out how sweet it is to remain immune to the mad passions that drive the majority to spend their life competing against each other, striving for status, struggling night and day to emerge top of the heap. Even the Stoic thinker Seneca the younger (1st century ad), who was for a time an adviser to Nero and as a Stoic was committed to the idea of public service for the public good, seems to think that withdrawal into a private life of study can be justified. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Asceticism — Greek askêsis, ‘training, practice, routine’, the belief that humans had an almost limitless potential for spiritual development through ‘exercises’ designed to transform the personality — had had a long pagan history before it became associated with Christianity. Among pagans, however, it was a practice for the educated rich, a ‘lifestyle’ statement they could afford to indulge. But for Christians, anyone of any class could renounce the world, the flesh and the Devil, or sell all that they had and give to the poor; hence the hermit (Greek erêmos, ‘solitary’) and the fascination with the desert, the powerful symbol of the renunciation of man as a social and civilised being. Not that everyone had to go that far: renunciation of the demon sex was often felt to be enough of a statement about one’s other-worldly perspective. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The assimilation of these and other practices awaited the conviction that only the teaching and traditions of a Catholic Church, under a pope invested with the authority of Christ, really counted. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Retire to your study; become a hermit; abjure sex; go to church — unlikely advice for the retired, perhaps, but anything must be preferable to pleading abjectly with ‘society’ to value you. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>21st September</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The USA and the Middle East are quite content to engage in commercial exchange, but seem incapable of using such transactions to realise any deeper cultural understanding, let alone interaction. In the ancient world the two frequently went hand in hand, especially when the Middle East was the ‘superpower’.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ancient Greece is the ‘cradle of civilisation’ for the Western world, but what was the cradle of civilisation for the Greeks? The shaft-graves of Agamemnon’s Mycenae (16th century bc) tell the story, with their glass beads from Iraq, elephant tusks from Syria, jugs and vases from Egypt, drinking vessels from Egypt or Syria/Palestine made of Nubian ostrich eggs and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So, too, does the great Iraqi epic of Gilgamesh, some 2,000 years older than the first voice of Western literature, 8th-century bc Homer. Gilgamesh is a hero, the son of a mortal father, Lugalbanda, and a goddess, Ninsun. Father stays out of the way, but mother plays a large part in his life, advising him and interceding on his behalf with the powerful god Shamash. Gilgamesh is strong, proud and impulsive, and as a result he causes the death of his dearly beloved companion Enkidu; he is prostrate with grief, etc.... Achilles is a hero, the son of a mortal father, Peleus, and a goddess, Thetis. Father stays out of the way, but mother plays a large part in his life, advising him and interceding on his behalf with the powerful god Zeus. Achilles is strong, proud and impulsive, and as a result he causes the death of his dearly beloved companion Patroclus; he is prostrate with grief, etc.... However the interaction actually came about, the first literature of the West is deeply indebted to the East. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For some 6,000 years the rich cultures of the Middle East, especially Mesopotamia/Iraq, fed into south-eastern Europe everything that was to make the Greek miracle possible: the cultivation of cereals, flax, vines and olives; pottery (hand- and then wheel-made); working in copper, then bronze and iron; writing on clay tablets, papyrus and skins; town walls; the harp, the lyre and the double oboe. They gave the Greeks their religious practices and gods, as the Greek historian Herodotus was only too happy to acknowledge, much of their cosmology, eschatology and astronomy, and the concept of treaties and law-codes. They.... </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But then it was so much easier in those days. Pagan gods were not on the whole jealous gods, imposing on their followers the exclusive demands typical of some of our more modern deities. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-5035100623437792752010-04-07T10:36:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:39:32.891-07:00A&M: 2002 August<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>3rd August 2002</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbeard of Canterbury elect, has been unfolding his thoughts on abortion. He has gratifyingly little that is new to say on a debate which is at least 2,500 years old. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dr Williams raises the problem of whether the foetus counts as human, and might thus be said to have ‘claims’ of its own. Presumably he is a Pythagorean on the issue, since they were convinced that the foetus had every innate human capacity, body and soul, from the moment of conception, and abortion was therefore wrong — a strongly held position in the early Church. On the other hand, Exodus xxi 22–4, the only clear reference in the Bible to abortion, does not regard it as homicide — to the annoyance of some early Church fathers. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But one cannot really debate the subject unless one has an argued position on the status of the foetus, and Dr Williams seems happy merely to assert its inviolability. No ancient would have accepted this. Some argued that the foetus’s movement in the womb indicated sensibility; others that it was a plant, moving without conscious thought; others that it was more like something that was asleep. Most were gradualists, arguing that animation and sensation developed only slowly (so early abortion was permissible). Ancient doctors, inevitably, took a pragmatic approach. They did not want to be seen as abortionists, arguing that their duty was to save life, not destroy it, but well understood that, in certain circumstances relating to the wellbeing of the mother, they had little option. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dr Williams further argues that abortion cannot simply be a matter of one person’s choice, since it has wider political, ethical and cultural implications. This was well understood in the ancient world. As Cicero says in his Pro Cluentio (79 bc) of a woman from Miletus who had had an abortion, ‘she deprived her husband of the hope of becoming a father, the memory of his name, the successor to his generation, the heir to his family, and the city of a future citizen’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Finally, Dr Williams claims that ‘choice’ in such a matter merely boils down to a question of ‘who can more successfully defend their interest against others’. But so does removal of choice. This is a philosopher-king argument which Plato would have keenly applauded. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All this is an excellent omen. Dr Williams adds virtually nothing to a debate which has been going on for millennia. This is precisely what any respectable religious organisation deriving its authority from an ancient, sole source of truth should expect of its leaders. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>17th August</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Tom Stoppard has written a trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, and the critics are reeling with amazement that the National can put on a nine-hour marathon, lasting all day, involving 30 actors playing 70 roles. Ancient Greeks would have been even more surprised: what other way was there to stage plays? And 30 actors for a mere 70 parts would have seemed to them ludicrously luxurious. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Greek tragedies were staged as trilogies, and lasted all day. The number of actors allowed was strictly limited: it eventually became three. It is not possible to be absolutely certain how parts were distributed among the actors, but in the sole surviving complete trilogy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the three actors were needed to cover Clytaemnestra, Agamemnon, Cassandra, Aegisthus, a watchman, messenger and herald in Agamemnon; Orestes, Electra, Clytaemnestra, Pylades, Aegisthus, nurse and servant in Choephori; and Orestes, Apollo, Athena, priestess at Delphi and ghost of Clytaemnestra in Eumenides — 19 parts in all. It is hard to say whether that would have been seen as a light or heavy load. Euripides’ Phoenician Women on its own demands that the three actors cover 11 parts (Jocasta, Antigone, Teiresias, pedagogue, Polyneices, Creon, Eteocles, Menoeceus, two messengers and Oedipus), as does Euripides’ Rhesus (Hector, Odysseus, Alexander, Aeneas, Rhesus, Athena, Muse, Dolon, shepherd, Diomedes and charioteer). We do not know what demands the other plays in the trilogies may have made, but it is possible to see that three actors may on occasions have had to cover more than 30 roles between them in the course of a day. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And what diverse roles they were. In Sophocles’ Women from Trachis, it is likely that one actor played the two big parts — both the mighty muscleman Heracles and his jealous wife Deianeira; in Antigone, one actor probably played both Antigone and her fiancé Haemon, and if the part of Creon absorbed the energies of one other actor, it is not impossible that the poor old third actor had to feature as Antigone’s sister Ismene, a guard, a messenger, the blind prophet Teiresias and Creon’s wife Eurydice. In some plays, it is impossible to distribute the parts among three actors without two different actors playing the same role at different times.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Not to mention the fact that the trilogy was then rounded off with a fourth, so-called ‘satyr’ play. So ’appen, lad, it’s a grand life at t’ National, in’t it?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Two American film companies are evidently racing neck-and-neck to bring out a film about the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, and the word on the street is that one of the companies is proposing to cast a fashionable black actor in the lead. That’s the stuff, boys. Africa! Cuddly Blacks v. Wicked Anglo-Saxon Romans! Great box-office! The truth is somewhat less, um, Hollywood. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">To generalise, black Africans (the so-called Negroid type) in the ancient world lived south of the Sahara: to the east, that meant south of Aswan, and to the west, southern Morocco. Blacks, it seems, did not inhabit the coastline of north Africa — at any rate, when the Greeks and later the Romans established themselves there, they did not talk of the local inhabitants as Negroid in type. That was a description they reserved for Africans from elsewhere. This is not to say that there was no contact between black Africans and people further north. Egyptians, for example, were in contact with them from the third millennium bc. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But whoever the indigenous inhabitants of north Africa were, they first met the people we know as Carthaginians in the eighth century bc. It was then that Qart Hadahst, ‘New Town’ (later latinised into Carthago), was established near modern Tunis by the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were a Semitic people from along the coast of Lebanon/Syria. Expert traders, they established way-stations along the Mediterranean in their search for markets and metals. From such beginnings the powerful independent state of Carthage arose. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Hannibal (246–183 bc) was a member of Carthage’s ruling elite, the Barca family, which could trace its origins back to Carthage’s first ruler, Queen Dido. His name is the latinised form of Chenu Baal, ‘grace of Baal’, that Old Testament god who gave the Israelites such problems. So whatever racial mixing may have subsequently taken place after the Carthaginian arrival in north Africa, Hannibal was not a black African. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But he was a quite brilliant general. It was his leadership qualities and capacity to manoeuvre the enemy into the position he wanted that made him so formidable. Hitting the inflexible Roman legions from the side was a speciality. As a result, he came within an ace of defeating Rome in the second Punic War (218–202 bc). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It all makes for a great story, but if the Americans really want to go for authenticity, they should cast a Semite from Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria or even Palestine in the lead. Ah! Not such good box-office.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>24th August</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">‘Anger-management consultants’ have been appearing all over the papers in the past few weeks discussing how the footballer Roy Keane might learn to control his foul temper. The papers could have saved the cost of their predictable services by reprinting selected chunks from Seneca (4 bc–ad 65) De Ira, ‘On Anger’, and Plutarch (ad 46– 120) Peri Aorgêsias, ‘On Negation of Anger’, and following up with Aristotle’s view that anger was an excellent thing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Seneca gives a fine picture of the angry man: devoid of self-control, forgetful of decency, unmindful of loyalties, deaf to reason and advice, excited by trivialities, incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, he wears a bold and threatening look and a fierce expression; his eyes blaze and sparkle, his whole face is crimson with blood, his lips quiver, his teeth are clenched, his joints crack with writhing (when, in the delightful Keane’s case, he is not cracking other people’s), he groans and bellows, and so on. After which Seneca launches into a lengthy moral diatribe against anger in any of its forms.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Plutarch, meanwhile, couches his treatise in the shape of an account by the notoriously irascible Roman Fundanus of how he finally beat the bug. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was a long exercise in behaviour therapy: first, observing how unhinged people looked when they became angry and seeing how ineffective anger was as a means of achieving anything; and second, identifying the causes of it, usually in the belief that one is being slighted or ignored. As a result of this analysis, Fundanus adopts patterns of belief and behaviour which help him to avoid situations in which anger can bubble up.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At which point, enter Aristotle (384–322 bc). He will have none of this. For him anger was just another natural human ‘passion’ of which one can have too much or too little. The irascible man will fly off the handle at nothing or, even worse, suppress his anger and keep it warm over years, ruining his life in the process; the ‘angerless’ man, however, will not get angry at, for instance, injustice or wrongs done to his friends, and be equally miserable. One must learn to be angry for the right reasons, against the right people, in the right way, at the right time.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The first word of Western literature (Homer’s Iliad) is ‘anger’. Tragedy and satire (‘indignatio makes my poetry’, says Juvenal) depend on it; so do the minor prophets and that arch-exponent, the God of the Old Testament. Aristotle, as usual, was right. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>31st August</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">As the USA considers its impending assault on Iraq, von Rumsfeld would do well to ponder Thucydides’ Melian debate. Athens was at war with Sparta, and in 416 bc decided to attack the island of Melos, which was populated by colonists from Sparta but, unlike the other islanders, had remained strictly neutral in the war, helping neither side. Before Athens did so, however, it sent a deputation, and the contemporary historian Thucydides records the ensuing debate: </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Melians: Such is your state of mind, it is clear that the result of the discussions will be either war or our own enslavement by you. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Athenians: There will be no point in continuing with these talks if you are simply going to speculate about the future and not face up to the real issue, i.e. how you can save your city from destruction. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Melians: We get the point. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Athenians: We are not going to say we have any right to control this part of the world; nor will it do you any good to say that you have remained neutral. The point, as you well know, is that when these matters are discussed by practical people, right is in question only between those who are equal in power, and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept whatever they have to accept. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Melians: But there is a principle at stake of common interest to all, that of fair play and just dealing. This affects you as much as anyone, since your fall would be accompanied by the most terrible vengeance, an example to the world. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Athenians: It is a risk we are prepared to take. Now: for or against? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Melians: We could not, we suppose, remain neutral. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Athenians: Certainly not. That would be a sign of weakness in us. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Melians: But will that not make enemies of all the states that are presently neutral, who will immediately assume that you will attack them too? Thus you will strengthen the enemies you have already and force others, against their inclinations, to turn against you. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Athenians: We are not worried about them. Gods, we believe, and men, we know, by a necessary law of nature rule wherever they can. We did not make this law. It existed before us, and will exist when we are gone. We merely act in accordance with it, knowing that anyone else in our position would do exactly the same. Think about it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It may not give von Rumsfeld any sleepless nights, but friends of America could toss and turn a bit. </div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-44463776064825544412010-04-07T10:34:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:36:51.891-07:00A&M: 2002 July<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>6th July 2002</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the Austrian Grand Prix last month, the Ferrari driver Rubens Barrichello was ordered to pull over and let his world champion team- mate Michael Schumacher win. This caused outrage among the sporting public, and Ferrari have been fined — but for the antics that went on at the winner’s podium after the race, not for their orders to Barrichello to pull over. Ancient Greeks would have applauded the decision. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Since the Greeks’ desire to win at everything was intense, their athletes were professionals. Games were put on all over the Greek world, and prize money and appearance money, though not available at the Olympics, made the periodos, ‘circuit’, as it was called, very lucrative for the top performers. Such athletes were sponsored by their families if they were wealthy, by their cities if they were not, and top trainers were eagerly sought. When an individual won, it was he who got the glory, and the celebrations might well include a song composed for him by a poet who specialised in victory odes, such as Pindar (c. 518–440 bc). His surviving odes celebrate clients over the full range of events — boxing, wrestling, running, the pankration, horse-racing and so on — and, where individuals were concerned, Pindar was eloquent about their skills. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Equine events, however, were different. They required phenomenal outlay — horses, stables, chariots, etc. — and were therefore the domain only of the rich and successful. As a result, chariot victories carried by far the greatest prestige of all. Indeed, Alcibiades thought it politically advantageous to boast of once having entered seven chariots, more than anyone else, and coming first, second and fourth. The crucial point, however, is that the winner who was celebrated by Pindar was not the jockey or chariot-driver, but the owner. Winning was down to the horses. The jockey/driver was merely a technician. He did what he was told — or was out of a job. We even hear of a horse, Breeze, that threw its rider at the start but still won in superb style and was duly given the prize. As a result, Pindar’s odes for equestrian victors concentrated not on the jockey/rider’s skill but on the glory the owner had gained, his great wealth, and his willingness to spend it on a good cause. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was the owner who made horse-racing possible. It was the owner, therefore, who ran the show and took the credit. The same is true of Formula One. The drivers, sitting behind their little wheels going brrm brrm, may be brave and brilliant technicians, but that is all they are. In relation to the owners, they know their place. Nowhere. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>13th July</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The territorial fence which the Israelis are building is structurally and functionally a dead ringer for Hadrian’s Wall (started ad 122). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Hadrian’s Wall was about 14 feet high, the Israeli fence about 11 feet. The Wall discouraged approaches from the barbarian side with a 10-feet- deep V-shaped ditch about 20 feet from the Wall; men trapped there would be in easy throwing range. The Israelis are placing razor wire on the Palestinian side. On the Wall’s Roman side, the first construction was a military communications road, running its whole length; so, too, with the Israelis. Behind that the Romans constructed another V-shaped ditch running the length of the Wall, about 10 feet deep and 20 feet wide at the top; and on both sides of that ditch they built turf mounds 6 feet high and 20 feet wide. Behind the Israeli military road, running the length of their fence, is a 24-feet-wide stretch of razor wire, and behind that a steep anti-vehicle ditch. Finally, both Hadrian’s Wall and the Israeli fence have look-out positions and heavily controlled crossing-points. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The name of the game on both sides is separation, definition, defence and control. The first purpose of Hadrian’s Wall (as our only source to mention it says) was to ‘separate Romans from barbarians’, especially the warring tribes of northern Britain (the Brigantes) from those of southern Scotland. From now on, there should be no more trouble there. But in building a wall to achieve that end the Romans were also announcing that, effectively, in northern Britain their empire finished here. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Wall brought to an end a difficult situation in which boundaries were fluid and ill-defined. Everyone now knew what was Roman empire and what was not. The Romans were back in control, able to supervise movements north and south of the Wall, prevent petty raiding and hinder large-scale attacks, and so encourage peaceful development of Britain right up to that frontier. This explains the extensive ditch-plus-turf-mound complex on the Roman side of the Wall: the whole area immediately behind the Wall was designed to be a Roman military zone, under army control, where civilian and other access was strictly forbidden — except at the controlled crossing-points. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mutate the mutanda, and you have the Israeli situation in a nutshell, the single, absolutely critical difference being that it made little odds to the Romans where they drew their line. The Israeli fence, in other words, signals the beginning of the end of the Israel–Palestine territorial conflict.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>27th July</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr Paul Kelleher, who demonstrated his free-thinking credentials by knocking the head off a statue of Lady Thatcher in the Guildhall Art Gallery in London, will never know how close an escape he had. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the course of his 22-year career as a boxer and pancratiast, Theagenes from the Greek island of Thasos (c. 480 bc) is said to have won more than 1,300 victories in the various games held in Greek cities around the Mediterranean, even including one as a long-distance runner. However unlikely this is, he was clearly some athlete; and the Greek travel writer Pausanias (c. ad 170), writing up a guided tour of Olympia, tells us that when Theagenes died the people of Thasos proudly erected a bronze statue of the great man in their town. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Theagenes, however, had made his enemies, and one of them took to coming every night and flogging the statue, as if he were flogging Theagenes himself. The statue, presumably tiring of this abuse, put an end to it by falling on him and killing him, at which the sons of the dead man prosecuted the statue for murder. After due process the statue was found guilty, and, in accordance with a law that inflicted exile even on inanimate objects if they happened to kill someone, the statue was taken out to sea and dumped. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Next year, however, the crops failed, and when the Thasians sent to Delphi to find out what they should do about it, the oracle instructed them to bring back their exiles. This they did, but the famine continued. So they sent again, and the priestess replied, ‘You have forgotten your great Theagenes.’ This put the Thasians in a very difficult position, since they had no idea where the statue had been dumped or how to locate it, but fortunately some fisherman accidentally netted it and brought it in. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Thasians immediately re-erected it in its original position and, as Pausanias tells us, ‘sacrifice regularly to it as to a god’ — some 650 years after it was hauled out of the sea and restored to its plinth. Pausanias goes on to say that there are many other places he knows of, both Greek and non-Greek, where images of Theagenes have been set up to receive honours from the locals and obligingly cure diseases in return. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr Kelleher probably got away with it because Lady Thatcher is still alive and therefore, in theory, able to exact her own retribution. But he would be unwise to try the trick again. It would be so distressing for a free-thinker to know that he might have enshrined her cult for the next half a millennium. </div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-88934725421632350802010-04-07T10:31:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:34:37.682-07:00A&M: 2002 June<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>1st June 2002</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Those who normally enjoy games often feel nothing but distaste for monstrous international foulathons such as Formula One racing and the impending World Cup. Many ancients felt the same about the Olympic Games. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The theory of the Games was noble: the poet Pindar (5th century bc) painted winners as people who epitomised the connection between physical prowess, moral virtue and success (but then he was under commission). Anti-Games sentiment is surprisingly early. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Olympic Games were founded in 776 bc, and by 630 bc the Spartan war-poet Tyrtaeus was already arguing that a man was worth remembering only for valour in war, not in games. A century later Xenophanes claimed that ‘a noble boxer will never order the city better or fill her granaries’. Aristotle (4th century bc) commented, ‘The athlete’s physical condition is useless for civic life in general, and does not encourage ordinary health or the procreation of children.’ The satirist Lucian (2nd century ad) imagines a dialogue between the Greek philosopher Solon and the non-Greek Anacharsis, in which Solon extols the athletes’ ‘courage and beauty, marvellous condition, skill, strength and enterprise’, and suggests that such men would become ‘good guardians of our country and bulwarks of our freedom’. Anacharsis wittily replies that if someone were to wave a knife at them, they would (as it were) run a mile. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The debate going on here is the question of the value to society of the success of the individual on the athletics field. It was easy to view the Games in the first place as a sort of training for war, but that fiction could not be maintained for long. It was easy to see in a brilliant individual performance an ideal that all should strive for, but the desire to come out on top at all costs (Greeks were highly competitive) was of limited value when it applied only to something as trivial as the games field, and could become downright destructive if turned into a principle on which society itself should be constructed. For example, athletes had to train at Olympia for a month before the Games. During that time they assessed the opposition and, if they knew they could not win, withdrew. Examples survive of those — particularly in contact sports — who won the Olympic crown akoniti, ‘without dust’, i.e., without a single fight; their opponents had taken one look and quietly sloped off. What sort of model was that? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">An excellent one, come to think of it. Let the mockery and vilification of these foul professionals begin.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>8th June</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The world heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis believes that women weaken a boxer, and therefore avoids sex for three weeks before a big fight. The theory is a hoary one.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was based in the ancient world on the idea that semen was a vital factor in keeping a man strong. The doctor Aretaeus (1st century ad) says, ‘If any man is in possession of semen, he is fierce, courageous and physically mighty, like beasts. Evidence for this is to be found in athletes who practise abstinence.’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even involuntary nocturnal emissions were thought to be enfeebling, threatening one’s endurance and breathing. The thinker Philostratus (3rd century ad) says in his Gumnastikos that those who have had one ‘should take exercise carefully and build up their strength more than usual, since they now have a deficit in their system ...their workouts should be easy to do but spread out over a longer period of time, so that their lungs may be exercised’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Prevention, however, is better than cure, and the doctor Galen (2nd century ad) recommends that athletes take precautions against them: ‘A flattened lead plate is an object to be placed under the muscles of the loins of an athlete in training, chilling them whenever they might have nocturnal emissions of semen.’ But if sex before exercise was regarded as potentially deleterious to health, exercise before sex was strongly recommended, especially foot-races and horse-riding. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many stories are told of heroic feats of abstinence from athletes bent only on sporting glory. The notoriously irresistible hetaira Lais is said to have fallen madly in love with one Aristotle from Cyrene (not the Aristotle). He was having none of it, but promised to take her back with him to Cyrene if he enjoyed any success at the games. After he swept the board, he kept his promise — by having a realistic statue made of her and sending that back.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some athletes refused to tolerate even the mention of sex in their presence, walking out of the room when the conversation turned that way. The pancratiast Cleitomachus is said to have averted his gaze when he saw two dogs mating. Even so, in the homo-erotic atmosphere of the gymnasium, the naked athletes were aware of the temptations. Infibulation, tying up the foreskin, seems to have been practised in an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of overexcitement in the heat of the moment. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Lennox may have his problems with Mike Tyson this week, but one cannot quite believe that this will be one of them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>15th June</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">In contradiction to the linear theory of time — i.e., that the universe started with a Big Bang about 15 million years ago — two leading cosmologists have proposed that the cosmos in fact undergoes cycles of expansion and contraction, so that it endlessly dies and rises from the ashes. It is good to know that modern science has finally caught up with the ancient atomists. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The belief that matter consisted basically of indivisible ‘atoms’ below the level of perception, whose combination in various forms produced the world we see about us, was developed in Athens in the 5th century bc by Democritus and Leucippus. The crucial point they established (to their own satisfaction) was that the universe must consist of an infinite number of atoms in an endless extent of emptiness (‘the void’). Under those circumstances, they argued, the idea of a single world-system — our world — was an absurdity. There must be an innumerable, possibly even infinite, number of them. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">An account of their beliefs on this matter survives. It reads:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There are innumerable cosmoses differing in size. In some there is no sun or moon, in others they are larger than with us, in others more numerous. The intervals between the cosmoses are unequal; in some places there are more, in others fewer; some are growing, others are fully grown, others again are dying; somewhere worlds are coming into being, elsewhere fading. And they are destroyed when they collide with each other. Some cosmoses have no living creatures or plants, and no water at all.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Modern science in fact acknowledges ancient theories by taking over the Stoic term ‘ekpyrotic’ to describe this sort of universe, in which successive cosmoses are generated one after the other on the same pattern, each one culminating in an ekpurôsis (‘burn-out’) which lays the foundation for the next. Stoics looked for physical signs that this process was about to reach its climax. One such they observed was global warming, as evinced by, e.g., the drying up of swamps and wetlands. The Latin poet Lucretius (1st century bc) thought that the increasing infertility of the earth also pointed in the same direction, showing that ‘everything is gradually decaying and on course for shipwreck, worn out by the long years of its old age’.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But if theories come and go, rather like the ekpyrotic universe, the questions stay the same: e.g. (as the ancients wondered), is change of this sort mechanistic, or is there a Grand Design? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>22nd June</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The mathematician Stephen Hawking wants engraved on his tombstone not an epitaph but a formula relating to his work on black holes. He is not the first to have thought in this way. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The epitaph is the origin of the literary genre that we know as the epigram (Greek epi-gramma, ‘something written on [some material e.g. stone]’; Latin inscriptio). The earliest epitaphs convey essential information in usually no more than four lines, but by the 6th century bc more ambitious attempts are being made to elicit the sympathy of the reader (‘You who go on your way with your mind on other things,/Stop and feel sorrow beside Thrason’s memorial here’). By the 5th century considerable artistic skill is being shown, most famously in the epitaph to those who died at Thermopylae (‘Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here/ We lie, obeying their instructions’). In the 4th century these epitaphs and dedications were collected and assigned to authors (with little justification, since such inscriptions were in principle anonymous), and this opened the way for the composition of purely literary epigrams, on any topic. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">To Hawking, then. The Syracusan Archimedes (287–211 bc), the greatest mathematician of antiquity, was killed by a Roman soldier during the sack of the city; he was drawing in the sand, working on a problem involving circles, and had told the soldier not to disturb him. But he had already asked for his tomb to be set with a cylinder circumscribing a sphere, to celebrate his discovery that a sphere contained within a cylinder will always have an area two-thirds that of the cylinder. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When Cicero was serving on the Roman governor’s staff in Sicily in 75 bc, he decided to try to find Archimedes’ grave. Cicero says that he had remembered some verses written on the tomb claiming that it was decorated with a sphere + cylinder on top, and recounts how he set out to look for it. It was not easy, since the graveyard was large and overgrown, but eventually he spotted in the distance a column with the monument on top, and sent slaves with sickles to clear the path to it. ‘When a passage had been cleared, we approached the pedestal in front of us. The epigram could be traced, though only about half the lines were legible, the latter portion being worn away.’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Cicero tells this charming story while contrasting the misery of the tyrant’s life with the pleasures available to those engaged in research — Professor Hawking’s sentiments precisely, no doubt. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>29th June</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">It has been claimed that beards are now back in fashion. Pogonic fashion certainly changed in the ancient world. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For the most part, beards were de rigueur; the difficulty of shaving saw to that. No one shaved himself — the iron instruments were far too crude — and only water (not soap or oil) was used. So it required care and time to ensure a safe, clean shave. The Roman emperor Augustus took work to the barber’s. The satirist Martial claimed that the barber Eutrapelus was so slow that a second beard had grown by the time he had cut the first. Some people preferred depilation to shaving. We hear of men rubbing their faces with various sorts of pastes and resins, including ass’s fat, bat’s blood and powdered viper. Cutting the first beard was a rite of passage, signalling the change from youth to maturity. Nero deposited his first beard in a golden casket and offered it to Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alexander the Great (died 323 bc) was the first great trendsetter. He went clean-shaven, and Greeks promptly followed suit. About 200 bc Romans did the same, probably to differentiate themselves from other ‘barbarians’ and show how ‘Greek’ and therefore how cultured and civilised they were. Pliny the Elder says that Scipio Africanus (236–183 bc) was the first Roman to shave clean. The thick beard now became the mark of Greek philosophers and other ‘rebels’ — to impress on the common people how different and superior they were. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The razor swung back, however, with the Roman emperor Hadrian (ruled ad 117–138). He returned the beard to fashion, perhaps to hide an ugly scar, or because he thought it made him look more attractive, or perhaps just to avoid the daily agony of shaving. But the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine (died ad 337), reverted to the clean-shaven look, and beards went out of fashion again. Julian, the last pagan Roman emperor (died ad 363), was having none of that, however, and the good, honest pagan philosopher’s beard made its comeback. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mere fashion, however, will not keep beardies ahead of the game. The Greek doctor Galen (2nd century ad) holds the key. He argued that beards were good for you, helping to drain off the ill-effects of the exhalations from ‘humours’ that built up inside males (males being very hot, unlike females). If it could also be shown that beards were ‘green’ and had a beneficial effect on the environment by, e.g., plugging holes in the ozone layer, the case would be unanswerable. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-27549281647750075292010-04-07T10:30:00.000-07:002010-04-07T10:31:13.790-07:00A&M: 2002 May<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>11th May 2002</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">There are some problems that can be solved just by throwing money at them (e.g., an overdraft) but there is no indication that the NHS is one of those. Since socialists, however, take it as an article of faith that injections of money — or is it just the removal of money? — will solve everything, Gordon Brown was not about to attempt an argument on the matter in his Budget speech. If he had done, it is unlikely that he would have considered how far patients are as responsible for their cures as doctors. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the ancient Greek treatise On the Art (sc. ‘of medicine’), there is a powerful passage in which the writer complains about the way in which it is always the doctor’s fault if things go wrong, and never the patient’s, ‘as if it is possible for doctors to give wrong instructions, but not possible for the sick to disobey their orders’. ‘Hippocrates’ — his name is attached to nearly all ancient Greek medical treatises — goes on to point out that it is far more likely that the sick are incapable of carrying out instructions than that the doctor will give bad advice. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The reason is that ‘the doctor comes to a case healthy in body and mind; he assesses the present circumstances as well as past cases that were similarly disposed, so that he is able to say how treatment leads to cures’. But, he goes on, patients receive their orders not knowing what they are suffering from, or why they are suffering it, or what is likely to happen next. So, he argues, which is the more likely? ‘That people in such a condition will carry out the doctor’s orders, or do something quite different from what they are told — or that doctors give the wrong orders? Is it not far more likely that the doctors give proper orders but the patients probably are unable to obey them and, by not obeying them, incur their deaths — for which those who do not reason correctly ascribe the blame to the innocent while letting the guilty go free?’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Not all Greek doctors were quite so staggeringly assured of their own abilities. There are treatises in which we read of doctors admitting that they have made mistakes and that medicine is an inexact science. As one doctor points out, ‘Those things also give good instruction which after trial show themselves to be failures and show why they failed.’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is, of course, rhetorical advantage for the doctor in showing both confidence and caution. But however the doctor performs, that still leaves the problem of the patient. Not that that will worry Gordon. He, after all, possesses the sovereign remedy for everything — throwing more money at it.</div><div><br /></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-45573496516229043162010-04-07T09:18:00.000-07:002010-04-07T09:21:37.555-07:00A&M: 2002 April<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>6th April 2002</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">An Oscar-winning film about the Nobel-Prize mathematician John Nash (A Beautiful Mind) concentrates on his really important achievements, i.e. falling in love and going potty. Plato (429–347 bc) would have thoroughly approved of the whole package.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Maths, beauty, erôs and madness lie at the root of Plato’s thought. ‘Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness,’ says Plato’s mouthpiece Socrates in Phaedrus, ‘provided it is given as a gift from the gods.’ Socrates goes on to define four types of divine madness: prophetic (given by Apollo), ritual (by Dionysus), poetic (by the Muses) and erotic (by Aphrodite). But, as Plato explains in his Symposium, it is the erotic that is the most important blessing of all. For erôs is driven by love for something, and in this case it is love for the beautiful — male or female, in the first instance. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Fulfilling that experience itself gives man his first taste of the transcendent, and inspires in his soul a longing for something beyond the earthly; indeed, it encourages him in the search, since erôs leads to physical procreation and thus immortality through one’s children, or, in same-sex relationships, spiritual procreation, producing immortal thoughts. This engenders a growing desire for yet closer union with immortality, which will take him beyond the physical world into an abstract world of ultimate, unchanging reality, the model for which is maths.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Plato saw in maths the only example of the infallible in this all too fallible world: its laws seemed to him eternal and immutable. In his Republic, Plato points out that geometricians may illustrate what they are trying to prove with circles and squares, yet it is not the actual drawings which they are really talking about but rather the invisible absolutes they represent: the physical is being used as an aid to understanding something eternal and unchanging that lies beyond it. So with this whole world: what exists on earth is but a pale reflection of a perfect reality to which we must aspire. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As a result, Plato argued, Out There Somewhere exist the perfect exemplars of everything we know on earth, from Tables to Beauty, from Piety to Justice. But even these do not exist as ultimates: above them all there is one controlling master principle, reigning supreme — the Good. It is there that man’s search ends. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alas for Plato, none of this rubbed off on the film or its loutish star. But then the film did concentrate only on erôs and madness; and anyway films are about as far from reality as one can get. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>13th April</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">One of the Israeli soldiers surrounding the Palestinian gunmen claiming asylum in the (exquisite paradox) church of Christ’s nativity in Bethlehem said that they would not ‘attack’ it ‘because it is a holy place’; and besides, it was only when the gunmen got outside that they became a danger. An ancient Greek could not have put it better. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">‘Asylum’ comes from the Greek asulia meaning ‘freedom from seizure’, and was associated with the rights of those seeking sanctuary at a shrine of the gods. A useful parallel is with children’s games like ‘tag’, where participants can put themselves ‘out of bounds’ by, e.g., holding on to something. The idea of asylum was that anyone inside or in contact with the sacred area was inviolable; it dishonoured the gods of the place to remove them from it by force. But rules are there to be, if not broken, at least bent. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In about 630 bc the Athenian Cylon attempted a coup. He failed, and he and his supporters took refuge on the Acropolis. There the Athenians laid siege to them and, when their food and water had run out, a number of them claimed asylum at the altar outside the Temple of Athena. When the Athenians saw this, they persuaded them to leave the altar of their own free will, on the understanding that they would not be harmed. Cylon’s supporters agreed, were taken away and promptly put to death. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We are also told that some of Cylon’s men tied a cord to the goddess’s altar and held on to it as they were led away. This, technically, kept them in contact with the altar and maintained their inviolability. But the cord broke, and the Athenians interpreted this as a sign that Athena had abandoned them. Clever, but not clever enough: the spirit of the rules had been broken, and the perpetrators were put under a curse. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Another tactic was tried with the Spartan general Pausanias. In 470 bc he fled into a temple to avoid prosecution. The Spartans walled him up inside so that he could not escape and simply left him there. Aware, however, that the temple would be polluted if he died in it, they brought him out just before he expired. It was another nice try, but again the technicality got them nowhere, and a curse was laid on the guilty. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The ‘games-playing’ element in all this is strong. The besiegers seem to hold all the cards, but the asylum-seekers hold the one big one — the threat of divine wrath. Can the besiegers bend the rules so as not to incur it? In an age which does not believe in divine wrath, the end-game in Bethlehem, if there is one, will be most instructive. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>20th April</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">David Triesman, New Labour’s general secretary, is complaining that the BBC’s Today programme not only insists on asking all sorts of ‘howwid’, hard questions, but also expects answers! Diddums! He can be thankful that Labour has only the repetitive old hacks of the Today programme to deal with, and not Tacitus or Suetonius.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Under the Roman republican system, politics were, broadly, ‘open’. All decisions were taken by the Senate, which consisted of elected executives like consuls and praetors who were serving, or had served, their time in office; and new laws had to be approved by the people before they came into effect. Under the principate, however, everything changed. The first princeps (‘main man’), Augustus (emperor 27 bc to ad 14), gradually drew the reins of power into his own hands. He and his closed consilium of advisers in the imperial palace made all the decisions, and the senatorial system declined into a sideshow. Augustus’ death proves the point. When the Senate was voting his successor Tiberius the powers to control the empire, Tiberius said that he was not sure he could control all of it, but would do his best with what he was given. ‘Then what would you like to be given?’ Asinius Gallus jokily asked. He could not have made clearer who was in charge now.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The consequence of this closed system was that historians of the empire were faced with an impossible task: how on earth could they write history when they had no idea what was going on? The result was the sort of history that one finds in Tacitus (ad 56–120) and Suetonius (ad 70–130), rich in intrigue, rumour, scandal and gossip. Did you know that, even in old age, Augustus had a passion for deflowering young girls, collected for him by his wife? That Caligula committed incest with each of his three sisters in turn? That Claudius planned to legitimise farting at table? That Nero would prowl the streets at night, stabbing people and throwing them into the sewers? That Galba introduced tightrope-walking elephants? That Vitellius never feasted out for less than 4,000 gold pieces? That Domitian was such a good archer that from a distance he could shoot arrows between the splayed fingers of his slaves? Read Suetonius. It is all there. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, Mr Triesman could ask Mr Blair and his closed consilium of advisers if they might deign to become a little more open and accountable. Then the Today programme would have nothing to sink its gums into. Now, did you know that Campbell...? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>27th April</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Israel blitzes Palestinian territory while America tries to get a stranglehold on al-Qa'eda's mountain hideouts. Both can claim 'victory', but an enemy must (in a sense) agree that it has been defeated before real victory has been gained - as Hannibal discovered.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The First Punic War (264-241 BC) was fought over Sicily. Carthage failed to exploit its superiority at sea and when it sued for peace, Rome turned Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica into its first provinces (the Roman empire starts here). Carthage shifted its overseas power-base to Spain, and in 218 BC the Second Punic War began when Hannibal launched a daring attack on Rome, marching his army and elephants over the Rhone, across the Alps and down into northern Italy. Hannibal was banking on his tough, experienced army; his own brilliantly innovative generalship; and (the great imponderable) his ability to win Italians to his cause. He made a terrifying start, crushing the Roman army at Trebia (218 BC), Trasimene (217 BC) and, most devastatingly of all, further south at Cannae (216 BC). After such victories, he had every reason to expect Rome to surrender. But the Romans did not agree that they had been defeated, and poured money and manpower into proving it. They learned from experience, observing how Hannibal lured the enemy into fighting on terrain advantageous to himself and liked to hit the legions from the side rather than head-on. They saw that the way to deal with him was to harry and worry him, not confront him; and to take the war to Spain and Africa too. Further, they took ruthless reprisals against Italians who defected. As a result, Italy did not rise against Rome. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In a war of attrition on enemy soil, an unsupported Hannibal could not win, for all the victories and devastation. When Carthage did finally get reinforcements through, they were defeated at Metaurus in 207 BC before they could link up. In 203 BC, claiming to have killed 300,000 Romans and sacked 400 towns, Hannibal reluctantly returned to north Africa, where he was defeated by Scipio at Zama in 202 BC. After Cannae, with 50,000 Roman corpses covering a few square miles of open plain, Hannibal's cavalry leader Maharbal said to him vincere scis, Hannibal, victoria uti nescis, 'You know how to gain a victory, Hannibal, but not how to use it'. The words should ring loud in American and Israeli ears if they are to persuade their enemies to agree that they have been defeated. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">Because if not... </div></div></div></div><div><br /></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-13630742558742304552010-04-07T09:14:00.000-07:002010-04-07T09:17:36.784-07:00A&M: 2002 March<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>9th March</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">An ancient Athenian witnessing the lying of government and its hangers-on over the Stephen Byers affair would have been no more or less surprised than any of us at the sight of someone trying to save his skin. What would have appalled them is the secrecy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 5th century bc Athens, the people in Assembly (all male citizens over 18) were sovereign. They took all the decisions that MPs take today, and then handed matters over to their public officials to see through. These public officials were appointed for one year, most of them by lot (voting, of course, is not democratic but meritocratic). In order to discourage incompetents from putting their names forward — it would obviously be disastrous if the system resulted in someone like Stephen Byers coming out of the hat — they held their public officials fully accountable, both for what they did in the people’s name and how they handled their budgets. This, the theory went, would prevent anyone applying for office for the sheer hell of it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So when an official entered office, the state at once had a lien on his property and civic freedom. Regularly throughout his term of office, the official had to come through a vote of confidence by the people in Assembly, and at the end his whole performance was reviewed. Within 30 days of laying down office, he had to present his financial records for audit, to be checked against documents in the state archive. If that was passed, he was then scrutinised on other matters, and any citizen could bring a charge against him for performing his functions detrimentally to an individual or the state. If he was found wanting, he could be fined, exiled or executed. As the orator Demosthenes said, a top military official was more likely to die at the hands of the people than in battle. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No official was sacrosanct. Pericles was often slow to submit his accounts, and in 443 bc suspicions were raised over a vast ten-talent sum eis to deon, ‘to requirements’, from some years earlier. He was not appointed to office for that year. In 430 he was tried for some dodgy dealing, fined and deposed from office. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When the people are sovereign, there is no messing. But parliamentary oligarchs? Forget it. From Jo Moore’s pay-off to the role of the British ambassador to Romania in the Mittal affair, all is shrouded in secrecy. The fact that these brutes work in the public domain and we pay for them is not of the slightest concern. The people have no right to know, and that’s how it’s gonna stay. OK?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>16th March</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some disquiet has recently been expressed about the Today programme’s ‘Thought for the Day’. In a slot ideal for a persuasive Christian homily — expounding a biblical text and applying it to the modern world —one feels that, on present form, Aesop’s Fables would serve the purpose better.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Greek historian Herodotus placed Aesop in the 6th century bc, as a slave of one Iadmon from Samos. Whatever the truth of that, the first collection of fables was made about 300 bc, and they have enjoyed a flourishing existence, in prose and verse, ever since. They generally feature a conflict between talking animals who stand for human types, usually the rich and powerful against the poor and weak. They stress either the folly of taking on a stronger power, or the cunning which the weaker must deploy if he is to stand any chance of success; and they often warn that nature never changes. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What makes them perfect for ‘Thought for the Day’ is that the moral is conveyed in a brief, usually amusing, story, which is rounded off with a pithy summarising punch line. Take the jackdaw and the pigeons. The jackdaw had noticed that pigeons in the nearby coop were well fed, so he coloured his feathers to look like theirs and joined them, taking care not to make any sound. At first the pigeons were fooled, but one day the jackdaw forgot where he was and let out his familiar cry. The pigeons promptly chased him off. Dejected, he returned to his fellow jackdaws, who promptly mistook him for a pigeon and also chased him off. Moral: be content with what you are. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Or what of the donkey and the fox? They became friends and, setting out to hunt, met a lion. Sensing danger, the fox said to the lion that he could have the donkey to eat if he left him (the fox) alone. The lion said that seemed very fair, so the fox led the donkey straight into a ditch. The lion, seeing that the donkey was his in any case, picked up the fox and threw him in too. Moral: if you set traps for your friends, you may find yourself caught in one as well. And then there is the tortoise who refused to come to Zeus’ party, arguing that there was no place like home. So Zeus angrily condemned him to carry his house with him wherever he went. Moral: many agree with the tortoise. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Aesop, in other words, was a sort of spiritual Rabbi Blue, though with rather more moral and intellectual depth. This raises the question of whether the BBC might not consider the Fables too demanding for the current slot. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>23rd March</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">As tribal warfare extends all over Afghanistan and the job of the peace- keepers becomes more and more impossible, the example of the late Roman empire in the West comes to mind.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Alaric, ruler of the Visigoths (ad 395–410), was born in the Danube region c. 365. In 394, he was recruited by the western Roman emperor Theodosius to take on the usurper Eugenius at the river Frigidus (north of Trieste). Eugenius was captured and executed, and Alaric demanded his reward. This was, after all, a matter of internal imperial politics, and Alaric had assumed he would be offered an appointment at the top of the Roman military hierarchy. But he was rejected. As a result, he took his career into his own hands and, backed by his powerful Gothic troops, set out to legitimise himself some other way.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For 15 years he and the Roman state engaged in a danse macabre. Stilicho, a Romanised Vandal and regent of the western Roman empire after Theodosius’ death, was unable to defeat him decisively, buy him off or recruit him — Stilicho seems to have wanted to use Alaric against the eastern half of the empire but never managed to clinch a deal. In 406 a massive barbarian invasion (not involving Alaric) swept across the Rhine, leaving Rome even more unstable. Stilicho was put to death, and Alaric upped the stakes. Twice he marched on Rome and was bought off; the third time in 410 the gates were opened and, for the first time in its 800 years, Rome was ransacked. Its fall shocked the civilised world. St Augustine composed his City of God to refute the notion that God must have turned his back on his people.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The point is that ‘barbarians’ had been coming into the Roman empire since the 3rd century ad, some peacefully, others by force. Like Stilicho, many were absorbed and thoroughly Romanised. The late Roman army, for example, was full of first- and second-generation German immigrants, and none the worse for it. But there were other barbarians who remained free agents, under their own leaders, and these could change sides, without warning, depending on the offers available. Alaric was one, and he caused mayhem — within the Roman empire itself.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The grim lesson for the West in Afghanistan today is that we are not even on home ground. Acculturation of the locals to Western ways is out of the question. Tribal leaders will, like Alaric, demand their money from the West and change sides at will. A not dishonourable, speedy exit is the West’s only hope. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>30th March</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">As Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat continue their murderous assault on each other’s people, an Aristophanic image comes strongly to mind. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In his comedy Peace (421 bc), Aristophanes introduces his hero, the little farmer Trygaeus. He is sick of the war between Athens and Sparta (the historian Thucydides’ ‘Peloponnesian War’), and rides a dung-beetle up to heaven to remonstrate with Zeus. On his arrival, Hermes explains to him that Zeus and almost all the other gods have abandoned Olympus; War has been installed in their place, and Peace buried deep in Hades. When Trygaeus demands to know why, Hermes replies that, whenever the gods tried to make peace, the Greeks preferred war: whichever side gained the smallest advantage immediately assumed they would win, and refused all terms. A great noise is heard and Hermes now departs, warning Trygaeus that War is about to appear with a huge mortar, in which he intends to pound the Greek states to pieces. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Enter, then, War: ‘Iô brotoi brotoi brotoi polutlêmones,’ he cries (‘Oho mortals, mortals, mortals, much-enduring [mortals]’), and proceeds to hurl cities, pro-Spartan and pro-Athenian alike, into the mortar: Prasiae, leek- city, Megara, garlic-city, Sicily, cheese-land, and Athens, honey-town. He then calls on his slave, SoundandFury, to fetch a pestle with which he can grind them to pulp. Get one from Athens, War tells him. SoundandFury reports back that Athens no longer has one. Well, says War, get one from Sparta. Back comes the report that Sparta has not got one either. ‘I’ll make my own, then,’ snarls War, and stumps off. But before War can return Trygaeus digs up Peace, and, with other attractive female deities, Fullfruit and Showtime, also in tow, returns to earth to celebrate the advent of peace, joy and plenty — Everyman’s triumph. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In 422 bc, a year before Peace was staged, Athens and Sparta had been fighting in northern Greece, around Amphipolis. In this battle the Athenian war-leader Cleon and the uncompromising Spartan general Brasidas had been killed, and, with them now gone, both sides had started to make tentative moves towards a settlement. These two are the ‘pestles’ to which War refers when he asks SoundandFury to fetch them. As a result of their removal, a truce had virtually been agreed when Peace was put on. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Meanwhile in Israel the terrible pounding, the pestles-and-mortar crushing and destroying, continue. What else are pestles for? What do pestles know of Fullfruit and Showtime? </div><div><br /></div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-50087507931378357772010-04-07T09:11:00.000-07:002010-04-07T09:13:55.244-07:00A&M:2002 February<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>2nd February</i></b></span><div><div>So Ivan Massow (chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts) thinks conceptual art is rubbish. Oh dear. According to Pliny the Elder (who died investigating the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79), one of the finest paintings in Rome was nothing but a few lines. </div><div><br /></div><div>According to Pliny, Apelles (fl. c. 330 bc) from the island of Cos ‘surpassed all painters before and after him’. He published volumes on the principles of painting and was modest enough to recognise excellence in others; indeed, he thought Protogenes his equal, except in one respect — that he (Apelles) ‘knew when to remove his hand from the picture’. He was never so busy that he did not find time every day to practise, by drawing a line. This became a proverb, ‘No day without a line’ (nulla dies sine linea). </div><div><br /></div><div>Protogenes lived in Rhodes (not far from Cos), and Apelles, who at the time knew his work only by reputation, decided to make a visit. He turned up at Protogenes’ studio to find the artist away, but saw that there was a large panel ready for painting, guarded by a single old woman. When the woman asked him who she should say had called, Apelles said, ‘Say it was this person’, took a brush, painted in colour a very fine line on the panel and left. </div><div><br /></div><div>When Protogenes returned, the old woman told him what had happened. Protogenes inspected the line and said it was Apelles who had come; no one else could have done that. He then took a brush and drew a yet finer line, in a different colour, on top of the first one, adding that if the visitor returned she was to show him the addition and tell him that this was the man he was after. And so it happened. Apelles returned and, ashamed to be worsted, took a brush in another colour and added a yet finer line on top of Protogenes’. When Protogenes saw it, he admitted defeat and decided that the panel should be handed down to posterity for the admiration of everyone, particularly artists. </div><div><br /></div><div>Pliny goes on to say that the panel found its way into Augustus’ palace on the Palatine in Rome and in ad 4 was destroyed by fire there — but not before ‘we had much admired it, containing as it did on its vast surface nothing but those elusive lines. Indeed, among the many other fine works of art there, it looked like a blank space; and that was what attracted attention and made it more esteemed than all other work.’ </div><div><br /></div><div>Anyone up to drawing a line or two for next year’s Turner? </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>9th February</i></b></span></div><div><div>Last week’s column described how, according to the Natural History of the Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder (ad 23–79), the famous 4th-century bc Greek artist Apelles offered a useful subject for next year’s Turner-prize entrants — three lines on a panel. Pliny himself could have gone on to recommend the virtue of unfinished paintings too, which ‘are held in greater esteem than finished works: for in these the sketch-lines remain and the actual thoughts of the artist are visible, and even as one is charmed by their excellence, there is sadness that the artist’s hand was stilled as he was working on the picture’. Much further thought there for the aspiring Turnerista. Remember, you read it here first. </div><div><br /></div><div>This week, however, Apelles has useful advice to offer that national figure of fun Lord Birt, who, having virtually destroyed the BBC, has now been asked by the Prime Minister to see, presumably, if he can make it two out of two with the railways, and rid the country of the problem once and for all. </div><div><br /></div><div>According to Pliny, Apelles rated the general public a better judge of his pictures than himself, and when one of his works had been put on display he would hide behind it in order to hear what the man on the Subura omnibus had to say. One day a shoemaker faulted a picture because, in drawing someone’s sandals, Apelles had put in a lace-hole too few. Apelles promptly corrected the error, and next day the shoemaker was thrilled to see that his remarks had been taken into account. Fancying himself a critic, he now proceeded to make fun of the leg; at which point Apelles peered out from behind the picture and said a shoemaker should not judge anything higher than a sandal — or, as we would put it, should stick to his last. </div><div><br /></div><div>Apelles took the same attitude even with Alexander the Great. Alexander frequently visited Apelles’ studio, having published an edict forbidding any other artist to paint his portrait. The problem was that he would bang on endlessly about painting when it was perfectly clear that he knew nothing about it whatsoever. Even though he was addressing Alexander the Great, who was known for the ferocity of his temper, Apelles gently advised him to drop the subject, saying that the boys who were grinding the colours were laughing at him. </div><div><br /></div><div>No, no, Lord Birt, no one (splutter) is laughing at you (snort), honestly. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>16th February</i></b></span></div><div><div>As the rail system disintegrates before our very eyes, it is some comfort to know that the Romans had the same problem. With them, it was the roads. </div><div><br /></div><div>Vegetius, a civil servant, composed the only surviving Latin treatise on war — his Epitome of Military Science (late 4th century ad). He asserts that ‘more dangers tend to arise on the march than in the battle itself ...so wherever the general intends to wage war, he should find out about the distances between places, the quality of the roads, the short-cuts, by-ways....’ </div><div><br /></div><div>Roman roads were originally planned with the military in mind, and were therefore built to provide a firm footing for legionaries to march along under all conditions. They were constructed on firm bases and surfaced with paving blocks of flint or basalt, secured by kerbstones. The poet Statius leaves us our only account of Roman road construction in a poem praising the emperor Domitian for building a short-cut along the Via Appia in ad 95, reducing travelling time from a whole day to two hours (beat that, Connex): trench; secure grounding; foundation material; paving-stone; kerbs — and all involving vast squadrons of workers. Designated public highways were constructed at state expense, sometimes with help from local landowners. Other roads were public-private partnerships, funded by a combination of state subsidy, imperial donation and local financing from townships and roadside inhabitants. </div><div><br /></div><div>But construction practices varied all over the empire, and while some roads lasted for hundreds of years, others required continual upkeep. Inscriptions, often on milestones, describe how so-and-so, usually at his own expense, repaired a road that had collapsed, subsided, broken up, been long neglected or badly constructed in the first place (ouch). The emperor Tiberius tried to persuade the people of Trebia to put into their roads money left to them to build a theatre (he failed). In the provinces, there was always a terrified scramble to repair the roads if the emperor was due to make a friendly visit. Upkeep of the roads for military use made heavy demands. In Macedonia, for example, we find Trajan (at war around the Danube) demanding that an important through-road be repaired to military standards, and the rich from a neighbouring city rallying round to help the locals bear the vast expense. </div><div><br /></div><div>All roads, of course, led to Rome: an expression of Rome’s control over the empire’s landscape and populace. Roads sped communication and cultural and economic exchange. But, like the railways, they did not come cheap. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>23rd February</i></b></span></div><div><div>The two main political parties have announced that they are jointly going to attack cynicism. So that’s the end of Prime Minister’s Question Time, then. More urgent, however, is the cynicism of the electorate. Or is it merely idealism?</div><div><br /></div><div>The inventor of the philosophy known as Cynicism, Diogenes (c. 410–320 bc), would certainly have said that he was an idealist. Admittedly, he and his followers were called Cynics because the Greek kyn- stem means ‘dog’, and dogs were renowned for their shamelessness, but shameless behaviour was simply part and parcel of Diogenes’ idealism. </div><div><br /></div><div>Diogenes took the view that true values and moral standards were to be found only in animals, primitive man, barbarians and the gods. These held the key to the ideally virtuous existence, and civilisation had wrecked it by imposing its own un-ideal conventions like marriage, family, politics, the city, all social, sexual and racial distinctions, reputation, wealth, power, authority, literature, music, and so on. </div><div><br /></div><div>As a result he tried to live, as he put it, ‘according to nature’. He learned to inure himself to all hardship, kept his possessions to the bare minimum and lived off water and vegetables, begging and stealing as necessary. He lived, not in a barrel or tub, but in a large clay jar used for storing wine. He performed all necessary functions in public — including masturbation and fornication. He taught anyone, anywhere, any time, being contemptuous of closed schools like Plato’s. Not that Diogenes had a consistently and fully worked out philosophy to offer — more a way of life. One of his claims was to be ‘a citizen of the cosmos’ — presumably because with his ‘philosophy’ he could live anywhere and get on with anyone. He certainly raised serious questions of the relationship between city-state institutions and ‘natural law’. </div><div><br /></div><div>What attracted people to Cynicism was its demand for absolute standards of moral integrity, whatever the implications. Even Plato saw something admirable in him (he called him ‘Socrates gone mad’). So did Alexander the Great. He once stood over Diogenes while he was sunning himself in his jar and said, ‘Ask me for anything you want.’ ‘Get out of my light’ came the reply. Alexander is then reported to have said that, had he not been Alexander, he would have liked to be Diogenes. </div><div><br /></div><div>Alexander was no fool. Nor is the British electorate. It is not to them that the MPs should look, but to themselves, for the cure for modern cynicism. </div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-55811899196139514382010-04-07T09:08:00.000-07:002010-04-07T09:11:03.991-07:00A&M: 2002 January<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>12th January</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many newspapers have recorded the sad demise of Europe’s oldest coinage, the drachma, ‘handful’ (ancient Greek drattomai, ‘I grasp’). Papers did not grasp, however, that coinage itself is effectively a Greek phenomenon. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If ‘money’ is a means of measuring value, making payment or negotiating exchange, money had existed in one form or another long before coin. From c. 2,300 bc in Mesopotamia silver was regularly used for wages, rents, taxes, loans and gifts, and entrepreneurs took silver with them to trade abroad. Often it was shaped into an identifiable standard, e.g. ingots. As for Greece, though neither the earliest Greek documents (‘Linear B’ tablets, c. 1300 bc) nor Homer (c. 700 bc) mentions money, it was in early use in the shape of iron spits (obelos or obolos) and bars of precious metal. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is not absolutely certain who invented coinage, or when. Literary sources say that it was the Lydians (western Turkey), but the world’s earliest coins (so far) come from the famous temple of Artemis in Greek Ephesus and are dated by context to 560 bc. Since Croesus — the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia — admired Greek culture and contributed to the temple’s construction, the Greek-Lydian connection is extremely likely. At any rate, the Greeks immediately saw what a brilliant idea it was. Coinage at once spread like wildfire among the Greek city-states in the Mediterranean as far as Sicily and south Italy, and in fairly standardised format too, as if to a template — issued in the name of a city-state, in regulation styles (e.g. owl + Athena = Athens), with the large coins being of pure silver and weighing between 12 and 17 grams. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">How did this happen? And why? Independent, proud, fiercely competitive and linked by long-established patterns of interchange across the Mediterranean, the city-states had long been engines for the rapid adoption of all sorts of new phenomena. Market exchange was already well-established among them: what could be more useful for expanding market exchange than coinage? Trade through coin was not only easy, it also ‘freed up’ wealth, making it accessible beyond closed aristocratic family circles and creating the possibility of a new wealth-based hierarchy, open to all. No wonder that people-power, dêmokratia, was soon to follow in some city-states. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The drachma, a ‘handful’ of six obeloi, represents one of the world’s most liberating innovations. And the euro....?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>19th January</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The term ‘hero’ these days is commonly used of large numbers of people: those engaged in dangerous work (soldiers, firemen), those engaged in demanding work (nurses, teachers) and those simply doing a conscientious job, whatever that job is. Ancient Greeks might have had some sympathy with this — though not while the ‘heroes’ were alive. </div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">‘Hero’ derives from the Greek hêrôs. The epic poet Homer (8th century bc) used it only of the living, and it meant, broadly, ‘warrior’. In later Greek literature, however, a hêrôs was someone who had been of significance to the local community but was now dead. There was no need for the person to have been a warrior or even male, let alone to have lived in a heroic age. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This status was for the most part bestowed on those who were associated with outstanding local benefactions. They were patrons or saviours of their city, or had founded it in the first place; they had come to the aid of people in danger or sickness; or they had been responsible for the foundation of a new cult. Often an oracle was linked with the award, commanding that so-and-so be given heroic status. The result was that the hêrôs, who was usually envisaged in the full flower of youth, received cult worship. This centred on the hero’s tomb and could involve anything from quite humble annual offerings to the erection of a great sanctuary complex and sacrifices that would do credit to a god. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There were, however, no precise rules about who should receive heroic status. Merit did not necessarily come into it; we hear of a criminal who died an amazing death being heroised. It was some uncanny, unpredictable, eternal quality that created the hero — one passed a hero’s shrine in silence — which was thought to allow him to wield power over the community, even from the grave. An angry hero could strike a city with disaster; an appeased hero would bring it blessings. Here we see the origins of the Christian concept of the ‘saint’, whose supreme holiness not only demanded special acknowledgment after death, but also gave his remains strange powers to influence the world. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Take, then, the World Trade Center outrage. This was surely one of those incomprehensible events that call for special acknowledgment. Thousands of innocents were slaughtered in that appalling moment. Greeks might well have heroised all of them. Who knows what evil they might otherwise visit on the city? Or, heroised, what good?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>26th January</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The ‘Nomenclature’ Committee of the European Union is wrestling with the tricky problem of the number of lumps that a sauce can contain in order for it not to be classified as a ‘vegetable’ — because if it is classified as a ‘vegetable’ it attracts import taxes that can reach nearly 300 per cent. At the moment, a sauce containing more than 20 per cent lumps is a ‘vegetable’. The EU is considering raising the lump quotient to 30 per cent. But this raises a vital prior question — what is a lump? Most importantly, when does a lump actually become a lump? </div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is the sort of philosophical problem in which ancient thinkers revelled; it is, in fact, a paradox, the paradox of the ‘Heap’, and ancients adored paradoxes. Heraclitus (fl. c. 500 bc) started the paradox game, pointing out that, for example, hills go both up and down, but the star of the show was Zeno (fl. c. 450 bc) who was determined to shake our grip on reality by showing that the world was full of logical impossibilities. Thus, he argued, an arrow in flight is actually motionless, because at any one time it occupies a space exactly equal to itself. But if it does that, it must be at rest. When, therefore, does it fly? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then consider his argument about magnitude. Anything of magnitude is infinitely divisible by two; it must therefore have an infinite number of parts; the sum of an infinite number of parts is infinite; therefore anything with magnitude must be infinitely large. This principle lies at the heart of his better-known paradoxes, e.g. that Achilles can never reach the winning post because to do so he has to touch an infinite number of points on the way (half-way, quarter-way, eighth-way, etc.); no one can do that in a finite period of time, so Achilles will never reach the winning post. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A century later Eubulides, who also came up with the ‘Liar’ puzzle (can the statement ‘I am lying’ be simultaneously true and false?), anticipated the Great Lump Question with his ‘Heap’ paradox. It takes two forms: a) You cannot make a heap out of one grain of sand: how, then, can you create a heap simply by adding one? b) ‘One’ is a small number. Any number bigger than a small number by just one must also be small. So all numbers are small. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Und now ve call on Philosopher Kinnock — or is it his charming vife, or up-and-coming son? — to read a paper on ze urgent issue of tax on ze import of frozen angels on pinheads, sorry, horseback.... </div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-43052054024138708582010-04-07T09:04:00.000-07:002010-04-07T09:07:33.189-07:00A&M: 2001 December<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>1st December</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Last week, the Delphic oracle was shown to have acted in large part like a Citizens' Advice Bureau, with a strong rational streak to it; stories about a foaming, ranting Pythia were simply not true. But that is not the whole story.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The more thoughtful ancients were indeed drawn to rational accounts of religious belief, since they felt that the physical world had been rationally constructed and therefore the deity who was responsible for it must be able to be rationalised. Ancient Stoics, for example, pointed out that the world obeyed certain predictable physical laws and human behaviour followed certain predictable patterns, all capable of being understood by reason. If the world reflected its Maker, as logically it must, reason must therefore hold sway: reason was the divine in us. But that is not to deny the legitimate role of the mysterious, miraculous and numinous in ancient and modern religion. Despite Stoic assumptions, there is still much in the world that seems to make no sense, and if the purpose of religion is to confront ultimate mysteries, beyond the ken of human understanding, it is not surprising if it calls up concepts and images that will not bear strictly rational scrutiny. It has been pointed out here before that religion is like a language. To those who speak it, it makes perfect sense. To those who do not, it sounds like nonsense. The 'language' that is religion is as subtle and delicate as any human language - and just as incomprehensible to those who cannot understand it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So when the oracle at Delphi did come up with something ambiguous or hard to interpret, no Greek was surprised. This was, after all, a god speaking. The god could also speak (as he did at other oracles) through the flight of birds, the clashing of the metal bowls and the murmuring of trees. This is 'speech', but of a different kind - one which did not communicate through verbal but through non-verbal means, and therefore needed even more interpretation by fallible humans. As the sixth-century BC philosopher Heraclitus said of the god of the oracle at Delphi, 'he neither speaks nor hides: he uses signs'.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Plato talks of certain types of behaviour as driven by MANIA: the lover, the artist and the prophet were all subject to it. It does not mean 'madness'. It means 'inspiration'. The Pythia knew all about it. So did JS Bach. In other words, some phenomena are beyond explanation, rational or irrational. It is at such points that the ancients tended to insert the divine.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>8th December</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Simon Heffer has been arguing that Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech was warning against the dangers not of racism but of multi- culturalism. But what does multi-culturalism mean? If its opposite is mono-culturalism, no westerner has lived in a mono-culture for a very long time.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In about AD 58, Paul was arrested by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem for causing a riot. Claudius Lysias, garrison commander, ordered him to be flogged. As he was being tied up, Paul revealed that he was a Roman citizen, who had been found guilty on no charge. Claudius was summoned, and in the ensuing exchange revealed that he (Claudius) had bought his citizenship. Paul replied 'It was mine by birth'.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Paul was a Jew. He had been born in Tarsus, an important city in the province of Cilicia (south-east Turkey) which had become part of the Roman empire from 102 BC, and had inherited his status as a citizen from his father, by birth. We have to reconstruct Claudius Lysias' history, but he was probably a Greek, from the eastern Mediterranean, who had been a slave under the emperor Claudius. He must have done well in that position, bought his freedom and thus inherited the status of his master, as was normal in such cases. He had continued to prosper - freed slaves who had flourished in the emperor's service usually did - and been appointed to the garrison in Jerusalem.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The exchange is a fascinating one. Here were two Roman citizens. One, born or made a slave and so denied any legal status, had eventually bought his citizenship and been given a position of some authority in the Roman imperial system. The other, from one of Rome's rougher, bandit-infested provinces, a strict Pharisee and tent-maker by profession - Jewish teachers were expected to be able to support themselves - was a Roman citizen by birth but had never been near Rome in his life. One wonders what they both thought it meant to be Roman, and what they would have replied if they had been asked who they were - and what that reply would have indicated. The language of the majority in Rome, incidentally, was probably Greek.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If Enoch Powell really was arguing that we should all be mono- culturalists now, in a world where an Indian, living in Newcastle, wearing Nike trainers, can study Homer when she is not searching the world-wide web on her Sony computer, he was being even more monophthalmic than usual. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>15th December</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was business as usual in the Roman Empire on that first Christmas, and it was not a pretty sight</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Christmas story comes as something of a shock to those whose knowledge of the ancient world derives from the Roman historians. The gospel world is one of shepherds, innkeepers and mangers, of carpenters, fishermen and widows with their mites, of the lives and expectations of the lowly and destitute in a difficult Roman province on the edge of a vast empire. But Roman historians like Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny were members of the educated, elite, imperial inner ring. Tacitus had been consul and, like Pliny, governor of a Roman province, Suetonius a bureaucrat in the emperor’s court in Rome. History for them is power politics played out at the very centre of things, and the plebs feature in it only when their actions have political implications that the imperial court cannot afford to ignore. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But it was one world — SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus, meant what it said — and, by calling on non-literary sources in particular, we can get some sense of the lives, hopes and fears of that c. 95 per cent of the populus who did not form the Roman educated elite. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Graffiti tell us that some things at least do not change: ‘I came here, I had a shag, then I went home,’ scrawls one of the last great romantics on a wall in Pompeii. Workers in Pompeii formed co-operatives to support political candidates: graffiti record requests from groups like the fruit-sellers, mule-drivers, goldsmiths, carpenters, cloth-dyers, innkeepers, bakers, porters and removers, chicken-sellers, mat-makers, grape-pickers and late drinkers (!) to vote for this or that candidate for office. Indeed, even the humblest citizen could approach the mighty emperor with a request and expect a reply. We hear of one such response (many like it survive) from Antoninus Pius to a lowly worker: </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If you approach the relevant authorities, they will give orders that you should receive upkeep from your father, provided that, since you say you are a workman, you are in such ill health that you cannot sustain your work. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">An epitaph, popular enough for it to be known in two versions, says of the tomb: </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All a person needs. Bones reposing sweetly, I am not anxious about suddenly being short of food. I do not suffer from arthritis, and I am not indebted because of being behind in my rent. In fact my lodgings are permanent and free! </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The plight of thousands of back-street Romans is summarised in this ironic little text. Shortage of food was an obvious problem; so was ill health, though Rome was not filled with the sick and starving (they died). But accommodation created problems too. It was rented and expensive; overcrowding and violence were commonplace. The historian Suetonius tells us that Augustus derived special pleasure from watching groups of people brawling in narrow city streets. Legal texts tell us of a shopkeeper putting his lantern out on the pavement. A passer-by grabs it and the shopkeeper gives chase. The thief hits him with a lash, and in the brawl the shopkeeper knocks out one of the thief’s eyes. We hear of runaway wagons and building materials crushing people to death in the crowded streets. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even when work was obtained, it was often organised on short-term contracts, especially during the harvest and vintage. We hear of a woman who gave birth while working on a day-contract in a digging gang. Fearful of losing her wages, she hid the child and carried on. She was spotted and, against all expectations, paid in full and sent home by a kindly manager. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The stercorarius (or ‘night soil man’, as he was known well into the Fifties in Britain) had regular, if rather more disagreeable, work. We can assume that the average Roman generated about 1.5lbs of body-waste a day. Imperial Rome, with a population of one million, would therefore generate more than 650 tons of daily sewage. Though we hear of the need for sewer-cleaners and the risk they ran of choking to death, little of this human waste would disappear down a sewer. Very few Romans were connected up since, in the absence of the S-bend, stench and vermin could find their way from sewer into house and, when the Tiber rose, sewage too (we hear of one house which an octopus nightly entered via the drain to eat the pickled fish stored inside). But, more importantly, Romans regularly used human excrement to supplement animal manure. Where there’s muck, there’s brass, and it was the job of the stercorarius to empty the cesspits and sell on the contents to farmers on city outskirts. A graffito from Herculaneum records a payment of 11 asses for the removal of ordure (the as being the lowest denomination of coin). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yet we should not imagine a population permanently struggling for work. One hundred and sixty different types of employment in Rome are attested from epigraphic evidence; and an insulting graffito (from Pompeii) says of its victim, ‘You’ve had eight different job opportunities — barman, baker, farmer, at the mint, salesman, now you’re flogging pots.... Just lick — and you’ll have done the lot.’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The point is that the Romans were a nation of shopkeepers. Raw materials poured into the city from the countryside to be processed and turned into goods in the myriad tabernae and officinae that crowded Rome. The historian Livy tells of Camillus visiting Tusculum, where he ‘found doors wide open, shops doing business with all their contents out on display. Each artisan was intent on his work. He could hear the learning games of children, voice against voice. He saw the streets were full of people, women and children wandering at will to do whatever they needed.’ Rome was full of workers turning wool, leather, metals, clay, timber, straw, oil, wine and grain into what people wanted — and many such workers made it very good, as huge tomb monuments like that of Eurysaces the contract-baker record. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At one level, the elite despised the plebs (while, naturally, owning the apartment blocks they rented). Cicero saw workers as liars and slaves — liars, because retailers marked up the ‘true’ value of the produce they received; slaves, because they worked for others for pay and were thus dependent on them for life. The elite, of course, had everything done for them in-house. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the same time, the elite knew — none better than the emperor — that they ignored the people at their peril. ‘Bread and circuses’ (i.e. chariot races) were their answer, not because the people were lazy or feckless but because the culture of benefaction had long been the standard way of harmonising relationships between rich and poor. Races, gladiatorial combat, the theatre and a good, regular grain supply, all paid for by the wealthy or by the wealth that the state generated from its provinces, gave the people a taste of the high life and were seen as the rightful rewards of those who, as farmer-soldiers all those years ago, had made the empire possible. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So when the emperor entered the amphitheatre or circus to watch the games, it was to the cheers, or curses, of the crowd. And he paid attention. He knew which side his bread was buttered. So did the plebs. It was, indeed, one world. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>29th December</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">As the happy people of Europe link hands, singing and dancing, to welcome the bright new dawn of the euro, they might consider the judgment of Tacitus on the British acceptance of Roman ways in the 1st century ad: ‘the ignorant called it civilisation: it was in fact a mark of their servitude’.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the ancient world, only Athens in the 5th century bc and Egypt during the period of the Greek kings (‘Ptolemies’, c. 300–31 BC) attempted anything like the imposition of their own coin, to the exclusion of any other, on their subjects. In Athens’ case, it is quite unclear to what extent their efforts were successful; they were certainly short-lived. The Ptolemies were more successful, though even they allowed local issues to mingle with the royal coinage on the edges of their dominions. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Romans were well aware that there might be something in a uniform currency. As Augustus Caesar’s adviser Maecenas is made to say, ‘None of the cities [of our empire] should be allowed to have its own separate coinage or system of weights and measures; they should all be required to use ours.’ In fact, it was only near the very end of the empire (under Diocletian, who abdicated in ad 305) that the Romans saw fit to impose a common currency on everyone. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the Western empire, Roman coin came to be the standard simply because hundreds of city coinages petered out in favour of it (no local Western coinage was struck after ad 54). The probable explanation is that the conquered peoples had not been city dwellers but now, surrounded by Roman architecture and civic forms, they had come to see themselves as Roman. In the Eastern empire, however, Romans had taken over a powerful polis (‘city-state’) tradition, in which Greek consciousness of their identity and rich past was deep-rooted, and local coinage continued to be struck by the polis authorities out of a sense of pride and self-respect. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At least those nations of Europe that have chosen to adopt the euro have done so freely, albeit with a great deal of central bullying (vote and vote and vote again, you ignorant brutes, till you get it right). So we cannot say quite yet that Brussels is an empire, ‘a political system based on the actual or threatened use of force to extract surpluses from subjects’. Nevertheless, the issuing of a common currency, with all that implies in terms of ideology, autonomy, political identity and assertion of power, could be a useful first step in the servitude stakes, if nothing else.</div><div><br /></div></div></div></div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-2105203036845855502010-04-07T08:56:00.000-07:002010-04-07T09:01:33.368-07:00A&M: 2001 November<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">November 2001</span></i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>3rd November 2001</i></b></span> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ is a weasel phrase: how will we know when the ‘process’ is ended and ‘peace’ delivered? If there is currently a ‘truce’, we must eventually have a treaty. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Ancient precedents might help. In the ancient world, truces to bring about a temporary suspension of hostilities were declared for specific purposes — often to provide time for a more permanent agreement to be reached. They could extend from a few hours to years, and were usually agreed between the leaders of the combatants. A peace treaty was supposed to be permanent and had to be officially agreed between representatives of the states involved. In Greece such treaties were often accompanied by an agreement to renew them annually, as if it were understood that peace was an unnatural condition and hostile relationships between states the norm. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Guarantees were needed to ensure that both sides abided by the terms. Oaths taken in the name of the gods were perhaps the most important surety — the gods would frown on anyone who broke an agreement made in their name. The terms of the treaty would be inscribed on stone and bronze pillars and displayed in the home territories of the parties involved, as well as in the great sanctuaries (such as Olympia). Hostages, too, would be exchanged, their number, social standing and length of detention all being at issue. Sometimes it was possible to negotiate for hostages to be replaced from time to time, when men from lower social groups could replace the original candidates. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But a peace treaty implied more than the end of hostilities. The Latin for ‘peace’, pax, implied the ‘establishment’ of a new state of affairs and of legal bases for future relations. For Greeks, peace would lead to ‘alliance’, summachia, literally ‘fighting together’; one treaty specifies that both sides were ‘to have the same friends and enemies’. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If the IRA gesture is a truce offered by General Adams before a treaty, the government must now decide whom they make the treaty with (tricky, that). They must line up hostages (a good chance to bury Stephen Byers and Jo Moore), and they must draft the ‘soldiers’ of the IRA into the front line against the Afghans. With their heroic towels over their faces, they look the part already.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>10th November 2001</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">East has fought West since the Trojan War, but the roots of the current 'war' against terrorism have specific origins unrelated to the Graeco- Roman world: the peculiar demands of monotheism.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Pagan religion was, broadly, a matter of acknowledging the powerful forces, external and internal, that affected one's life - from the gods of the forces of nature, like Zeus (weather), Poseidon (earth and sea) and Hera (childbirth), to the gods of human impulses, like Aphrodite (sex). No priests or scriptures, creeds or dogmas, had anything to say about these forces, except that they existed and must be placated: and the means of so doing involved ritual - performing right actions at right times in right ways. No other demands were imposed, let alone ideologies or beliefs. Nor were these forces jealous of each other. Pagan religion was tolerant of all gods whatever their origins, and eager to accommodate them. Given that the forces of nature affect all men equally, it was not difficult for one culture to see reflections or even sources of their own deities in other cultures. Here is the Phoenician sky-god Baal: he must be the same as our sky-god Jupiter. Here is a Phoenician sex-goddess Astarte: she must be Aphrodite.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The great exception to this attitude in the ancient world was the Jews. It was not just that they insisted on worshipping one god and no other; it was that their god was primarily interested in being worshipped not through ritual but through a commitment to values and a way of life. Yahweh, however, did not impose an evangelising mission on his chosen people: as long as the Jews worshipped no other gods, Yahweh seemed content. The Christian god, however, took a different attitude. Further cultural and ideological, rather than merely ritual, demands went hand in hand with the call to ensure that the world acknowledged the one true god - a cry taken up with equal fervour by Islam from the seventh century AD. The means by which extremists on both sides have attempted to fulfil these demands is a major reason for the East-West impasse.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The fifth-century BC Greek philosopher Protagoras thought 'the obscurity of the subject' made dogmatism about the gods unwise. The historian Herodotus, talking of the Egyptians, said 'I am not anxious to expound the divine matters in the accounts I have heard...since I believe all men have an equal sense of the matter'. Not a bad starting-point.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>17th November 2001</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A fifteen year-old is leading a three hundred-strong private army against the Taliban. But that's youth for you, Aristotle (384-322 BC) would argue. In his ART OF RHETORIC, he devotes considerable space to discussing the points one can make on a whole range of topics to persuade your audience to agree with you. One such topic is the young.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In general, he says, the young are the sort of people who will indulge themselves in anything they have an appetite for. Of the bodily appetites, he says, they are especially subservient to those to do with sex, over which they have no control whatsoever. The intensity of their desires is equalled only by the speed with which those desires cool - since their will is keen, rather than determined and strong. They are passionate, hot-tempered and carried away by impulse. Because they love to be highly regarded, they cannot bear to be slighted, and become angry if they think they have been wronged.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But even more than being highly regarded, they love to win, since the young are keen on going over the top (and victory, Aristotle points out, is a kind of going over the top). They are not interested in money, never having experienced shortage; they are good-natured, never having experienced much wickedness; naïve, never having been deceived very often; and optimistic, never having experienced much in the way of failure.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For the most part, Aristotle continues, they live in hope - 'for hope is concerned with the future, and remembrance with the past, and for the young the past is short but the future long'. So because they easily hope, they are easily deceived, but they are more courageous too: for their passion prevents them fearing, while their hope inspires them with confidence. They also prefer to do what is noble rather than what is in their interest, since they live by character rather than calculation. At this age more than any other, they love friends and companions because of the pleasure of simply being together and their inexperience in making judgements according to their interests. They also think they know everything, so are obstinate; but they are prone to pity because they judge others as they do themselves and assume all men are honest; and they love laughter, which is 'educated humiliating'.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In other words, the young don't quite know what they are doing. What a pity they have to grow up and find out. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>24th November 2001</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Geologists claim to have explained the frenzied rantings of the priestess (the Pythia) at the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi. They argue that ethane, methane and ethylene issued from the spring which once flowed under the oracle. Since the first stages of ethylene inhalation (widely used as an anaesthetic in the past) induce in patients a 'frenzy', they conclude that was how the Pythia generated her aperçus.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is scientific nonsense. Ethylene occurs naturally only in plants (it is a maturing agent). Even if by some remote chance it could occur naturally in streams, it is impossible that enough could be generated at one point to have any effect on humans. It is also historical nonsense. No ancient historian says anything about frenzied rantings at Delphi. Plutarch (c. AD 50 - 120), a Delphian priest, does record one occasion when the Pythia started gabbling unintelligibly, but explains she had been forced into prophecy when the omens were unfavourable. Her behaviour was untypical.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The boring probability is that the Pythia produced coherent answers, which were written down by her attendants or interpreters before being given to the consultants. The 5th century BC historian Herodotus records numerous oracular consultations, all of which featured a direct approach to the Pythia and a coherent and intelligible (if at times ambiguous) response. Plutarch too is quite clear on the matter: the Pythia speaks with her own voice under the impulse of Apollo, who puts visions into her mind for her to express in speech as best she can.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And that is the point. The Delphic oracle was not some sort of magical mystery show. Certainly there were amazing oracles - you will marry your mother and kill your father, O Oedipus - but these were largely the stuff of the fantasy worlds of myth and tragedy. As we can see from the hundreds of historically genuine questions and answers that have survived, the oracle in fact acted as a sort of citizens' advice bureau, specialising in problems of religious conduct ('If I do X, should I sacrifice to Y or Z?'), or nudging consultants into adopting one or another pre-determined solution to a social or political problem causing unrest in the community ('If we send out a colony, should it be to A or B?'). The ecstatic does have a place in religious experience, but it is not the rule. Greeks did not expect the Pythia to rant and rave when she uttered her prophecies any more than we expect the vicar to foam at the mouth when he announces the hymns.</div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8446672920425054101.post-10605958304798562112010-04-07T08:55:00.000-07:002010-04-07T09:04:03.585-07:00A&M: 2001 October<div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>October 2001</i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>13th October 2001 </i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A leading theologian of the Church of England has announced that the Harry Potter books, rather than being works of the devil (as some have claimed), convey deep Christian truths. It may seem feeble of the Church, even in these straitened times, to prop up its teaching with the assistance of children's stories about witches, but such tactics have an ancient ancestry. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For example, allêgoria, veiled or metaphorical language, was often used to explain Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (c. 700 BC). Ancient Greeks attached huge importance to these two great epics, but were worried by the problems of fictional narrative. 'Poets lie a great deal,' said the Athenian wise man Solon, and philosophers inveighed against Homer's depiction of gods as immoral fun-lovers. There was even a story that Pythagoras saw Homer being punished in the underworld for telling fibs about the immortals. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Theagenes, a Greek living on the toe of Italy in Reggio, led the fight-back c. 525 bc. He analyses the incidents in Iliad 20 and 21, in which the gods on the Greek side at Troy attack those on the Trojan - Athene cleans up Ares with a rock and then punches out Aphrodite; Hera seizes Artemis by the wrists and boxes her ears with her very own bow and quiver, 'smiling as her victim twisted and turned, and the arrows came tumbling out'; though Hermes amusingly refuses to fight Artemis's mother Leto ('you can boast to your heart's content and tell the gods your brute strength got the better of me'). Theagenes deals with these by arguing that Homer here was 'really' talking about the conflict between physical forces and moral or psychological forces (e.g. Athene = 'intelligence', Ares = 'stupidity', Hermes = 'reason'). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the Bible, Christians did not budge: 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' barked Tertullian. 'What does the Bible lack that pagan literature can supply you with?' argues an apostolic tract. But education was different. Children had to learn to read, and pagan texts were the received medium. That meant a degree of negotiation. St Basil's On the Reading of Profane Authors suggested interpreting pagans in the light of the Gospels. Justin Martyr saw pagan philosophy as an important first step towards revealed truth; Origen reckoned the study of pagan literature and mathematics an invaluable grounding in abstract thought.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Virgil was seen as a proto-Christian. Christians have never been slow to bring the pagans on side. Potter, join the gang. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;"><b><i>20th October </i></b></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The supermodel Elle Macpherson has evidently stuck up neatly typed notes round her kitchen reminding her how to treat her child — presumably in case she forgets. One of them says, ‘Avoid language which evaluates. Instead use words which describe how you feel.’ This dopey philosophy, as if children should be taught that the one important thing was to make other people feel good, might on certain conditions have drawn applause from the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bc). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Like his compatriot Plato, Aristotle believed that we consist of rational and irrational elements, and that proper moral character depends on learning how to use the rational elements to control the irrational elements, i.e. the emotions — anger, fear, love, lust, thirst, hatred, resentment, and all those other mental conditions that (for Aristotle) were accompanied by pleasure and pain. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The problem, as Aristotle realised, was that it is not easy to control the emotions by reason. One does not, for example, easily reason one’s way out of feelings of lust. To bring emotions to heel, therefore, they must be carefully trained over a long period of time, preferably from youth. As Aristotle points out, ‘If arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly, as the poet Theognis says, have won very great rewards, and such rewards would surely have been provided; but as things are, arguments are not enough in themselves to encourage men to become good.’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Moral training, therefore, not moral argument, was the thing — Aristotle is remarkable for a philosopher in the emphasis he places on the inefficacy of argument in this respect — and he urges that family discipline should go hand-in-hand with the community’s laws, customs and education to habituate the young to proper moral behaviour. But it was also possible for the young to receive bad training, and Aristotle regarded this possibility with very considerable distress: ‘It makes no small difference whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, it makes all the difference.’ </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Punishment and reward were for Aristotle important ways of training the young. So as long as Macpherson can recognise moral virtue in her son, and by merely telling him that his behaviour is making her feel happy or unhappy can persuade him to lead the virtuous life, Aristotle might have approved. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b><i>27th October</i></b></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">The home secretary David Blunkett is planning a crack-down on jokes about religion that may offend sensibilities. Ancient Greeks might have thought he had the wrong target.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even in free-thinking ancient Athens, with its numerous pagan deities, there were times when the Athenian assembly (the legislature, consisting of all males over eighteen) passed laws relating to ASEBEIA, 'wrong- doing in relation to the gods'. The first decree of this sort seems to have been proposed in 432 BC by one Diopeithes. It allowed for public prosecution of offenders in two categories: first, those who did not acknowledge divine things; and second, those who taught rational doctrines relating to the heavens. If our sources are to be believed, many 5th-century intellectuals were caught in this net - including the tragic playwright Euripides (though he was acquitted) and, most famously of all, Socrates (who was not). Aristotle in the 4th century BC seems to suggest that being an intellectual was a dangerous occupation, on a par with being a general.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Diopeithes' motives in proposing his decree are not at all clear. Some sources argue that he was out to nail the leading Athenian politician Pericles, who was well-known for consorting with free thinkers. Pericles' friend Anaxagoras, for example, who argued that the heavenly bodies were no more than clods of earth, the moon shone by reflected light and the sun was not much bigger than the Peloponnese, was one of those successfully prosecuted. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But since Diopeithes was a seer, it is just as possible that he wished to draw the line somewhere in respect of his own traditional profession, and that the Athenian assembly agreed with him. If that is the case, Athens' increasingly fraught relations with their bitter enemy Sparta may have had something to do with it. In 432 BC the omens were not good, and next year Athens and Sparta were at war. In such edgy times, it would not be surprising if the assembly felt hostile to anyone who might possibly bring the anger of the gods down on their heads, when divine favours were so desperately needed.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Athenians were great freedom-lovers, but 'piety' and 'patriotism' for them were almost synonymous, and when push came to shove, they were more concerned with the well-being of the community than the individual. But would they have judged the weedy JOKERS worthy of Blunkett's strictures, rather than the THINKERS? Come in, Hawking-Dawkins, your time is up... </div></div>JAT55http://www.blogger.com/profile/13675416372149189361noreply@blogger.com0