A&M: 2002 July

6th July 2002

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.

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.

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.

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.

13th July

The territorial fence which the Israelis are building is structurally and functionally a dead ringer for Hadrian’s Wall (started ad 122).

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.

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.

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.

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.

27th July

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A&M: 2002 June

1st June 2002

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.

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.

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.

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?

An excellent one, come to think of it. Let the mockery and vilification of these foul professionals begin.

8th June

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.

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.’

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’.

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.

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.

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.

Lennox may have his problems with Mike Tyson this week, but one cannot quite believe that this will be one of them.

15th June

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.

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.

An account of their beliefs on this matter survives. It reads:

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.

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’.

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?

22nd June

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

29th June

It has been claimed that beards are now back in fashion. Pogonic fashion certainly changed in the ancient world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A&M: 2002 May

11th May 2002

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.

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.

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?’

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.’

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.

A&M: 2002 April

6th April 2002

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

13th April

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

20th April

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.

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.

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.

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...?

27th April

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.

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.

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.

Because if not...

A&M: 2002 March

9th March

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

16th March

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

23rd March

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

30th March

As Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat continue their murderous assault on each other’s people, an Aristophanic image comes strongly to mind.

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.

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.

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.

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?

A&M:2002 February

2nd February

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.’

Anyone up to drawing a line or two for next year’s Turner?

9th February

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, no, Lord Birt, no one (splutter) is laughing at you (snort), honestly.

16th February

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.

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....’

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.

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.

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.

23rd February

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?

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

A&M: 2002 January

12th January

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.

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.

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.

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.

The drachma, a ‘handful’ of six obeloi, represents one of the world’s most liberating innovations. And the euro....?

19th January

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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?

26th January

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?

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?

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.

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.

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....