A&M: 2002 October

5th October 2002

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.

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’.

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.

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.

13th October

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.

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’.

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’.

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.’

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.

27th October

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

A&M: 2002 September

14th September 2002

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

21st September

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’.

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.

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.

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....

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.

A&M: 2002 August

3rd August 2002

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

17th August

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

24th August

‘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.

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.

Plutarch, meanwhile, couches his treatise in the shape of an account by the notoriously irascible Roman Fundanus of how he finally beat the bug.

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.

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.

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.

31st August

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:

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.

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.

Melians: We get the point.

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.

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.

Athenians: It is a risk we are prepared to take. Now: for or against?

Melians: We could not, we suppose, remain neutral.

Athenians: Certainly not. That would be a sign of weakness in us.

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.

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.

It may not give von Rumsfeld any sleepless nights, but friends of America could toss and turn a bit.

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...