The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
THE ANCIENT GUIDE TO MODERN LIFE
THE ANCIENT GUIDE TO
MODERN LIFE
Natalie Haynes
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Profile Books Ltd
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This eBook edition published in 2010
Copyright © Natalie Haynes, 2010
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84765 293 5
For Dan
tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam lubens
Horace, Odes 3.9
Contents
Introduction
1. Old World Order
2. How Many Angry Men?
3. Thinking Allowed
4. In the Lap of the Gods
5. Frankly, Medea, I Don’t Give a Damn
6. There’s No Place Like Rome
7. No Business Like Show-business
8. The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Some Modern Guides to Ancient Life
Index
Introduction
I have been obsessed with the ancient world since I was eleven years old, when I began learning about Roman Life at school. We read about Julius Caesar, looked at pictures of Hadrian’s Wall, and made scale models of temples from cardboard boxes (complete with a cotton-wool sacrificial sheep bleeding red nail varnish over one corner of the box). When I turned twelve, Roman Life became Latin, and the Cambridge Latin Course took over. These brightly coloured books introduced a new generation of classical scholars to Caecilius and his wife Metella, who lived in Pompeii and so had a death sentence hanging over them from Book One. ‘Caecilius est in horto,’ we would chant, before grimly observing that he wouldn’t survive the impending eruption from the garden, no matter how nice his triclinium was. I also remember some twins called Loquax and Antiloquax, about whom I can recall nothing else, although a residual suspicion of identical twins remains somewhere in my brain.
When we chose our GCSE subjects, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t take Latin, and if I was going to do Latin, I might as well take Greek, too. Luckily, my parents didn’t see a need for any other living languages. French was enough. And this way, after all, there was no risk of a sullen German exchange student pitching up and moaning about everything in our house (which had happened with my brother’s the year before. I think my brother then made up for it by going to Germany and eschewing wurst). If I’d thought the whole thing through, of course, I would have borrowed the Italian girl from the year above me at school, taken her home, dressed her in a sheet and pretended she was my Roman exchange, but I had less imagination in those days, and got the giggles too easily to carry off that kind of thing well.
My future in Classics was probably determined by the set texts I was given to learn for GCSE. Book Two of Virgil’s Aeneid was the Latin verse – it’s about the fall of Troy, the story of which we all thought we knew from those books on Greek myth we’d read as children. Book Two explains the bit with the Trojan horse that previously had never made any sense: seriously, you had the Greeks camped outside your city for ten years, and then they go away, leaving a big, Greek-army-sized wooden horse outside; and you take it into the city, and are then surprised when it turns out to be full of soldiers with death on their minds. No wonder the Trojans had lost the war. They were idiots. ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ didn’t really cover it. ‘Beware of Trojans, they’re too stupid to live’ was closer to the mark. How had they survived ten years of war without accidentally stabbing themselves through the eye with their own spears?
It turns out, when you actually read Book Two of The Aeneid, that the Trojans were not idiots. They did question the Greeks. Their priest, Laocoön, busted the horse right from the start. He’s the one who says the line about beware the Greeks bearing gifts. He says the horse is full of Greek soldiers, or if it isn’t, it’s some kind of infernal siege engine, designed to trash their city in some way. He even guesses who had the idea for the horse – Ulysses (or Odysseus, to give him his Greek name). Laocoön throws his spear into the horse’s flank and it vibrates there. You can only imagine the Greeks inside, holding their breath, thinking they were discovered. But then comes the Greeks’ master-stroke: Sinon. Sinon is a Greek, left behind by his countrymen when they sailed away. He’s dishevelled and unassuming, and he plays the Trojans like a cheap violin. He presents himself as a victim of Ulysses’ machinations – Ulysses has hated his family for years. And then he refuses to say any more. Why don’t the Trojans simply kill him, he asks. That would please the Greek leaders – Menelaus, Agamemnon, Ulysses. The Trojans are hooked. Why would killing him please the Greeks? What has happened? Aeneas, who narrates this story, reminds his audience that the Trojans just weren’t used to the Greeks and their lies. So, of course, they fell for it. Sinon, apparently unwillingly, continues with his tale of woe. The Greeks had sacrificed Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods when they first set out for Troy. The offering had ensured safe passage across the seas. Now they were giving up and going home, they needed to kill someone else for a safe return journey. Their priest, Calchas, would decide whom Apollo wanted as his victim. Eventually, bullied into it by Ulysses, he chose Sinon. No one argued: rather Sinon than them. Sinon was dressed up as a sacrificial victim: all the trappings that would normally adorn an animal were placed upon him. The scene he describes is horrifying. So he did a runner, and hid. Even as he tells the story, he begins to cry.
The kindly Trojans cannot bear his unhappiness. King Priam orders him to be freed from his bonds. Forget about the Greeks, he says. You’re one of us now. By the way, what’s this big wooden horse they left behind? Sinon appeals to the gods. He must keep Troy safe, now they have shown him such kindness. The horse is a religious arte-fact, made by the Greeks to appease the goddess Pallas Athene. The reason it’s so big is so that the Trojans can’t get it into their city. If they do, the offering will benefit them, rather than the Greeks. But if they damage the horse in some way, destruction will rain down upon Priam and the Trojans instead.
Sinon gives an award-winning performance. Even so, the Trojans aren’t completely sure. Maybe they should believe Sinon, maybe they shouldn’t. But then the gods intervene. Two huge sea-snakes appear near the shore. They head straight for Laocoön, and snatch his two small sons. Laocoön tries to rescue them, but the snakes seize him too. He stabs at them with his sword, and is soon covered in venom and blood. The snakes escape and hide in Athene’s temple: it’s surely a sign that she has sent them. The Trojans make their decision. The snakes had attacked Laocoön because he had violated the wooden horse, hurling a spear at it. They should take care of the horse, and wheel it into their city to keep it safe; offer prayers to the goddess to make up for the spear-chucking incident. The Trojans aren’t stupid, they’re out-flanked: the twin persuasions of sneaky human being and supernatural monsters are simply too much for them.
The Greeks were incredibly lucky and incredibly smart – they had a much better plan than just leaving the horse behind and hoping for the best. Sinon could have come straight from the pages of John Le Carré, saying just enough to sound plausible. Before the end of Book Two of The Aeneid, there is fighting, slaughter, sacrilege, raging fire and two ghosts. I was as hooked as the poor Trojans.
At the same time, over in Greek lessons, we were reading about Odysseus as hero, rather than villain. Our set text included his escape from the cave of Polyphemus, the Cyclops. Odysseus claims his name is No One, blinds Polyphemus – the original poke in the eye with a sharp stick – and then ties himself beneath a small team of sheep, sneaking past the Cyclops as they scamper outdoors. When the blinded Cyclops shouts out for help, he bellows that No One has hurt him. The other Cyclops assume he is deranged. Why cry out for help when no one’s hurting you?
It is no exaggeration to say that these books changed my life. I could have taken science A-levels and become a vet, like I had planned to, aged eight. Instead, I took Latin, Greek and Ancient History A-levels, then a Classics degree, just so I could keep reading stuff like this. I realise this isn’t something many people get the opportunity to do now – very few schools teach Latin and Greek, and tuition fees have made it difficult to choose a degree subject because you like it, rather than because you think it will be useful. So, all I can say is this: the Classics are worth whatever time you give them. Whether you study Latin verb-endings every day for a year, or simply wander into the cinema to watch the latest sword-and-sandal spectacular, you’re in for a treat (unless the film is Troy. Then you’re in for a snooze). Classics have informed so much of our lives – o
ur politics, our laws, our history, our culture, our language. We live in a world where a defiant refusal to acknowledge anything but the present is commonplace: the past is considered too boring and the future too scary. But the past is full of people just like us, people who lived ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Spend some time with them, and we might learn more about ourselves. So that’s what this book is – a collection of some of the best stories from the ancient world, stories which are interesting, funny, sad or peculiar, and especially stories which seem impossibly contemporary even though they’re a couple of millennia old, like the one about Vedius Pollio, surely the world’s first Bond villain. Myths are debunked – Julius Caesar’s last words weren’t ‘Et tu, Brute?’, gladiators didn’t salute the emperor when they were about to die, and the Romans weren’t chucking Christians to the lions every mealtime. This book is about how the ancient world has shaped the present one, and how our present is illuminated by the past. Ancient history doesn’t just belong in dusty classrooms and dog-eared textbooks, it belongs in our lives now. As Thucydides, the Athenian historian, once wrote, ‘It will be enough for me if these words are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.’
1
Old World Order
It’s tempting to believe that we no longer need to think about politics. After all, voter apathy is high in countries all over the world, and voter cynicism about our elected officials is even higher. Does it matter who’s in office when they all use it as a chance to feather their own nests and take advantage of their positions? Can politicians really make a positive difference to our lives, or is it just so much empty rhetoric? And what can we possibly learn about politics from the ancient world, where citizens (no women, no foreigners) were the only ones allowed to vote, let alone stand for office?
Well, yes, of course politics matters. Although we shrug in the UK when reminded that we’re technically subjects of a monarch rather than citizens of a democracy, we live like citizens. We vote, and by voting, we have some control over our own and our country’s destiny. If choosing between the major political parties sometimes feels a little like deciding whether to be drowned in salt water or fresh, it still beats the alternatives. Like it or not, wherever we are in the world, most of us are governed by someone. An elected chamber, a prime minister, a president, a queen: someone has the right to tell us what to do. We can either retire to the mountains, stockpile tinned food and arm ourselves to the teeth, or we can accept it. And if we’re going to accept governance, that means we also need to question and challenge it.
Trevor J. Saunders, late Professor of Greek at Newcastle University, put things most succinctly in his introduction to Aristotle’s Politics: ‘The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life has been, and could be, different from what it is. Such men bear tyranny easily; for they have nothing with which to compare it.’
Ancient writers give us everything we need to ask ourselves and our leaders difficult questions. Greek and Roman philosophers, historians, playwrights and comedians were all keen to assess the political situation in which they lived, wanted to live or believed people could live. They wrote extensively about politics, both domestic and foreign. Whether it was the direct democracy of fifth-century BCE Athens, or the civil wars that ravaged first-century BCE Rome, the ancients were keenly aware of how profound, and instant, an effect politics could have on an individual life.
Aristotle summed up our relationship with politics in a bon mot that survives to this day: Man is, by nature, a politikon zōon – a political animal. In other words, we are designed to live in a city-state, a polis. That’s how we thrive, being the sociable creatures we are. Our nature intends for us to live among others, which presumably explains why so many of us pile into overcrowded cities to live and work in them. We can’t help ourselves. And if we’re going to live alongside other people, we need to have some system for doing so. Anarchy, after all, has never really caught on. It just seems like so much trouble. The suffix -archy, by the way, comes from the Greek verb archein, meaning ‘to rule’. So, anarchy: an absence of rule; monarchy: one ruler; oligarchy: a small group of rulers; patriarchy: the rule of a father; matriarchy: the rule of a mother. Over time, various Greek states managed to test out virtually every system of government: kings, tyrants, oligarchs. The Spartans even managed a diarchy, where two kings from separate royal families ruled jointly. But it is Athens that has always inspired us the most, with its extraordinary, seemingly impossible democracy.
Athenian democracy wasn’t representative, as democracies almost everywhere are now. In America, in the UK, in virtually every country that uses a democratic system of government, we vote for someone to represent our interests: a constituency MP or a congressman, for example. They go to vote on matters of state, while we go to our place of work, safe in the knowledge that they will vote as we would vote. That is, at least, the theory. And it sometimes works, too – how many times have you seen an MP acknowledging that power stations need to be built, or airports extended, or affordable housing created, just not in their constituency?
But the Athenians did things differently. Their democracy was direct. In other words, they didn’t vote for someone else to turn out and make decisions for them. On days when the Ekklesia – or Assembly – was held, the citizens of Athens walked to the Pnyx, a hill near the Acropolis (and a Scrabble-player’s delight, now that proper nouns are allowed), listened to arguments for and against, say, a military expedition to Syracuse, and then they voted for or against the proposal themselves, by show of hands. The whole process was administered by ordinary men like them, who were appointed by lot. A council of 500, called the Boulē, drew up the agenda for Assembly meetings. The council comprised of fifty men from each of the ten Athenian tribes, and each tribe ruled the council for a tenth of the year, the order again decided by lot. The ruling tribe was called the prytany, and it had a chairman who decided what business they should undertake. He, too, was chosen by sortition – lot – and would be in charge for one day and one night. Aristotle, in his Athenian Constitution, tells us that no one was ever allowed to serve for longer than a day, or a second time. So any nefarious scheme hatched to acquire undue influence over the chairman of the prytany would be almost impossible to administer, and even if it succeeded, would be mayfly-brief.
Anyone who worries about an elected representative’s salary or expenses may be interested to know that the Athenians serving on the council, or in the prytany, would receive a sum of a few obols (a low-skilled worker’s wage) for each day they served. And they got free communal dinners during their time in the prytany. These small benefits were essentially to make up for any earnings lost while men did their democratic duty, rather than payment for their service to the state.
It was, obviously, an egalitarian system. Office wasn’t limited to those who could afford to hold it, because the stipend made it possible for all. In the words of the Athenian historian Thucydides, ‘When it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty.’
It’s hard to imagine Marx himself dreaming of a more even distribution of authority – farmers, smiths, merchants and gentry all served the people in turn. And during the time they formed the prytany, they lived and ate together, too. But the question arises: did you get the best man for the job? What if the lot fell upon a person of chronic stupidity? The cheering truth is that someone could only hold a position of real authority, the chairmanship of the prytany, for twenty-four hours. And though one hesitates to test the talents of modern politicians, how much damage can really be wrought by one official in twenty-four hours? The rest of the time that man would be one of fifty men in the prytany, or 500 in the Boulē, or several thousand in the Assembly. One assumes that the wisdom of crowds must have more than compensated for the stupidity of individuals. But then, didn’t the Athenians also face the contrary problem? What happened if you found the perfect candidate – efficient, and self-effacing – and you lost him twenty-four hours later?