Classics for the people – why we should all learn from the ancient Greeks

The dazzling thought-world of the Greeks gave us our ideas of democracy and happiness. Yet learning classics tends to be restricted to the privileged few. It’s time for ‘elitist dinosaurs’ to embrace a citizens’ classics for all

• Just how special were the ancient Greeks? Was there really a Greek “miracle”? The question has become painfully politicised. Critics of colonialism and racism tend to play down the specialness of the ancient Greeks. Those who maintain that there was something identifiably different and even superior about the Greeks, on the other hand, are often die- hard conservatives who have a vested interest in proving the superiority of “western” ideals. I fit into neither camp. I am certainly opposed to colonialism and racism, and have investigated reactionary abuses of the classical tradition in colonial India and by apologists of slavery all the way through to the American Civil War. But my constant engagement with the ancient Greeks and their culture has made me more, rather than less, convinced that they asked a series of crucial questions that are difficult to identify in combination within any of the other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean or Near Eastern antiquity. This is why, as I will go on to argue, I believe in classics for the people – that ideas from the ancient Greeks should be taught to everybody, not just the privileged few. • The foundations of Greek culture were laid long before the arrival of Christianity, between 800 and 300BC. Greek-speakers lived in hundreds of different villages, towns and cities, from Spain to Libya and the Nile Delta, from the freezing river Don in the northeastern corner of the Black Sea to Trebizond. They were culturally elastic, and often freely intermarried with other peoples; they had no sense of ethnic inequality that was biologically determined, since the concepts of distinct world “races” had not been invented. They tolerated and even welcomed imported foreign gods. And what united them was never geopolitics. With the arguable exception of the short-lived Macedonian empire in the later 4th century BC, there never was a recognisable, independent, state run by Greek-speakers, centred in and including what we now know as Greece, until after the Greek war of independence in the early 19th century. • What bound the Greeks together was an enquiring cast of mind underpinned by a wonderful shared set of stories and poems and a restlessness that made them more likely to sail away and found a new city- state than tolerate starvation or oppression in a mainland metropolis. The diasporic, seafaring Greeks, while they invented new communities from scratch and were stimulated by interacting with other ethnic groups, made a rapid series of intellectual discoveries that raised the Mediterranean world to a new level of civilisation. This process of self- education was much admired by the Greeks and Romans of the centuries that followed. When the texts and artworks of classical Greece were rediscovered in the European Renaissance, they changed the world for a second time.

• Yet over the last two decades the notion that the Greeks were exceptional has been questioned. It has been emphasised that they were just one of many ethnic and linguistic groups centred in the eastern end of the ancient Mediterranean world. Long before the Greeks appeared in the historical record, several complicated civilisations had existed – the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Hattians and Hittites. Other peoples provided the Greeks with crucial technological advances; they learned the phonetic alphabet from the Phoenicians, and how to mint coins from the Lydians. They may have learned how to compose elaborate cult hymns from the mysterious Luwians of Syria and central Anatolia. During the period in which the Greeks invented rational philosophy and science, after 600BC, their horizons were dramatically opened up by the expansion of the Persian empire. • In the late 19th and 20th centuries, our understanding of the other cultures of the Ancient Near East advanced rapidly. We know far more about the minds of the Greeks’ predecessors and neighbours than we did before the landmark discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh on clay tablets in the Tigris valley in 1853. There has been a stream of newly published texts in the languages of the successive peoples who dominated the fertile plains of Mesopotamia (Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians). The words of Hittites on the tablets found at Hattuša in central Turkey and the phrases inscribed on clay tablets at Ugarit in northern Syria have been deciphered. New texts as well as fresh interpretations of writings by the ancient Egyptians continue to appear, requiring, for example, a reassessment of the importance of the Nubians to North African history. Many of these thrilling advances have revealed how much the Greeks shared with, and absorbed from, their predecessors and neighbours. Painstaking comparative studies have been published which reveal the Greek “miracle” to have been one constituent of a continuous process of intercultural exchange.

• It has become a new orthodoxy that the Greeks were very similar to their Ancient Near Eastern neighbours, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Persia and Asia Minor. Some scholars have gone so far as to ask whether the Greeks came up with anything new at all, or whether they merely acted as a conduit through which the combined wisdom of all the civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean was disseminated across the territories conquered by Alexander the Great, before arriving at Rome and posterity. Others have seen sinister racist motives at work and accused classicists of creating in their own image the Oldest Dead White European Males; some have claimed, with some justification, that northern Europeans have systematically distorted and concealed the evidence showing how much the ancient Greeks owed to Semitic and African peoples rather than to Indo-European, “Aryan” traditions. • Taken singly, most Greek achievements can be paralleled in the culture of at least one of their neighbours. The Babylonians knew about Pythagoras’s theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. The tribes of the Caucasus had brought mining and metallurgy to unprecedented levels. The Hittites had made advances in chariot technology, but they were also highly literate. They recorded the polished and emotive orations delivered on formal occasions in their royal court, and their carefully argued legal speeches. One Hittite king foreshadows Greek historiography when he chronicles in detail his frustration at the incompetence of some of his military officers during the siege of a Hurrian city. The Phoenicians were just as great seafarers as any Greeks. The Egyptians developed medicine based on empirical experience rather than religious dogma and told Odyssey-like stories about sailors who went missing and returned after adventures overseas. Pithy fables similar to those of Aesop were composed in an archaic Aramaic dialect of Syria and housed in Jewish temples. Architectural design concepts and technical know- how came from the Persians to the Greek world via the many Ionian Greek workmen who helped build Persepolis, Susa and Pasargadae, named Yauna in Persian texts. Nevertheless, none of these peoples produced anything equivalent to Athenian democracy, comic theatre, philosophical logic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. • I do not deny that the Greeks acted as a conduit for other ancient peoples’ achievements. But to function successfully as a conduit, channel or intermediary is in itself to perform an exceptional role. It requires a range of talents and resources. Taking over someone else’s technical knowledge requires an opportunistic ability to identify a serendipitous find or encounter, excellent communicative skills and the imagination to see how a technique, story or object could be adapted to a different linguistic and cultural milieu. In this sense, the Romans fruitfully took over substantial achievements of their civilisation from the Greeks, as did the Renaissance Humanists. Of course the Greeks were not by nature or in potential superior to any other human beings, either physically or intellectually. Indeed, they themselves often commented on how difficult it was to distinguish Greek from non-Greek, let alone free person from slave, if all the trappings of culture, clothing and adornment were removed. But that does not mean they were not the right people, in the right place, at the right time, to take up the human baton of intellectual progress for several hundred years. • And that period of intellectual ferment produced ideas that have subsequently informed the most significant moments in western political history. Thomas Jefferson, framing the Declaration of Independence, took the idea of the pursuit of happiness from Aristotle. Toussaint Louverture read Plutarch’s account of Spartacus before leading the first successful slave rebellion in Haiti in 1791. Thomas Paine argued that issues such as the relationship of religion to the state should be discussed with reference to historical examples from antiquity onwards. Chartist leaders were inspired by the Athenian democratic revolution. Women suffragists recited at their meetings the resounding speech that the tragedian Euripides gives his heroine Medea on the economic, political and sexual oppression of the entire female sex. • The Greeks, more even than the Romans, show us how to question received opinion and authority. The earliest myths reveal mankind actively disputing the terms on which the Olympian gods want to rule them, and the philanthropic god Prometheus rebelling against Zeus in order to steal fire – a divine prerogative – and give it to mortal men. Sophocles’ Antigone refuses to accept her tyrannical uncle’s arbitrary edict, draws crucial distinctions between moral decency and contingent legislation, and buries her brother anyway. Aristophanes, in his democratic comedies, subjected politicians who wielded power to satire of eye-watering savagery. Socrates dedicated his life to proving the difference between the truth and received opinion, the unexamined life being, in his view, not worth living. No wonder Hobbes thought that reading Greek and Roman authors should be banned by any self-respecting tyrant, in Leviathan arguing that they foment revolution under the slogan of liberty, instilling in people a habit “of favouring uproars, lawlessly controlling the actions of their sovereigns, and then controlling those controllers”. • The recent general election has exposed the danger inherent in vote- based democracies: that they inevitably entail large disaffected minorities being excluded from executive power. The ancient Greek inventors of democracy vigorously debated this issue, having painful historical experience of it – recorded by Thucydides – and theoretical solutions – discussed by Aristotle. Yet in Britain today, few secondary school students are ever given the opportunity to investigate the dazzling thought-world of the Greeks. This is despite the existence for half a century of excellent GCSE and A-level courses in classical civilisation, which have been a success wherever introduced, and can be taught cost-effectively across the state-school sector. The failure to include classical civilisation among the subjects taught in every secondary school deprives us and our future citizens of access to educational treasures which can not only enthral, but fulfil what Jefferson argued in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782) was the main goal of education in a democracy: to enable us to defend our liberty. History, he proposed, is the subject that equips citizens for this. To stay free also requires comparison of constitutions, utopian thinking, fearlessness about innovation, critical, lateral and relativist thinking, advanced epistemological skills in source criticism and the ability to argue cogently. All these skills can be learned from their succinct, entertaining, original formulations and applications in the works of the Greeks. • The situation is aggravated by the role that training in the ancient languages, as opposed to ancient ideas, plays in dividing social and economic classes. One of the many ways in which the schism between rich and poor in Britain is reflected educationally is in access to Greek and Latin grammar. In 2013 (the last year for which figures are available), 3,580 state-sector candidates took A-levels in classical civilisation or ancient history. Greek A-level was taken by 260 candidates; 223 of these were at independent schools, which only 7% of our children attend; Latin was taken by 1305 candidates, a depressing 940 of whom were at independent schools. High grades in the ancient languages – easily enough won by solicitous coaching – provide near-guaranteed access to our most elite universities. For those without Greek and Latin A- levels there are indeed Oxbridge opportunities: a four-year classics course at Cambridge, and at Oxford the fast-track “Course II” as well as two smaller courses (ancient and modern history, ancient history and archaeology) focussing on history and material culture rather than literature and philosophy. • The chances of admission for these are in line with other courses such as English and history. But it is easier to get into Oxbridge to read the long-established classics courses, requiring an ancient language A-level, than any other subject: between 2012 and 2014, for the traditional classics “Course I” at Oxford, 51 students were accepted from the state sector and 233 from fee- paying schools. There is nothing like such a high percentage of privately educated students on any other course; there is no similarly high chance of admission – at around 45%. Classics applicants have a comparable chance of getting into Cambridge, at 45%; Cambridge has only a slightly better ratio of state-sector students. • To me, as a Greek scholar, educated in the 1970s and 80s entirely at the taxpayer’s expense at a direct grant school and at Oxford, this is profoundly embarrassing. Instead of Greek ideas expanding the minds of all young citizens, Greek denotes money and provides a queue-jumping ticket to privilege.

• How can we eradicate the apartheid system in British classics? First, we need to support classical civilisation qualifications, campaign for their introduction in every school and recognise their excellence as intellectual preparation for adult life and university. Specifically, classical civilisation needs to be recognised in the English baccalaureate and given the same governmental support as Latin. • Second, we need to expand the tiny number of teachers trained to teach classical civilisation via classics-dedicated PGCE courses, and also, crucially, encourage qualified teachers of other subjects in schools – English, history, modern languages, religious studies – to add classical civilisation to their repertoire. Take Christ the King Sixth Form College in south London. A committed philosophy teacher there, Eddie Barnett, was inspired by the enthusiastic response elicited by the (small) Plato element on the A-level philosophy syllabus; he has recently secured an agreement that classical civilisation will be rolled out at all three campuses of the college. Classical civilisation qualifications are embraced by most universities already, and this is the first year in which it has been possible for Open University students to graduate with single honours in classical studies, even if they have had no contact with the Greeks and Romans previously. But Oxford and Cambridge, with their fame and brand, now need to lead by example and offer challenging classics courses that do not fetishise grammar and consequently repel state-sector students who have been excited by reading classics in English. This means engaging with literary texts fearlessly in translation plus increasing the importance of critical thinking and lowering that of language acquisition. Undergraduate degrees are supposed to produce competent citizens. Traditional classics courses are not making the most of those ancient authors on their curriculum who enhance civic as opposed to syntactical competence. • There is, however, an obstacle to such citizen-friendly proposals for the future of classics – the contempt directed from some upper echelons of the classics community against GCSEs and A-levels in classical civilisation. Some classics scholars and alumni happily maintain the exclusive private-school/Oxbridge monopoly on the Greeks. Almost all the energy currently expended by some classics-friendly charities on supporting a classical presence in the state system is directed towards Latin. I have, of course, no objection to Latin teaching, but focusing on it exclusively entails three dangers. First, plenty of talented young people with a great deal to offer society don’t particularly enjoy grammar and are put off the ancient world forever by being offered a diet that is too heavy on language, when they might be thrilled by other aspects of antiquity. Second, omitting the broader, more conceptually stretching study of the ancient world, and especially of Greek thought, implicitly suggests that Latin has a prior claim on our citizens’ attentions. Third, placing the emphasis on training in Latin grammar encourages classical Luddites (who would rather destroy the modern study of the ancient world than see any overhaul of pedagogical tradition) publicly to disparage classical civilisation’s in-depth study of ancient society. • One prominent Oxford-trained journalist, Harry Mount, in an article lamenting the decline of Greek in schools, recently described classical civilisation qualifications as “intellectual baby food” with which students are spoon-fed, and as “classics lite”. This was to insult the entire community of state-sector classicists and anyone who ever reads an ancient author in translation. He and his associates have forgotten Gilbert Murray’s injunction that it is the Greeks, not Greek, who are the true object of the humanist curriculum. They have forgotten Milton, who wrote in his treatise Of Education that language study “is but the instrument convaying to us things usefull to be known”. If a linguist has “not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteem’d a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only”. Jefferson said exactly the opposite to Mount: he proposed that impressionable minds of the ablest younger children, including the poor ones he wanted to be funded by the state, could be kept safely occupied with rote learning of the minutiae of ancient languages, until they acquired sufficient intellectual robustness in mid- adolescence to cope with truly rigorous education in argumentation. That is, he saw language learning as the intellectual baby food. • The instrumentality of ancient languages in social exclusion has an inglorious history which we surely do not want to perpetuate. In 1748, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son: “Classical knowledge, that is, Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody … the word illiterate, in its common acceptance, means a man who is ignorant of these two languages.” Classical knowledge is here limited to linguistic knowledge, education to men, and literacy to reading competence in Greek and Latin. Greek was also handy when white people wanted to deride the intellectual abilities of black ones. In 1833-4, American pro-slavery thinkers were on the defensive. The senator for South Carolina, John C Calhoun, declared at a Washington dinner party that only when he could “find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax” could he be brought to “believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man”. This snipe motivated a free black errand boy, Alexander Crummell, to head for Cambridge University in England. There he indeed learned Greek as part of his studies, financed by abolitionist campaigners, in theology at Queens’ College (1851–3). • The best-known example is the hero of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Jude Fawley, a poor stonemason living in a Victorian village, is desperate to study Latin and Greek at university. He gazes on the spires and domes of the University of Christminster – they “gleamed” like topaz. The lustrous topaz shares its golden colour with the stone used to build Oxbridge colleges, but is one of the hardest minerals in nature. Jude’s fragile psyche and health inevitably collapse when he discovers just how unbreakable are the social barriers that exclude him from elite culture. Hardy was writing from personal experience: as the son of a stonemason himself, and apprenticed to an architect’s firm, he had been denied a public school and university education; like Fawley, he had struggled to learn enough Greek to read the Iliad as a teenager. Unlike Jude, Hardy rose through the social ranks to become a prosperous member of the literary establishment. But he never resolved his internal conflict between admiration for Greek and Latin authors and resentment of the supercilious attitude of some members of the upper classes who had been formally trained in them. • There is in fact a splendid history of the ancient authors being read by Britons far beyond the privileged elite, a history that has been ignored by those rich enough to be able to give their children the opportunity to learn ancient languages. Pope’s early 18th-century translations of the Iliad and Odyssey brought Homer to a far larger audience, including women, than ever had access to an elite education. Take Esther Easton, a Jedburgh gardener’s wife, visited by the poet Robert Burns in 1787. He recorded that “she can repeat by heart almost everything she has ever read, particularly Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end” and “is a woman of very extraordinary abilities”. Pope’s Homer also captured the childhood imagination of Hugh Miller, another Scot, a stonemason and a distinguished autodidact, who grew up to become a world-famous geologist. He saw the Iliad as incomparable, and wrote in My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854) that he had learned early “that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide.”

• There is an alternative history of classical scholarship – the history of many individuals, brave, stubborn, naive, or all three – who, in the face of every kind of obstruction did succeed in “entering Minerva’s temple”, as the working-class imagination often framed the project of autodidacticism. The most prodigious of British autodidacts was Joseph Wright, a Victorian workhouse boy who became professor of comparative philology at Oxford. Illiterate at the age of 15, he discovered his aptitude for languages at a Wesleyan night school, funded a PhD in Greek at Heidelberg by teaching incessantly, and, before appointment to his chair, lectured for the Association for the Higher Education of Women. • The Reverend John Relly Beard was a crucial force behind the movement for popular education in Lancashire and never wavered in his zeal for universal education to the highest level. He wrote accessible works on classical and biblical subjects, Latin Made Easy and Cassell’s Lessons in Greek … Intended Especially for Those Who Are Desirous of Learning Greek Without the Assistance of a Master. In this teach-yourself manual he is explicit about the readership he assumes: “The wants of what may roughly be termed the uneducated, will be carefully borne in mind by me, while I prepare these lessons … My purpose is to simplify the study of Greek so as to throw open to all who are earnest the great work of self-culture.”Organised working-class libraries reveal a fascinating alternative canon of books relating to the ancient word, from the first workers’ libraries in Europe established in the 1750s at Leadhills and Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway to the foundation of the Workers’ Educational Association. • By the end of the 19th century, these libraries’ holdings were often influenced by “Lubbock’s List”, the 100 books in 1887 deemed “best worth reading” by John Lubbock, principal of the Working-Men’s College in London from 1883 to 1899. Lubbock, who became the first Baron Avebury, was himself from a privileged banking family, and educated at Eton. Although he did not attend university, he was a polymath, specialising in archaeology and biological sciences. The proportion of classical authors in his list is remarkable: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plutarch’s Lives, Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Aeschylus’s Prometheus and Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus, Euripides’ Medea, Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and many more. In addition, two famous works on ancient history – Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Grote’s History of Greece – make it on to the list, along with the most popular novel set in antiquity, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. More than a quarter of all the books are by classical authors, and more than a third addressed to classical antiquity. • The 109 libraries of the South Wales coalfield are a wonder of labour history, and the books really were taken out. At Ebbw Vale, each reader borrowed an average of 52 volumes a year. The “Condensed Accessions Book” of Bargoed Colliery Library details its holdings by 1921-2. Texts in Latin and Greek are absent: until 1918 almost all miners had left school on their 13th birthday. But the “alternative classical curriculum” of the miner was wide-ranging. He read translations and biographies such as JB Forbes’s Socrates (1905). He learned about the Greeks from HB Cotterill’s Ancient Greece (1913), the Egyptians from George Rawlinson’s Herodotean History of Ancient Egypt (1880), and mythology from several books by Andrew Lang. • This inspiring past of people’s Greek can help us to look forward. It is theoretically in our power as British citizens to create the curriculum we want. In my personal utopia, the ancient Greek language would be universally available free of charge to everyone who wants to learn it, at whatever age – as would, for that matter, Latin, classical civilisation, ancient history, philosophy, Anglo-Saxon, Basque, Coptic, Syriac and Hittite. But classical civilisation qualifications are the admirable, economically viable and attainable solution that has evolved organically in our state sector. Classicists who do not actively promote them will justifiably be perceived as elitist dinosaurs.

• Edith Hall gave the Gaisford Lecture at the University of Oxford. Her Introducing the Ancient Greeks is published by Bodley Head. Mary Beard: why ancient Rome matters to the modern world Failure in Iraq, debates about freedom, expenses scandals, sex advice … the Romans seem versions of ourselves. But then there’s the slavery and the babies on rubbish heaps. We need to understand ancient Rome, but should we take lessons from it? • By the late fourth century CE the river Danube had become Rome’s Calais. What we often call the “invasions” into the Roman empire of barbarian hordes (or “swarms”, perhaps) could equally well be described as mass movements of economic migrants or political refugees from northern Europe. The Roman authorities had no better idea of how to deal with this crisis than our own authorities do, and, predictably, they were less humane. On one notorious occasion, uncomfortable even for some Roman observers, they sold dog-meat as food to the asylum-seekers who had managed to get across the river (dog was off limits for human consumption then as now). It was just one stage in a series of standoffs, compromises and military conflicts that eventually destroyed central Roman power in the western part of their empire. And it was exacerbated by the calculating policy of the Romans in the east, who by this era effectively formed a separate state. Their solution to the crisis of migration was to point the migrants firmly westwards, and try to make them someone else’s problem. • It’s tempting to imagine the ancient Romans as some version of ourselves. They launched disastrous military expeditions to those parts of the world where we too have failed. Iraq was as much a graveyard for the Romans as it has been for us. And one of their worst defeats, in 53BCE at the hands of a rival empire in the east, took place near the modern border between Syria and Turkey. In a particularly ghoulish twist, uncomfortably reminiscent of the sadistic showmanship of Islamic State, the head of the Roman commander was cut off and used by the enemy as a makeshift prop in a performance of Euripides’ play The Bacchae – in which the head of King Pentheus, horribly decapitated by his mother, takes a macabre starring role. • Back in Italy too, Roman life had a familiar side. Urban living in a capital city with a million inhabitants, the biggest conurbation in the west before the 19th century, raised all the usual questions: from traffic congestion (one law tried to keep heavy vehicles out of the city during the day, with the knock-on effect of appalling noise at night) to rudimentary planning problems (exactly how high were high-rise blocks allowed to be, and in what materials to make them safe from fire?). Meanwhile the political classes worried about everything from expenses scandals to benefits scroungers. There was endless, and largely unsuccessful, legislation aimed at preventing officials lining their own pockets out of the public purse. Even the famously upright Marcus Tullius Cicero – politician, poet, philosopher and jokester – left one overseas posting with a small fortune in his suitcase; he had apparently been “economical” with his expenses allowance. • There was also endless debate over the distribution of free or subsidised grain to citizens living in the capital, one half of the infamous pair of “bread and circuses”, which, according to a hard-nosed Roman satirist, had sapped the political energy and independence of the people. Was this a proper use of the state’s resources and a precedent to be proud of – the first time any state in the west had decided to guarantee the basic subsistence of many of its citizens? Or was it an encouragement to idleness, and an extravagance that the exchequer could not afford? One rich Roman conservative was once caught standing in line to collect this allowance of which he vehemently disapproved and certainly did not need. When asked why, he replied: “If you’re sharing out the state’s property, I’ll come and take my cut, thank you.” This is not far from the logic of the elderly modern millionaire who claims his free TV licence or bus pass. • But it is not so simple. To study ancient Rome from the 21st century is rather like walking on a tightrope – a careful balancing act, which demands a very particular sort of imagination. If you look down on one side, everything does look reassuringly familiar, or can be made to seem so. It is not just the military escapades or the problems of urban life and migrants. There are conversations going on that we almost join, about the nature of freedom or the problems of sex. There are jokes we still “get”, buildings and monuments we recognise and family life lived out in ways we understand, with all their quarrels, divorces and troublesome adolescents. Cicero’s disappointment in the first century BCE with his son Marcus, who, at university in Athens, preferred clubbing and drinking to attending lectures on philosophy, is one that many of us can share. So too is the dilemma revealed by a surviving Roman do-it-yourself fortune-telling kit. Among the many questions it lists for anxious consulters is: “Will I get caught in adultery?” And among the many possible responses you could receive (depending on how the dice fell) was the wise and realistic: “Yes, but not yet.” • On the other side of the tightrope, however, is completely alien territory. Some of that strangeness is well recognised. The institution of slavery disrupted any clear idea of what it was to be a human being (neither Greeks nor Romans ever worked out whether slaves were things or people). The filth of the place was, in our terms, shocking. There was hardly any reliable system of refuse collection in ancient Rome, or in any ancient city, and there were revealing stories about stray dogs walking into posh dinner parties clutching in their mouths human body parts they had picked up in the street. And that’s not to mention the slaughter in the gladiatorial arena or the death from illnesses whose cure we now take for granted. More than half of the Romans ever born would have died before they were 10 years old. Childbirth was as deadly to women as battle was to men. • new‑born babies who were thrown on to rubbish heaps (or “exposed” to use the modern scholarly euphemism); the boundary between contraception and infanticide was a blurred one, and disposing of children after birth was safer than getting rid of them before. Likewise overlooked are the young Roman girls, who were not uncommonly married by the age of 13 or 14, and sometimes even earlier, into what we would have little hesitation in calling child abuse. How soon these marriages were consummated is anyone’s guess, but Cicero’s response, on the eve of his second marriage, to questions about why, in his 60s, he was taking as a bride a young virgin, a child in her mid-teens, is instructive. “Don’t worry,” he said, “she’ll be a grown-up woman tomorrow” (that is, a virgin no longer). The ancient critic who quoted this answer thought that it was a brilliantly witty way of deflecting criticism, and held it up for admiration. We are likely to put it somewhere on the spectrum between uncomfortably coarse and painfully bleak – one powerful marker of the distance between the Roman world and our own. • Cicero's dismay at his son Marcus, who preferred clubbing to going to lectures, is a feeling many of us can share • The truth is that Roman history offers very few direct lessons for us, and no simple list of dos and don’ts. We hardly need to read of the difficulties of the Roman legions on the Syrian borders to understand that modern military interventions in western Asia might be ill‑advised, or that feeding inedible food to refugees is likely to rebound. I am not even certain that those modern generals who boast of following the tactics of Julius Caesar or Hannibal really do so, in anything more than their own imaginations; most military victories in the ancient world were achieved by massive superiority in numbers or by some variety of “going round the back” of the enemy and capturing them in a pincer movement (“tactics”, in any more sophisticated sense, just weren’t in it). Besides, “the Romans” were no less divided about how they thought the world worked, or should work, than we are. There is no simple Roman model to follow, or reject. If only things were that easy. • Ancient Rome still matters for very different reasons – mainly because Roman debates have given us a template and a language that continue to define the way we understand our own world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy, while prompting laughter, awe, horror and admiration in more or less equal measure. Of course, western culture is not the heir of the classical past alone, nor would anyone wish it to be. There are, happily, many different influences woven into our cultural fabric: Judaism, Christianity and Islam only three of the most obvious. But since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, beauty, and even humour, have been formed, and tested, in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.

• We see that in the vocabulary of modern politics, from “senators” to “dictators”, and in our own catchphrases and cliches. “Fiddling while Rome burns” is a reference to the emperor Nero playing his lyre while the city went up in flames in the great fire of 64CE (not, as is now often assumed, “fiddling” in the modern sense of fussing aimlessly). “Fearing Greeks even when bearing gifts” is how Virgil in his Aeneid scripted the warning of one of the Trojan elders at the appearance of the great “Trojan horse”, a treacherous present from their Greek enemies. And the single Latin word “plebs” is still an insult, whether actually uttered or not, that can force a government minister to resign. We see it too in the political geography of modern Europe. The main reason that London is the capital of the United Kingdom, so inconveniently located in many respects, is that the Romans made it the capital of their province Britannia – a dangerous place lying, as they saw it, beyond the great ocean that encircled the civilised world. Britain is in many ways a Roman creation. • But even more importantly, we have inherited from Rome many of the fundamental principles and symbols with which we define and debate politics and political action. The assassination of Julius Caesar on the “Ides of March” in 44BCE was in reality a bungled and slightly seedy operation. Despite Shakespeare’s glamorising recreation of the conspiracy, it was headed by the decidedly unattractive Marcus Junius Brutus, whose previous claim to fame had been to extract an almost 50% rate of interest for loans to the unfortunate people of Cyprus (when they could not come up with the repayments he had the main council chamber on the island besieged, starving five councillors to death in the process). It caught several innocent people in what we would call “friendly fire”. And in the medium term it did more to bring about one-man rule in Rome than to eradicate it as the assassins had hoped. Yet, helped no doubt by the Shakespearean version, it has provided the model and the justification for destroying “tyrants” in the name of “liberty” ever since. It is no coincidence that John Wilkes Booth used “Ides” as the code word for the day on which he planned to kill Abraham Lincoln. Almost every assassination in western politics has been seen against the background of the Ides of March. • Twenty years before Caesar’s murder there was another event that has had an equally long afterlife in western history and thought. While he held the chief office of the Roman state, the consulship, in 63BCE, Cicero uncovered what he claimed (and probably believed) to be a terrorist plot to overthrow the government and to eliminate several of its senior politicians, himself included. The mastermind was supposedly a bankrupt aristocrat by the name of Catiline, who had turned to revolution when he had failed to reach power by legitimate means. Cicero had been tipped off by his undercover agents, intelligence reports and intercept evidence, and so – displaying a breastplate under his toga (more or less the equivalent of turning up at the House of Commons with a bulletproof vest and pistol) – he denounced Catiline who quickly fled, and he rounded up the other conspirators. These he executed without trial, in the interests of homeland security. “Vixere,” he announced, in a chilling understatement, as he emerged from the prison where he had overseen their punishment: “They have lived.” That is: “They are dead.”

• We know about this incident almost wholly from Cicero’s side; in fact, four speeches that he delivered accusing Catiline of treason and revealing what he knew of the plot went on to the Roman school curriculum almost immediately, as models of persuasive oratory, and have been read and studied ever since. The speeches still have their foothold in the modern western school curriculum, albeit a considerably more tenuous one. But we also know that there was another side to the debate. Whatever Catiline was really up to (and there is still disagreement about how far the “reds under the bed” were a figment of Cicero’s conservative imagination or paranoia), every Roman citizen had the fundamental right to due process and fair trial; summary execution contravened the most basic of civil liberties, then as now. Cicero did not escape scot-free. He was shortly sent into exile, his house in Rome was demolished, and a shrine to the goddess Liberty was pointedly constructed on its site. • The exile was unpleasant for Cicero, and copies of his unattractively self-pitying letters, sent back to his family and friends, still survive. Roman men did not often have the stiff upper lips of popular imagination, and Cicero wallowed in his tears. But the crying did not last long, for in a year he was recalled – in his account again – to a hero’s welcome and to the rebuilding of his house. His career, however, never fully recovered and the basic clash between, on the one hand, the obligation on the elected officials of the state to ensure its security and, on the other, the civil liberties of every citizen, no matter how criminal, continued to be debated – as it still is, whether in relation to detention without trial, Guantánamo Bay or British drone strikes against British citizens in Syria. • Over the centuries Cicero and Catiline have hovered in the background of these and other political debates, and have sometimes provided an explicit template for them. Writing a play on the subject in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Ben Jonson turned Catiline into a sadistic anti-hero (though his Cicero was an almost equally unattractive droning bore), while from the other side of the political spectrum Henrik Ibsen, in the fallout of the European revolutions of the 1840s, imagined a highly principled Catiline pitted against the corruption of the world in which he lived. Even now, the very words that Cicero used in his speeches against Catiline – and especially the first line of the first speech “Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?” (“How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience”) – get replayed as a signal of fundamental and principled political opposition. That goes from the hard-line Republican senator for Texas, Ted Cruz, who just last year started his attack on Barack Obama’s immigration plans with the words, “When, President Obama, do you mean to cease abusing our patience?”, to protesters against the government in Hungary a couple of years before who emblazoned banners with just the words Quousque tandem. No more needed to be said.

• What is important here is the debate, not the resolution. Ancient Rome is not a simple lesson for us, nor is it a civilisation that we should gratefully admire. There is much in the classical world – both Roman and Greek – to engage our interest and demand our attention. But admiration is a different thing. After 50 years of working on, and with, the Romans, I bridle when I hear people talking, as they so often do, of “great” Roman conquerors, or even of Rome’s “great” empire. That certainly wasn’t what it looked liked from the other end of Roman swords. But admiration apart, Roman debates are embedded in our own, and they are embedded in those of our predecessors who have in turn bequeathed their own problems, solutions and interpretations to us. I am not only referring to debates on Catiline and civil liberties, but also to the lurid, largely fictional, anecdotes of Roman emperors that have framed our own views of political corruption and excess (where does autocratic excess end and a reign of terror begin?), or the justifications, bad and good, for imperial expansion and military intervention. • Our own world would be immeasurably the poorer, and immeasurably less comprehensible to us, if we did not continue to interact with the Roman past. If we want, for example, to understand why John F Kennedy, like Lord Palmerston before him, chose to adopt the slogan Civis Romanus sum (“I am a Roman citizen”) – in Kennedy’s case as a defence of the freedom of West Berlin, in Palmerston’s in defence of some gunboat diplomacy – we need to keep engaged with the history of ancient Rome itself, with Roman approaches to citizenship and nationhood, and why they might underpin our own. Cynically, we should probably also wonder whether Kennedy (or Palmerston) actually knew that their cherished slogan had first become a Roman commonplace after being uttered as a desperate plea from a tragic Sicilian as he was pinned to a cross and illegally crucified by a rogue Roman provincial governor in the first century BCE – a plea that had no effect whatsoever. • Inevitably, the Rome with which we engage is a moving target. Roman history has changed dramatically over the last 50 years, and even more so over the last 250 years since Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his idiosyncratic historical experiment that began the modern study of Roman history in the English-speaking world (and which certainly would have been on Palmerston’s desk). That is partly because of the new ways of looking at the old evidence, and the different questions we choose to put it. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not. But we come to Roman history with different priorities – from gender identity to food supply – that makes the ancient past speak to us in a new, as well as an old, idiom. Whereas once the empress Livia, wife of the first emperor Augustus, was presented as a scheming manipulator and poisoner, we are now much more sensitive to the way male traditions tend to project villainy and self-interest on to women who have the fortune, or misfortune, to be married to the man in charge (think Cherie Blair). Livia may not have been a shy retiring lady innocent of all machinations, but we now realise that we would be the dupes of a tendentiously patriarchal vision to think of her simply as the wicked witch behind the throne. • There have also been an extraordinary array of new discoveries – in the ground, under water, even lost in libraries – presenting novelties from antiquity that tell us more about ancient Rome than any modern historian before us could ever have known. We now have a manuscript of a touching essay by Galen, a Roman doctor whose prize possessions, kept in a lock-up store in the centre of Rome, had just gone up in flames; this resurfaced in the library of a Greek monastery only in 2005. We have discovered wrecks of Mediterranean cargo ships that never made it to Rome, with their foreign sculpture, furniture and glass destined for the houses of the rich, and the wine and olive oil that were the staples of everyone. Soundings off the coast of Sicily have even located on the sea bed the detritus of the last great naval battle in the first Punic war between Rome and Carthage in the mid-third- century BCE – including the metal rams from the prows of the ships inscribed with appropriate messages (one Carthaginian specimen has words to the effect of “Up yours, Rome”), helmets of the fighters and their day-to‑day supplies. Surprising as it may seem, the best- preserved ancient battlefield turns out be under the sea. • And, as I write, archaeological scientists are carefully examining samples drilled from the ice cap of Greenland to find the traces, even there, of the pollution produced by Roman industry – the mines in Roman Spain, for example, where thousands of people, children included, worked in appalling industrial conditions to produce the silver that ended up as Roman small change. Others are putting under the microscope the human excrement found in a cess-pit in Herculaneum, in south Italy, to itemise the diet of ordinary Romans, and to ask what went into – and out of – their digestive tracts, 2,000 years ago. A lot of eggs and sea urchins are part of the answer. • Roman history is always being rewritten, and always has been. It is a work in progress, and the myths and half-truths of our predecessors always demand correction – as our own myths will no doubt be corrected by our successors in due course. For me, it is the one-sided thuggish image of the Romans that we especially need to re-examine. It has a harmless and humorous form, perhaps, in the tales of plucky Astérix and his struggles with the Roman legions (and that is where most of us come across it first). But it is much more misleading when it masquerades as the answer to some of the biggest questions about ancient Rome. Why did a small and very ordinary little town by the Tiber, with no obvious advantages, come to dominate first the peninsula of Italy and then most of the known world? Were they simply, as is often claimed, a community committed to aggression and conquest, built on the values of military success and little else?

• The fact is that Romans did not start out with a grand plan of world conquest. They did eventually parade their empire in terms of some manifest destiny, and Virgil in his national epic, the Aeneid, could in retrospect make the god Jupiter prophesy for Rome “an empire without limit”. But the motivations that originally lay behind their conquests through the Mediterranean world are far harder to pin down. One thing is certain: in acquiring their empire, the Romans did not viciously trample over innocent peoples who were minding their own business in peaceable harmony until the legions appeared on the horizon. • Roman conquest undoubtedly was vicious. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul has not unfairly been compared to genocide, and was criticised by some Romans at the time in those terms. One of Caesar’s political rivals even suggested that he should be put on trial for war crimes, with the jury made up of the tribesmen he had conquered. But Rome expanded into a world not of communities living at peace with one another, but one of endemic violence, rival power bases backed up by military force (there was not really any alternative backing) and mini empires. Most of Rome’s enemies were as militaristic as the Romans, and, in our terms, as sadistic. This is where the “Astérix image” is part of the problem, with its suggestion that Caesar’s adversaries in Gaul relied on little more than wit, ingenuity and magic potion. One Greek visitor to Gaul a few decades before Caesar’s invasion reported seeing enemy heads regularly strung up as trophies outside Gallic huts – an alarming sight, he confessed, though in time one did get used to it. • What cries out for explanation is not the Romans’ militaristic character or psychic aggression, but why in a world that was universally violent the Romans were so consistently more successful than their enemies and rivals. The basic answer to that has little to do with superior tactics or even with better military hardware; it has much more to do with boots on the ground. In its early centuries at least, standard Roman practice, unique in the ancient world and most of the modern, was to turn those it had defeated into Roman citizens and to convert erstwhile enemies into allies and future manpower. It was an empire built – as those desperate refugees on the Danube must have hoped, long after the policy had ceased to be feasible – on the extension of citizenship and the incorporation of outsiders. • It was also an empire of which some Romans themselves were the most powerful critics. Rome was not simply the unsophisticated and badly behaved younger sibling of classical Greece, committed to engineering, military efficiency and absolutism, whereas the Greeks preferred intellectual inquiry, theatre and democracy. It suited some Romans to pretend that was the case, and it has suited many modern historians to present the classical world in terms of a simple dichotomy between two very different cultures. That is misleading, on both sides. The Greek city states were as keen on winning battles as the Romans were, and most had very little to do with the brief Athenian democratic experiment. And far from being the unthinking advocates of imperial might, several Roman writers sharply analysed the origins and effects of their interventions in the world. “They create desolation and call it peace,” is a slogan that has often summed up the consequences of military conquest. It was written in the second century CE by the Roman historian Tacitus, referring to the Roman conquest of Britain. • The history of Rome lasted for well over 1,000 years (and well over 2,000 if we count the centuries of the Byzantine Romans in the east). For better or worse, Rome is ingrained in our political, cultural and literary traditions, and ways of thinking. It is a fair bet that there has not been a single day since 19BCE when someone somewhere has not been reading Virgil’s Aeneid, and it is hard to think of many other books, apart from the Hebrew Bible, of which one could say that. I am making no plea for a fan club for ancient Rome. We do the Romans a disservice if we heroise them, as much as if we demonise them. But we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to take them seriously – and if we close our long and complicated conversation with them.