Caring about the ancients
If ancient history is nothing more than ancient history to you, I suggest the beach or the box. This column is intended for the happy fewer and fewer who, like my old friends Simon Raven and Peter Green, my dearest friend, the late irreplaceable Kenneth McLeish, and my ferociously engag?e correspondent Pamela Jane Shaw, see nothing obsolete in Greece and Rome.
Recently, I was reviewing the new (shrewdly abridged) edition of Jacob Burckhardt's The Greeks & Greek Civilisation. Until the scissors had to go in, for fear of boring the barbarians-I was elaborating a challenge to the great man's assertion that the Greeks uniquely invented and practised synoecism: the system of (sometimes forcibly) coalescing villages into city-states. I did not wholly agree. Who cares? So who cares what "people's" crap goes under the Millennium Dome or when Dr Cunningham gets reshuffled or whether England should have had a penalty (they should, they should)? I cared, because Greece lies at the root of western vanities and because it is the destination of most of our political and intellectual backtracking. Also, the wilful construction of Europe is a form of synoecism writ large, supervised by the kind of wise men (we hope) who, as Solon showed, can put their minds to social conflict and defuse it constitutionally. Is Senator Mitchell the old sage come again? Should Clinton check with the Dalai Lama?
By archaeological chance, we know more than Burckhardt did. The lost city of Palenque, for example, was rediscovered long after it could be added to his database. One of the mysteries concerning the great Mayan metropolis, founded in about 300 AD in what is now the Mexican state of Chiapas, is why a secure theocracy was suddenly abandoned to the jungle by rulers who lost the nerve and will to command.
Because the code of the hitherto indecipherable Mayan inscriptions now seems to have been cracked, we may yet get the official story. Meanwhile it remains plausible to guess that excessive faith in their computational skills undid the Mayan lords (their mathematics were more advanced than Plato required of his guardians). The Mayan fetish for astrology probably led the lords of Palenque to believe-as the Aztec Montezuma II believed when faced with the white-faced, bearded Spaniards-that it was impossible to contend with a heaven-sent terminus to their supremacy. Their fault was in the stars.
Mock not. Even today there are more astrologers than scientists in California. Are we not, too, constructing a world which will be governed by artificial intelligences that may one day tell us: sorry, folks, curtains for homo insipiens? Who will kick against the pyx and rescind the oracular edict of Windows 2098 before the human race is defenestrated? Think about it. Or better: get it to think about it.
Marxists might insist that economics brought about Palenque's abrupt eclipse; medical historians that it was epidemics. What intrigues me, re Burckhardt and synoecism, is that the Mayan rulers announced their abrogation of the purple with a specific edict to the citizens: "Return to your villages." This implies-doesn't it?-that the Mayans, too, practised synoecism: they knew all along where they had come from. The city was no more "natural" to them than it was to the ancient Greeks. Both Greeks and Mayans willed (and coerced) their polities into existence and recognised that there was nothing necessary about citizenship. Bang goes Burckhardt's uniqueness and Aristotle's taxonomy. See what the lunk-heads who prefer the beach are missing?
Do Tories believe their own myths?
The Greeks both knew and did not know that their myths were fabrications. Paul Veyne, the French classicist, has written a neat monograph entitled "Les Grecs, ont-ils crus ? leurs mythes?" His answer is oui et non. Myths were not idle tales; they underpinned vanities, confirmed prejudices, licensed wars. As Burckhardt insists, they were endlessly adaptable and often politically edited. Hence Plato's "noble lie"-which posits the ideal form of society as a three-decker class system, with us (the philosophers) on top, you (the policemen) below us and them (the workers) below you-was not out of line with routine Hellenic practice. Plato was only adding one more true lie to the unbounded existing stock. Pace your truth functions, true conclusions are always being drawn from false premises.
As Veyne points out, conscious/unconscious duplicity lay behind the use of myth: cities were not more "natural" or necessary than, say, the pound sterling.
At a time when the city-state was already being superseded, as the going political unit, by Macedonia's imperial and imperious hegemony, Aristotle decided to claim that the obsolete Greek political currency was "natural" and, presumably, should not be (have been?) abandoned. Could this have been a trimmer's belated attempt to be loyal to the Athens he had quit in order to become Alexander the Great's tutor?
Oh, and might it also be that the Tory party's patriotic fetish for "our" pound is a similar act of knowingly obsolete-not to say two-faced-sentimentality? Knowing very well that Britain will join the euro (and that they set the process in train), the Tories are now free to mount a brave campaign in the comfortably anguished knowledge that it will almost certainly fail, because it almost certainly already has. The pass has been sold long ago. Let us now defend it.
