BMCR 2009.02.28, Peter Jones, Vote for Caesar: How the Ancient Greeks

Peter Jones, Vote for Caesar: How the Ancient Greeks and Romans Solved
the Problems of Today.  London:  Orion, 2008.  Pp. viii, 264.  ISBN
9780752891408.  L9.99.

Reviewed by John David Lewis, Duke University
([email protected])
Word count:  1893 words
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Peter Jones is one of the most energetic British promoters of classical
studies for non-specialists, bringing readers of the Spectator into the
world of ancient Greece and Rome through his Ancient and Modern column
since 1996. This book has the same popular aim. Written entirely
without jargon, bereft of footnotes and citations, it is an engaging
exposition of real problems faced by the Greeks and the Romans, with
suggestions about how we might use the past to think about the issues
pressing on us today.

The organization is topical, as the Table of Contents makes clear:

1. Two capitals: Rome and London
2. Bread and (not) circuses
3. The Roman way of tax
4. Control Greeks--and Romans
5. Power to the people! Athens 508-323 BC
6. People's law and people's justice
7. Crime, punishment and education
8. Celebrity games
9. War and peace
10. The pleasures of paganism
11. Peering into the future
12. The science of living
13. The doctor could well see you shortly

We begin in the cities of Rome and London, each with seemingly
intractable problems of congestion. Juvenal tells us about the crowds
in front, crowds behind, elbows poking us in the ribs, a soldier's boot
stomping on toes. Rome had one million people crammed into seven square
miles--but without a transport system or "commuters," this seething
cauldron of humanity lived where it worked, in small tenements crammed
into an unplanned maze of narrow streets. In contrast, the seven and
half million Greater Londoners are spread over six hundred square
miles. The Romans lived at perhaps ten times this density, and had to
deal with the fires and floods that threatened to collapse seven-story
residential buildings, violence in unlit alleys, and seven hundred tons
of daily excrement. The city had its own "Ken Livingston moment," a
reference to the Mayor of London's vehicle congestion charge, which for
the Romans meant strict restrictions on vehicles entering Rome by day.
Despite this density and the immigration that caused it, Rome, like
London, was no parasite. Its artisans and shopkeepers added value to
their wares, and they had a sense of pride in their city. Jones
thoroughly debunks a popular view of Rome as a city of villas, and of
citizens bathing in calm repose amid luxury.

Roman entertainments, roads, buildings, aqueducts, brothels, and food
distributions, are the concerns of the second chapter, while the
Millennium Dome and the BBC--which the government should "throw out" in
favor of private initiatives--are his modern targets. Chapter Three
tells us how the Roman authorities paid for all this--they focused not
on extorting Roman citizens, but rather on bleeding other people dry
using the army. Jones' Mediterranean world "was in a fairly constant
state of conflict either for self-protection or in order to extract the
wealth" of others. (45) Inside Rome, the ruling aristocracy used the
revenue to create a sense of personal beneficence and of loyalty among
the populace. The contrast Jones creates with Her Majesty's Revenue and
Customs today begins with its spending of our money--not money taken
from strangers--in a way that divorces our "payments" from any direct
benefit to us. One suggestion Jones offers is whether Queen Elizabeth
should provide some kind of Res Gestae for the British people--a return
to the quid pro quo of personal benefaction found in Rome.  Is Jones
serious about trying to support the English state by taxing foreigners,
and then distributing the spoils by personal largesse? Is it properly
ironic to claim that the "lesson for our government" is to "concentrate
on wondering how to screw it [taxes] out of someone else. That's the
way to stay in power."? (50)

Chapter Four shows us how the Romans kept control over this
cauldron--the key was to gain and keep the support of the population.
We have heard very little of the Greeks so far--the first four chapters
are consumed almost totally with the Romans. Chapter five, on the
Athenian democracy, sets us on a path to a deeper discussion of the
nature of government and of citizen participation. Jones is witty in
his criticisms of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, berating him for "his
promises to 'slash red tape' (for 'slash' read 'rearrange')" and to
"'restore public trust in politics' (note: not 'in politicians'),"
along with his refusal to allow a referendum on the European
Constitution "because he knows that the people do not want it and he
would lose it." (80-81) The main point here is that we today do not
live in a democracy--we never have and we never will--and readers
should be aware of the contrast between us and the truly self-governing
ancient Athenians.

What comes out of all this is a platform for non-specialists to think
about how the ancients ("immensely fertile generators of ideas")
handled problems not totally foreign to us today. Jones' suggestions
are less proposals than they are food for thought, and although fraught
with serious difficulties, they foster an active-minded approach to
issues that are often not unique to us.

The next chapters build on this background, dealing with political
issues prior to matters of philosophy. Chapter Six turns to law; a
comparison with British Parliament distinguishes us from the Athenians
in that we do not make the law ourselves. In one of his many inset
boxes dealing with a narrow topic of interest today, Jones points out
that for many Greeks, the law was what separated us from animals;
although animals perceived and felt, they had no use of reason, no
capacity for mutuality and contracts, and therefore no "rights." In
matters of crime and punishment (chapter seven), Jones adopts the
Platonic view of punishment as properly bringing a cure to the
offender, rather than providing retribution, the protection of others,
and deterrence, His proposal for today is that prison sentences hold a
convict until he is cured, rather than to a fixed term--a proposition
that, if taken seriously, would invites arbitrary power over
psychiatric wards, but that nevertheless challenges us think about our
ineffectual reliance on incarceration for repeat offenders. (149)

A similarly open-ended proposal is found in education, which for the
ancients depended upon the self-motivated energy of the pupils to
engage in active learning. Today's students are passive receptors of
knowledge, who, to borrow Plato's metaphor, are "lying in a lecture
hall like beached seals, using their skills and judgment to roll over
now and again until lightly educated on both sides" (132) This would
have been incomprehensible to the active-minded Greeks and Romans.  For
education as for crime, Jones' proposal is untenable--that everyone be
allowed to attend college for one year, after which the school will
dismiss the say 50% who cannot make the grade, while the other receive
a free education thenceforth--but the idea that education is an active
process remains a valuable starting point for educational reform today.

Celebrity (chapter eight) would have been well-known to the Romans,
although the terms of stardom today--to be famous for being
famous--would have shocked them.  War and peace (chapter nine) reveals
another big difference between ancients and moderns. In their world,
the status quo was not a given "fighting successfully was the single
precondition of every society's existence," which left "little room for
niceties." (166) That no ancient god would have been jealous over the
worship of another god suggests why religious wars were unknown in
ancient times. The next step for Jones is to revel in the "pleasures of
paganism" (chapter ten), in which he reminds us that the polytheists of
the past showed little concern for foreign cults, unless they were
state-sponsored, or their adherents turned nasty. Surely modern readers
do need to know that it was Christian claims to exclusivity that the
Romans recognized as a threat--and that the Romans would be baffled to
see our officials today celebrate Islam after "some adherents of Islam
express a desire to extirpate us." (182)

Jones builds on paganism by stepping through a series of
issues--rituals, slavery, leisure time, cause and meaning, etc.--en
route to chapter eleven, on peering into the future. Jones' focus on
self-reliance extends through the Delphic Oracle and its clash with the
Athenian democracy, which made its own decisions even when trying to
avoid displeasing the gods. The pagan approach to the future was, for
intellectuals such as Seneca, to use our reason to ensure that nothing
unexpected happens to us, not to create a culture of victimhood by
blaming every adversity for our own conditions. Chapter twelve, "the
science of living," takes us to the essence of Greek culture: it was
the first "where issues that were (normally) the monopoly of religious
authorities or already settled by traditional beliefs . . . were
debated in public, in humanly intelligible terms . . ." (212) The
development of logical thinking, the study of man, the problems
inherent in calendars, the nature of the "expert," and atomic theory,
are among the topics that Jones connects to "logical accounting" of
proper arguments, and to his leitmotif of reason as man's distinctive
characteristic.

At many points Jones asks whether we today aren't living under forms of
"tyranny" of our own making--the "tyranny by numbers," for instance,
which has not allowed the sciences to understand the non-quantifiable
fields of the humanities. The Greeks had their own
straitjackets--without the use of experimentation, for instance, by
which hypotheses are tested against further observation, they remained
locked into deductive speculation. Jones sees this same pattern in our
politicians today, in which the "Tory  hypothesis" that lower tax rates
and markets will solve economic problems runs counter to the opposite,
socialist hypothesis. Greek medicine, chapter thirteen, demonstrates a
similar hypothetical method for ancient doctors, with a final parallel
between the Hippocratic Oath and its modern counterpart, released in
1997 by the British Medical association.

This book is handsomely produced with few errors (should "Cato" be
"Cicero" on page 142? And where, for instance, is Aristotle p.000 on
page 41?). It does require a basic background in classical history,
because its topical, comparative method allows it jump around with no
regard for chronology. This is so even within chapters; "Hannibalic
lessons" (170-172) precedes "Afghan Alexander" (172-173). A novice
reader might think that the city of Rome with its million inhabitants
existed before the classical city of Athens. This aside, Jones'
comparative approach will challenge readers to think as much about the
modern city of London and its cultural environs as about ancient Rome.

Vote for Caesar could function well as a recommended reading in a
classical civilization or culture course. Jones' ability to parallel
ancient problems with those of our own day will entice readers to think
outside the square about the issues we share. Perhaps the best lesson
of this book is for us to care about the noble, the beautiful, and the
true, and not to turn to the trashy, the tawdry and the cheap, "when so
much that is truly excellent is so widely and freely available" (259,
emphasis original). "Thanks to the degrading 'culture' of the world we
live in," Jones asks "Would I vote for Caesar? You bet I would."
(259-260) I wouldn't, because I do not see a good result in bringing
loot home from foreigners and then distributing it as personal favors.
But one might disagree with the vote for Caesar while recognizing the
overall value of the culture in which he lived.