Greece vs Rome, with Boris Johnson and Mary Beard

Boris Johnson and what the Romans didn't do for us.






Watching this debate between two titans of the public arena, it is hard not to be reminded of the sketch from the Monty Python sketch from 'The Life of Bryan', nick-named "What did the Romans do for us?" If you are unfamiliar with it, it can be viewed here, perhaps rather fittingly on a site called 'Science/Business  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo  Just on this site, it has been seen over 300,000 times. 

In reality since the Python skit was first performed exactly forty years ago, it must have been viewed by literally hundreds of millions of the world's human population and no doubt by millions of a non-human ones too, though presumably with a less sophisticated understanding of the subtle - or not so subtle point - it was making. Which was, we may ask ourselves?

On the superficial level it is about a group on Middle Eastern Jews questioning the value to them of their foreign occupiers and masters, and oh what parallels and paradoxes are embedded there!

But at a deeper level it satirises the human mental condition in all matters of opinion, for what are humans without their beliefs and attitudes to any question? And where is debate, or progress or conflict without it? 

With certain obvious exceptions, every mature person in the world views the rest of humanity in a certain way that is both congruent and antipathetic to different degrees. It results from all those cultural, religious and educational influences on the 'blank slate', as Locke coined it, of the infant's mind. 

That the world view so created should clash and be incongruent in certain situations is only to be expected. We talk of being 'narrow' or 'broad' minded, largely a 'Western' notion resulting from the relatively recent 'enlightenment'- a scientific empiricism and freedom from religious dogma. 

Yet this neo-liberal view of the world and the individual's place in it is not without its own trap of intellectual superiority and arrogance. In the panorama of  arguably the hundred thousand years of human history, less than ten thousand years of civilised urban settlement is relatively recent, let alone to our current scientific, atheistic view of the universe, seeded perhaps a few hundred years ago but coming to its inevitable Nietzschean 'God is Dead' nihilistic philosophical and social consequences in the last fifty years or so.

In the Greeks v. Romans debate, Boris Johnson draws attention to the change that is apparent in Greek sculpture and pottery in the British Museum - the only art to survive besides the literature rescued by Manuel Chrysoloras (1355 - 1415) and other monks when Constantinople came under concerted attack by French crusaders, disease and the Turks culminating in its fall in 1453. 

The realism and centrality of the human form is clear to see. The panoply of Greek gods and the myths surrounding them, are well known but arguably for the first time they were all in the image of man, not the other way around. Protagoras (c.550 - 420) statement that "Man is the measure of all things", reinvented and re imagined in 14th Century Italy 'renaissance', encapsulates the prevailing ethos of the Greek civilisation, which was to some extent remained intact and outlived the Roman Empire by a thousand years.

Given the intellectual preeminence in classical history of the two combatants (Johnson and Beard) it is perhaps surprising that neither refer to the fact that the very existence of the debate and the education that has enabled it to be undertaken and understood by the audience, not to mention the means by which it is amplified and transmitted, are down to education and science - not the Socratic idea of questions and answers - as a logical route to truth. Even though this was more biased rhetoric than objective logic, we were hopefully both educated and entertained in the process, as well as impressed. 

The well known analogy with the cultural relationship between Britain and the United States of America was drawn. One cannot help but wonder how Donald Trump as leader of that adolescent but powerful nation would have fared in such a debate?
(to be continued)