Consider, for instance, the tension between democracy and philosophy.
It is extremely interesting that the two things ancient Greece is credited for having invented were diametrically opposed to each other. Socrates famously railed against democracy, preferring instead rule by experts, the famous philosopher-kings. If you were going out on a journey by ship surely you would want the captain to be an expert in seafaring, not just someone plucked from the street. So why would you want something different in the captain of the ship of state? Some 30 years after Pericles’ funeral oration, Socrates was condemned to death — by a vote of 500 of his peers — for corrupting his students. It’s a debate we continue to have today.
There are two other features of ancient democracy which also have meaning for Boris. Particularly important — to a schoolboy sense of humour — is that it encourages piss-taking. It is no coincidence that Greek comedy, particularly Aristophanes, flowered at a time of democratic governance. For the freedom of ordinary people to take the piss out of their democratically elected leaders is a hallmark of democratic culture. Humour is a ‘pull down the mighty from their thrones’ kind of business. The plays of Aristophanes and Cratinus pilloried Pericles mercilessly.
For Pericles, as for Boris, this was a crucial part of democratic culture, and to be encouraged. But the grim-faced philosophers, with their visceral dislike of populist mockery, hated it. Regardless, populist democrats have been doing this to philosophers for millennia — think of how Boris drives A.C. Grayling nearly out of his mind. And I, for one, find it terribly funny.
I struggle more to understand the other strand of his infatuation with democracy: it is implicitly hostile to divinity. My feeling here is that Boris is instinctively the least religious Prime Minister that we have ever had. And his objection to religion is the Nietzschean one: it is implicitly anti-human. For the thing that the young Boris picked up from the British Museum was a historical narrative in which the Greek celebration of the individual came to replace fawning over divinities.
“After centuries of abject quivering before fishgods and cowgods and skygods you are seeing the arrival of the individual — centre stage at last in the story of humanity,” wrote Boris in 2014.
The Elgin Marbles were a celebration of human individuality. Pericles’s great building project, the Parthenon, may have been nominally dedicated to the goddess Athena, but its true object of worship was the human being. I wasn’t entirely sure how this feature of his intellectual landscape should be managed in the course of an explicitly religious slot like Thought for the Day.
One point about Pericles kept on returning to me, again and again. For all his achievements, his career ended in failure. The Peloponnesian war is a study in Athenian over-reach. Having banded together with other city states to see off the invading Persians, the Athenians began increasingly to dominate their neighbours through the first failed European Union, the Delian league. Pericles made it into an empire, using force to prevent states from leaving the union and imposing, for instance, a common currency across the region.
The Athenian owl stamped on this common currency was resented by city-states like Sparta, as much as the euro is in much of Greece today. And their rebellion against the dominance of the Athens of Pericles was what brought the whole democratic experiment of Athens to an end. As Athenians retreated behind their famous walls, plague gripped the city — probably typhus. Pericles and his sons were to die of it.
As I sat up into the night, the idea that Boris might himself succumb to the sort of death that finished off his great political hero seemed so absurdly unlikely and coincidental. Yet one couldn’t discount the possibility. It surely must have crossed Boris’ mind too.
But with his release from hospital, their stories diverge. And a good thing too. Not least because the story of Pericles was one of great hubris. And the funeral oration was the high point of that hubris.
I have no problem with Boris the populist democrat. Not even so much with his attempt to emulate his hero through grandiose building projects. It’s the arrogance that would have been his undoing, as it was with Pericles. And if this brush with death gives him a more modest sense of his place in the great scheme of things, he will surely be the better Prime Minister for it.
What would I have said in Thought for the Day? I still don’t know. And thank God I didn’t have to find out. But, unlike Pericles, I wouldn’t have subordinated the individual to their public role or to their political commitments. I would not have seen the individual through the lens of the city and its values. Yes, Boris having the virus was a powerful symbolism of the presence of an existential threat at the heart of our body politic. But in the end, it would have been the memory of that little chap buzzing around the cricket pitch that guided me more than anything else.
Or to put this another way: the virus may not be a “great leveller” — as Emily Maitlis forcefully argued on Newsnight last week — but death certainly is. Death doesn’t care how important we are. It cares not for reputation, oratory or applause. This idea of death being a leveller comes from James Shirley’s 17th-century poem — often used as a funeral oration — “Death the Leveller”. And it is the very opposite of what Pericles had to say:
“The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.”
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SubscribeWhen I woke up this morning at 5, I looked at Twitter and saw a silly tweet from a female Tory MP who has had COVID -19, saying the lockdown couldn’t be ended until the vaccine was ready. I then had a long, low spirited chat with my husband about how, in these days when death is rare, the effect of a brush with it does not make our politicians wiser. They have become so used to thinking their flesh is immortal they have no idea that they ought to make the best of their short time here, instead they believe they can go on and on, messing up and being forgiven.
Let us hope that post COVID Boris really does gain a more modest appreciation of his place in the great scheme of things and that this makes him a wiser man.
Modesty is a virtue that Johnson does not possess.
Says someone who doesn’t know him. Modesty is a virtue that is easily projected negatively (and Ignorantly) onto others by those who think that they, by comparison, possess it, when they don’t.
Having an opinion about the PM of the United Kingdom is neither a negative projection or a sign of ignorance.
More ignorant projection onto Boris.
“… in these days when death is rare,…”
Sorry love, but the death rate in all societies remains at a constant rate: 100%.
I read Boris’s book about the history of London and was impressed by his writing style, his zeal, his way of bringing it to life. I also really appreciate his expertise in and admiration for Ancient Greece. It’s almost like getting back to first principles. I’m a classical liberal and it seems to me that this now places me on the right when it used to feel more comfortable for me on the left. But the left has gone insane and now resembles an authoritarian cult. Boris is the leader I want, not Corbyn.
Indeed.
Brilliant stirring and enlightening piece of writing. Another great article Giles Fraser!