Sphinx

Someone – sorry, can’t for the moment recall where I saw this; maybe in commentary on Jon Hesk’s recent blog post on the ‘Challengers’ debate and ancient political rhetoric – recently noted in passing that they knew of some school students studying Aristophanes’ Knights with Nigel Farage playing the role of the Sausage-Seller, the rogue who out-bids even the shameless Kleon in his rabble-rousing. Fair enough, one might say, apart from the fact that it does let other politicians off the hook by attributing manipulative and shifty rhetoric to Farage alone; arguably they’re all Sausage-Sellers, or at least – and this is perhaps a more reasonable interpretation – they’re all being encouraged by highly-paid advisers to bury their decent instincts and reservations in the interests of victory, in the spirit of the end justifying the means.

This is most obvious in the case of the repulsive discussions of immigration as the Great Spoken issue of the election campaign, where even Labour is producing souvenir merchandise of their capitulation to, at best, profound moral feebleness.

This does bring to mind another ancient literary analogy, which must surely have been discussed in this context though I haven’t been able to find anything online*: Umbricius, in Juvenal’s Satire 3. Rants about everything that’s gone wrong with Rome compared with the good old days: rising crime, neglect of traditional values, lack of respect for good honest native Romans, streets full of foreigners – ex-slaves, even, who can’t speak the language properly – enjoying wealth and luxury while decent folk can barely make a living…

As Susanna Braund observed in an article years ago, Umbricius is an utterly compromised and unreliable figure whose words cannot be trusted for a moment; rather like a public-school-educated former City trader posing as a man of the people and denouncing Europe while with party gorges on European funding, this self-appointed defender of honest conservative virtue leaves the decadence of the city of Rome in order to move to the notorious luxury and corruption of the Bay of Naples. His complaints are completely self-interested, and also founded on myths and misconceptions. The founder of Rome was a refugee from Turkey; fleeing war, true, but he could have claimed asylum in Libya when he arrived there and was offered safe haven by the local ruler, rather than pushing on to Europe with the sole aim of leeching off its hard-working natives. And the founder of the actual city built its population up by welcoming any number of criminals, illegal workers, cat owners etc. without any regard for their origins or religion.

If Rome had remained just for the Romans by birth, it would never have amounted to anything; instead, unlike most ancient states, it developed ways in which people who wanted to become Roman could often do so. It was even happy for them to retan links to their places of origin, rather than insisting on an ancient equivalent of the cricket test. Roman society wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination – plenty of racism, slavery, inequality, exploitation etc. – but in respect to immigration it offers a model for recognition of the advantages that could be derived, by society as a whole as well as by the dominant elite, of welcoming those who want to contribute to its success. The idea of a clear divide between them and us, upstanding autocthonous natives against nasty foreigners, good old pre-immigration days versus today’s multicultural nightmare, is as ludicrous a myth today as it was in Juvenal’s time. As @crookedfootball tweeted in response to the recent UKIP proposal that all history should be taught chronologically, “Those bloody beaker people, coming over here with their beakers.” Goodness knows what they make of the fact that Britain was once physically connected to continental Europe…

*What I did find as a result of Googling ‘Juvenal’ and ‘UKIP’, was an obsession with the old “bread and circuses” line as a means of attack on proposals for public spending…