When Yanis met Jeremy




Above is a conversation between economist cum politician Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s finance minister from January to July 2015, and Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, at the Edinburgh Book festival on 20 August this year.

They talk about the usual – democracy, socialism, post-capitalism, etc, etc, before going on to discuss Brexit.

Here, Varoufakis, comes out against a second referendum since, he says, referenda require a binary choice whereas the UK has, in fact, four choices in front of it. These are the Canada plus deal favoured by the hard Brexiteers; Norway plus, the deal Varoufakis advocates and which the Labour party is broadly putting forward – staying in the single market and the customs union; the Chequers proposal supported by the British government; and Remain. 

Corbyn argues the case for a General Election rather than a second referendum, before going on to state the customary issues Labour intends to fight the Tories on: health, education, poverty, homelessness, inequality, low and stagnant wages, etc. 

Moral outrage shapes Corbyn’s politics and, for him, socialism is simply the triumph of justice over iniquity, of fairness over inequality, and, when all is said and done, of right over wrong. Varoufakis has a more highfalutin understanding of what a socialist society would look like, referring us to Star Trek – in which, Varoufakis says, technology is harnessed in the service of the common good or, as Varoufakis puts it, machines do all the work while citizens discuss philosophy and explore the universe. 

The conversation continues with Varoufakis repeating his rather hysterical warning that Europe is currently staring into the abyss and risks a return to the politics of the 1920s and 1930s, i.e. risks the rise of fascism, and he points to the emergence of Victor Orban in Hungary, Sebastian Kurz in Austria and Matteo Salvini in Italy to prove his (facile) theory.

Finally, there is a brief discussion of the contrasting regimes of Athens and Sparta. Corbyn clearly has no idea how radical Athenian democracy was and regurgitates the usual platitudes about its flaws – slavery, the exclusion of women and migrants (metics) from Athenian political life – while Varoufakis reverts to the usual caricature of Sparta as a despotic or, in his terms, ‘fascistic’ regime. 

In fact, while it’s not unreasonable to describe Sparta as a totalitarian regime, it was not a dictatorship, tyrannical or despotic (unless you were a helot). Rather, Sparta’s constitution, with its senate, ephors, kings and assembly, was designed to ensure accountability, transparency and checks and balances. 


Aristotle asserts Sparta was a mixed regime, in which its two kings represented monarchy; the senate (gerousia) represented oligarchy; while the assembly – to which all Spartan citizens (Spartiates) were entitled to attend – and the institution of the ephors reflected the democratic aspect of Spartan politics. 


Indeed, ephors (or magistrates) – perhaps the most powerful element in the Spartan politeia – were selected in the most democratic method possible, via lottery, and had their terms in office limited to only one year, after which they were put on trial to judge whether they carried out their duties legally and effectively. 

Greeks under the rule of barbarian Rome


Above is the final episode in Michael Scott’s BBC series Ancient Greece: the Greatest Show on Earth. (Watch part one here and part two here). Episode three looks at how Greek theatre fared as Rome emerged as a dominant military and political power and Greece and Greek cities and kingdoms lost their independence. It’s not a bad programme, but I find the Romans to be insufferable barbarians, on about the same level as the Seljuks and Ottomans.

Regarding what happened to Greek literature under the Romans, I was reading an essay by Peter Bien from The Greek World: Classic, Byzantine and Modern, in which Bien says the following:
‘It would be a mistake to think that Greek literature died with Greek liberty. Menander’s marvellous comedies of manners, the plays that, by way of Plautus and Terence, set the first theatrical example for the Renaissance, for Shakespeare and for Moliere, were… the growth of an age politically hopeless. Polybius, through whose history we know that Scipio wept over Carthage destroyed, was a Greek hostage. The historical analysis of Tacitus and of Livy depend on history written by losers, by generations of sarcastic Greeks. Machiavelli rediscovered and transfigured their style, mostly through Tacitus and Livy, and Marx read Machiavelli. Clarendon in his History of the Great Rebellion goes back for this style to the same ancient historians. Shakespeare transcribes Plutuarch’s Lives at times almost word for word.’
I’m curious as to which ‘sarcastic Greeks’ Bien is referring to.

Regarding Plutarch, Bien adds:
‘Plutarch’s drawing of Romans is much more effective than his gallery of Greeks. The Greeks lived longer ago, and he knows less about them. The death of Cicero, the suicide of Cato, and the story of Antony and Cleopatra are written in brilliant dryness. It was Plutarch’s sense of tragedy, not that of the tragic poets, that Shakespeare drank in.’
Bien also has this to say:
‘The greatest hero of late Greek literature is Jesus Christ. The gospels are in Greek because the entire eastern Mediterranean world in their time had been Hellenized since before Christ, and one of the thrills and shocks of the gospels is that mixture of cultures. In spite of their linguistic awkwardness, or because of it, they are powerful pieces of simple writing such as Greek had never encompassed before.’

Greek drama and the decline of Athens


Above is the second part of Michael Scott’s series Ancient Greece: the Greatest Show on Earth, which traces the central role of comic and tragic theatre in the culture and politics of ancient Greece. In the first part of the series – Democracy – (see it here) Scott established the links between tragedy and democracy in Athens, while in part two – Kings – he examines how theatre spread throughout the Greek world and changed in content and purpose with the decline of Athens in the aftermath of its defeat in the Peloponnesian war and the emergence of Greek kingdoms, such as Macedon. It’s a good narrative and there’s some interesting detail and points but, again, the British talking-head classicists are a dull lot, with the exception of Oliver Taplin. In fact, what is most exciting in the series is the travelogue element. Greece always looks stunning and Scott visits some evocative sites, such as the Syracuse stone quarries where 7,000 Athenian prisoners were held after the disastrous Sicilian expedition in 413 BC and Chaeronea, where the Macedonians led by King Philip the Great defeated an Athenian-led force to claim control over Greece in 338 BC.

* See part three of the series here.