Neil Faulkner’s first of a regular series of blog posts for Yale University Blog commenting on the London 2012 Olympics in the light of the wisdom (or lack of it) of the ancients.

I was waiting for the first person to say about the London 2012 Olympics, ‘let’s keep the politics out of sport’. As if sport was ever ‘non-political’. The idea, incidentally, that anything was ‘non-political’ – let alone something as important as sport – would have been bewildering to the ancient Greeks.

Anyway, no need to worry now. The Prime Minister has injected austerity politics into the London Olympics from the get-go. In his New Year message, he discussed the economic crisis. ‘There are fears about jobs and paying the bills,’ he said. ‘The search for work has become difficult, particularly for young people. And rising prices have hit household budgets.’

But these, it seems, are secondary matters. His message began with the triumphant announcement that this is the year of ‘the global drama of the Olympics and the glory of the Diamond Jubilee’.

This is what the ancients called ‘bread and circuses’. The phrase was coined by a satirical Roman poet called Juvenal (c. AD 55-140). The context is interesting. Juvenal was comparing lost democratic freedoms with the military dictatorship of his own time.

Long ago, we sold our vote to no-one, but nowadays, people couldn’t care less. Time was when we elected rulers, politicians, generals, everyone. Not any more. Now the only thing people worry about is bread and circuses.

That was, indeed, how it once worked. Ancient Rome was never a democracy, but there had been voting, open debate, and civil liberties. The emperors put a stop to all that, but to placate the mob, they nationalised the bread supply and controlled the price, and they built the Colosseum (for gladiatorial games) and the Circus Maximus (for chariot racing) and paid for free shows.

The Prime Minister’s message, then, was pure Caligula. Except for one thing: he forgot the bread. In 2012, it seems, we’re to get only the circuses. Why is that? Because the banks have crashed, the economy is in slump, and this is the age of austerity cuts (packaging the bad news is not helped by the fact that the people who caused the crisis are still raking it in). Never mind: we’ve got the London Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee to look forward to.

We need to take a lesson from the ancient Athenians (not the Romans). The Athenians, like the Romans, went to the games. But the Greek games were not the degraded blood spectacles of the Colosseum; they were genuine athletic contests involving citizen-sportsmen.

And that difference was not unrelated to the fact that, whereas the Roman crowd was a politically manipulated mob living in the shadow of state security, the Athenian crowd was a citizen-body that exercised full democratic control over the state through mass participation in popular assemblies, jury courts, and a people’s militia.

Now that’s an interesting model.

Reposted from Yale University Press London Blog

Neil Faulkner is the author of A Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient Olympics, to be published soon by Yale University Press. Over the next six months, in this regular blog, he will be commenting on the London 2012 Olympics in the light of the wisdom (or lack of it) of the ancients.