I'm Christopher Burden-Strevens, Lecturer in Roman History here at the University of Kent and today I'd like to talk to you about what politicians in Britain now can learn from the example of Roman history.
I'd like you to imagine for a moment that you lived in a state where the power of the executive is restrained by largely unwritten rules. By convention, by precedent, and by consensus, in the fairness of checks and balances.
Let's call it state X for the moment. In state X, all citizens - and that means you - have the right to vote but not all votes are equal. Depending upon your constituency or your voting bloc you can have a real say or no say at all.
State X privileges seniority and politicians actively court the favour of older voters because, in practice, older votes are technically worth more.
Even voting itself can be difficult too, as in state X there's no online or instant suffrage; the system works on the assumption that everyone will turn up to vote in person. In practice, this locks many people out of the system, especially if they live abroad.  
From time to time, state X might also ask your opinion in a referendum or a plebiscite. These processes can be controversial and often divisive. But in state X they're sometimes the only way to force the political class to act.
You see, state X is a rather conservative place. It values its traditions. Its political system has evolved and developed over the centuries and some of its institutions are genuinely archaic. 
The leader of state X isn't a president or a monarch but rather an elected ‘first among equals’ who has to collaborate with his fellow ministers and seek consensus among the political class. The constitution of State X isn't a legal document. It's a set of unwritten ideas refined through centuries of negotiation and stored in law books, rulings, popular assumptions, and in the memory and history of its institutions themselves.
This may all sound rather familiar but state X isn't Britain. It's Rome, about 2100 years ago.
Like Britain today, Rome was a rich and successful state but again, like Britain today, it was deeply divided. Rome was a republic and the largest and most successful European state to have ever existed. Its empire spanned from Canterbury to Carthage and stretched from Seville to Cyprus. 
The massive population of the city of Rome - close to a million people - was the largest in history until Victorian London. But for all its wealth and success, its institutions were struggling to cope and its political culture was fragmenting in a painful and often violent way. 
The result was a hundred years of civil strife, populism, and eventually the rise of a despot who overthrew the established order. 
The decline of the Roman Republic has much to teach us today about what happens to a state when its leaders take a flexible interpretation of the rules. For the next 10 minutes, or so I'd like to give you a few examples of what I think a Roman politician would make of Britain's foremost political leader: Boris Johnson.
I'll focus here on three aspects which the statesmen of the late Republic considered essential in any political leader. First, his use of oratory - that is, the art of public speech. Secondly, his capacity to inspire consensus - that is, to get people on board with a shared vision. And thirdly, his respect for the traditional customs of an unwritten constitution.
The result is a mixed and ambiguous picture but it follows a pattern which, by the end, the Romans of the Republic recognised very well.
So, first, public speaking: Boris Johnson has many of the qualities of effective public speech that Romans of the late Republic deeply admired. In Rome, political life revolved around public speech in a range of formal and informal settings. The arts of rhetoric and oratory were fundamental; politicians had to study rhetoric just as schoolchildren today have study maths.
Our evidence for what they thought about rhetoric mainly comes from the rhetorical handbooks and training manuals published in the first century BC. Boris Johnson's wordsmithery comes straight out of the textbook. Let's take as an example his inaugural speech before the steps of 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.
I quote: “Never mind the backstop, the buck stops here. The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters; they are going to get it wrong again.” There's a range of catchy rhetorical techniques here, and they are all classical.
He starts with a pun - a play on words - with the same sound but different meanings: backstop and buck stop. The Romans called this “paranomasia”.  It's a cheap trick but it's memorable for its humour. Another obvious technique here is “homoioteleuton”, or rhyming endings: “the doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters, it's a rhythmic and catchy sequence of rhyming words. They're not joined together by “and”, there are no connecting particles here so we bounce rapidly from one idea to the next – “the doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters”.
The Romans called this technique “asyndeton”. After this rising of three or tricolon, he reaches his climax: “they are going to get it wrong again”. This has almost exactly the same number of syllables as “the doubters, doomsters, gloomsters” line immediately before it. This is called isocolon, or “equal phrasing” - he's almost speaking in a poetic meter.
Boris Johnson knows and has studied these techniques. His book, The Churchill Factor, comfortably identifies when Churchill uses a descending tricolon with anaphora, for example. Like all Roman statesmen, he uses rhetoric and he knows when others are using it too.
But I think that the most important point here is what these techniques say about register. That is, who Boris Johnson is talking to. The Romans recognised three types of register: high middle and low. You modify your style to different audiences and settings.
Boris Johnson's inaugural speech with its rhymes, its wordplay and its informal neologisms like “doomster” and “gloomster” is recognisably in a low register. It's an extremely clever mix of the rhetorically elaborate and the casual. He's speaking not to the media or the intelligentsia but to the average voter. He is not the Etonian who studied Classics at Oxford, he is “one of us”.
Political Romans understood this sleight of hand and they would have recognised Boris Johnson copying it. In the 50s BC there was a popular Tribune of the Plebs called Publius Claudius. The Claudius family was one of the most ancient aristocratic dynasties in the city of Rome.
Publius Claudius, their energetic young blueblood nicknamed “the handsome” took to calling himself not “Claud-ius” but “Cloh-dius”. He was deliberately mimicking the way that the masses mispronounced his name. He was, in a sense, reclaiming it and creating a Plebeian “man-on-the-street” identity for himself. Now, Claudius became tremendously popular and he remained so for many years.
In the same way, we should remember that Boris Johnson's real name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel  Johnson, descendent of George the Third and the European aristocracy, rechristened as a popular Tribune. In short, the educated Romans of the late Republic would not only have recognised Boris Johnson's skill at popular communication, but they would even have begrudgingly admired it.
His capacity to inspire consensus is much more problematic. Consensus, literally in Latin, means “shared feeling” and, for the past 30 years or so, Roman historians have treated consensus as one of the most important, cohesive elements in the Republican political system. 
The shared assumptions and beliefs of the political class about their own values and about how the state should operate, stabilised the unwritten Roman constitution.
But as Rome’s power and wealth grew, as its Empire blossomed and exposed it to new forms of philosophy, art, literature, old assumptions and beliefs came under scrutiny. It was now possible in Rome to gain fame as a professional politician not just as a soldier. The votes of one's clients were no longer enough; it was more necessary than ever to buy and sell political support.
Even the meanings of words changed at the end of the Republic. Words like “liberty”, “dictator”, “the people”, “popular” and “the Republic” became fiercely contested by opposing groups with increasingly opposed purposes and ideas. 
If you want to see the decay of political consensus then language is the canary in the mine.
Boris Johnson's term as premier has not been a model of consensus-building and this, too, is reflected in his language. He's often spoken of the need to deliver Brexit at any cost; “do-or-die”, “deal or no deal” in order to deliver on “the will of the British people”. This claim presents “the people” or “populace” in Latin as a single group with a single unified consensus. 
But it is a sham consensus. This redefinition of the populace treats those who support a No Deal Brexit - who were never asked whether they actually wanted it - as the entirety of the people and the only legitimate voice in the body politic. He has, in short, invented a single populace that does not exist.
An uncharitable reading might suggest that his further actions have sought to pit that group against the rest of the population in a divisive manner. In September 2019 he described the Benn Act requiring him to seek a Brexit extension as “an act of surrender”. Just as he redefined “the people”, so too did he rename the Benn Act as the “Surrender Bill” or “Capitulation Act” in his public statements.
In a House of Commons debate, Paula Sheriff MP protested. All of these words, she said, suggest that we, because we disagree with him i.e. because we don't have consensus with him, are traitors. Are not Patriots.
Citing the murder of Jo Cox MP during the EU referendum debate in June 2016 she warned of the dangers of such a strategy to set the people against the establishment. Johnson's response was unequivocal. The best way to honour Jo Cox and to bring this country together would be to get Brexit done.
With those words, Johnson chose a contested and controversial interpretation of bringing the populace together. That is, the opposite of consensus.
By the end of the Republic and the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Romans had been watching this story on repeat for decades. Major faultlines had opened in their understanding of the people, their identity, and what liberty and sovereignty meant.
Perhaps our best verifiable historical example of this failure of consensus comes early in our period in 133 BC with the Tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus. The young and talented Tiberius Gracchus had been elected Tribune, so, representative of the people. He proposed an ambitious wealth redistribution plan which horrified much of the senatorial aristocracy in the Senate. The Senate, in response, put forward their own people's representatives, loyal to them, to oppose Tiberius Gracchus’ bill and to convince the people to reject it.
A struggle ensued. Both sides claimed to be advocating the people's will. In the end, Tiberius had his opponents removed from office on the grounds that they were the enemies of the people, and he was their true representative.
His career proved the model for all future Roman populists and his eventual murder was the beginning of a century of bloodshed and civil war.
Let's turn third and finally to Boris Johnson's respect for the traditional customs and practices of the unwritten constitution. By the first century BC, politically active Romans believed that the main aspects of their system of government had endured fundamentally unchanged for 500 years, half a millennium.
In mainstream public discourse, tradition and ancestral custom were not mere empty words. They will concrete political arguments and often arguments against change. The relatively consistent underlying assumption was that it was the ways of their ancestors, or the “mores maiorum” in Latin, which had made Rome great and to deviate from their path would bring ruin.
It's telling that the Roman word for innovation or “res novae”, has another meaning in Latin: “revolution”. This doesn't mean the Republic was completely static and never changed, that's not what I'm saying, Harriet Flower at Princeton University has recently shown that, somewhat like France, Rome had a series of slightly different republics over the centuries, with periods of transition and adaptation.
In her own words, Rome's unwritten republican constitution was flexible - but also brittle, like a ruler. It can bend, but if you apply too much pressure to its central points, it will snap.
In Republican Rome, only the most controversial and dangerous politicians tested the Constitution to that kind of limit,
The first six months of Boris Johnson's premiership have evidently tested the flexibility of Britain's constitution. In August 2019 he announced the suspension of Parliament to prepare a new legislative programme. This is a perfectly legitimate constitutional procedure which, under normal circumstances, occurs every autumn. But when combined with the parliamentary recess for party conferences, the effect of his decision was to close Parliament for five weeks, just before Britain's scheduled departure from the European Union.
The case went to the Supreme Court. The eleven justices of the court unanimously found that his decision to prorogue Parliament was unlawful because it had the effect of frustrating the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification.
The nub of the matter here is the response from Number 10. Citing precedent and custom, Johnson stated that he disagreed with the ruling and that prorogation had been used for centuries without challenge. “Let's be in no doubt”, he continued, “there are a lot of people who want to frustrate Brexit”.
Anonymous sources in Number 10 were even less careful. On September 22nd the Sunday Times ran an article quoting a threat from Number 10, warning the judiciary not to take sides over Brexit. The chair of the Bar Council responded the following day asking Number 10 not to threaten the independence of the judiciary and its place within the unwritten constitution.
These are interesting times, as the ancient Chinese curse runs. It is not normal for British prime ministers to be taken to court. It is not normal for them to indirectly threaten the judiciary. But again, it's not normal either for the Speaker of the House of Commons to allow the opposition to take control of parliamentary business and it's not normal for MPs to clap in the House of Commons.
In the late Roman Republic, the most successful Roman politicians were also the most innovative. Our politics in Britain is changing and the example of Rome teaches us that it is those politicians who ride that change who, will for good or ill, be the most successful.
Let's think of a few examples of the kind of innovativeness of the most successful Roman politicians, whose personal ambition took them beyond the limits of the unwritten constitution. Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great; these both used people's representatives to award themselves real power not for one year, as was the custom, but for several years in succession.
The Roman general Lucius Sulla invented new quasi-legal ways to murder his political opponents, possibly thousands of them. Mark Antony and Octavian resurrected and redefined old legitimate powers in order to divide up the empire between themselves.
Like Britain’s, the constitution of the Roman Republic was unwritten and flexible but that flexibility was both a strength and a weakness. It enabled politicians to technically observe the letter of the law while flagrantly violating its spirit.
So, what would Roman politicians make of Boris Johnson?
I hope to have shown here that they would recognise his approach there were, in fact, many Boris Johnsons in the turbulent last decades of the Roman Republic. He combines a remarkably effective mix of rhetorical skill and popular appeal with a strategic awareness that creating division can be more politically useful than creating consensus.
He recognises that there is considerable latitude in the unwritten constitution and he's prepared to exploit that latitude just as much as his opponents if not even more. He's compared himself to the Emperor Augustus and Winston Churchill, but the figures we've seen here are a much better fit: Publius Clodius, Tiberius Gracchus, and Julius Caesar.
Boris Johnson disproves the old adage, that those who do not study history are destined to repeat it. He has studied his Roman history and repeating it is precisely what he is trying to do.
Thank you.