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Every word Boris Johnson has said this past week has been pored over by people keen to understand the aspirations of the new Prime Minister. But when he spoke after being elected Conservative Party leader on Monday, it seemed to me that the structure as much as the content of his speech was revealing. It’s been observed his oratory reflected the pattern of one of the greatest speeches of ancient Greece – what’s called the funeral oration of the statesman and general, Pericles. Pericles gave this speech at the end of the first Peloponnesian War as part of the annual public funeral for the war dead. And like this speech, Boris Johnson’s paid tribute to those who’d gone before, to the vanquished, it noted the difficulties he faced from what he’d inherited and called on those left, to serve their country. Mr Johnson is a great admirer of the Greeks. He read Classics at Oxford, and in a public debate with classicist Mary Beard in 2015, he spoke up for Greece as the greater ancient civilization rather than Rome. The ancient Greeks are certainly fundamental to Western civilization, providing the foundations of philosophy and theology. And Greek thought is as important as the Bible to the theology of the Catholic Church, into which Mr Johnson was baptized as a baby. So when the new leader spoke in his acceptance speech about managing the jostling sets of instincts of the human heart, it occurred to me that it is worth turning to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, profoundly influenced by Aristotle, to seek an answer. A key human instinct is to seek satisfaction of some kind, what we might call happiness. But nowadays happiness often denotes materialism. A holiday makes people happy, or a new car. Or their children or their partner cause happiness. But the Greeks had other ideas, as did Aquinas. The greatest achievement for them was eudaimonia, which can be translated as human flourishing or well-being. That human flourishing has nothing to do with two weeks holiday, however enjoyable. Rather, it requires a life of virtuous activity and reason, according to Aristotle. The Aristotelian virtues adopted by Aquinas included courage, being just, prudence and temperance. To live the virtuous life is to secure true fulfilment, a good attained by our own will. We’ve got used to thinking in modern times that a moral person regulates their behaviour by obeying rules. But dig deeper into Christian theology and there’s the idea of practising virtue as the way to true morality – and it came to us from the ancient Greeks, that our new Prime Minister admires so much. We’ve a lot to thank them for.