Peter Jones

Boris’s waiting game

If you want to make it to the top, sometimes you’re going to need patience

issue 15 August 2015

While the Labour party rakes over its past in an effort to find a policy for its future, the commentators continue to speculate about Boris’s role, if any, in a Tory party increasingly dominated by chancellor George Osborne. Romans would have sympathised.

Life in the imperial court in Rome was not necessarily one long orgy. One’s fortunes rested precariously on the good will of the emperor, who could inspire both love, hate and fear, as the philosopher Epictetus pointed out, because he had the ‘power to confer the greatest advantages’ such as ‘wealth and office — tribunates, praetorships, consulships’. In a striking image Epictetus envisaged men in the court scrabbling for positions like children at parties scrambling for nuts and figs. And the price one paid for such trivia was to ‘stay up at night, rush this way and that, kiss men’s hands, rot away at other men’s doors, say and do much that is not worthy of a free man, sends presents to many people, and gifts of hospitality every day.’

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