A recent analysis has concluded that ‘British public opinion has got so used to things being bad/chaotic it’s hard to imagine anything else.’ But what ‘things’? Perhaps electioneering politics (always chaotic), but more likely the myriad social, legal and medical services the state claims to provide. No such services (let alone ‘rights’) were available in the ancient world. Family apart, you were on your own. Simple survival was the aim.
The farmer poet Hesiod (c. 680 BC) came up with his advice on the issue in an attack on his lazy, disputatious brother Perses: a man can have time for arguments when he has a year’s worth of grain laid up in his barns. Straight-dealing men do not suffer famine or blight: they work hard and become rich in flocks.
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