Ancient and modern

According to a top TV scientist, in the beginning there was ‘empty space’ and ‘energy’. After a big bang, the universe started out as a ‘featureless void’. But emerging particles ‘organised themselves into the universe we see today’ by ‘clumping together’ because of ‘deviation’ from perfect smoothness in ‘warped’ space. Meanwhile, cosmic light particles are

Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction and drills under the guidance of a good teacher, which might be hard work but was satisfying and good for pupil self-esteem. Romans would have seconded that. In ad 403 St Jerome wrote a letter

Since apologising has recently been all the rage, refusing to apologise, as Harriet Harman has done over the NCCL’s connection with the Paedophile Information Exchange, comes as a very pleasant surprise. Ancient Greeks would have understood exactly what she was doing. Socrates’ Apology (written by Plato) had nothing to do with apologising. Quite the opposite,

Tyrants never learn, do they? From Caligula through Gadaffi to the ex-Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, they rule not to serve the people but themselves — and all in virtually identical ways. The emperor Tiberius populated Capri with palaces and grottos where lovers entwined themselves for the pleasure of his guests, like Yanukovych’s gardens dotted with

Since the Somerset Levels are a flood plain, nature will flood it. Romans had no problems with that. Much of Rome was low-lying and pretty marshy. The main drain — the cloaca maxima, only incidentally a sewer as well — was constructed early in Rome’s history to make the forum inhabitable. The 250-mile-long Tiber flooded every four

What a song and dance about a tax rise affecting a minuscule proportion of the richest in society! Greeks would have been baffled. Classical Greeks did not have the automatic admiration for self-made millionaires that we do. They felt that only the very lucky or the very wicked could aspire to wealth. ‘No one gets

There is, apparently, an ‘obesity epidemic’ in the UK, such that two million people could benefit from weight-loss surgery. Ancient Greeks would have argued that they would benefit much more from a dose of self-control. The ancients associated fatness with a lazy lifestyle. No change there, then. The doctor Hippocrates, well aware that sudden death was

A ‘meme’ is ‘an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture, often by mimicry’. If selfies, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, tweets and all the other means of drawing attention to oneself are anything to go by, rampant narcissism (derived from the mythical figure Narcissus) is the current, dominant meme. The

The ancients were an inquisitive lot, a characteristic shown to best effect in works like Aristotle’s Problems (‘Why do sex-maniacs’ eyelashes fall out?’) and Plutarch’s Greek and Roman Questions. Among much else, Plutarch asked, ‘Why do Romans adopt the month of January as the beginning of the new year?’ He began by doing the maths:

‘And lo, there were shepherds in the fields, watching over their flocks by night…’   Reading recently that it was the 25th anniversary of the invention of the world wide web, I reflected (yet again) on the difficulty of creating in any of our minds that sense of the world as experienced by the Greeks

To watch the Revd Paul Flowers being grilled by the Treasury Select Committee on his role in the demise of the Co-op Bank is to watch a master charlatan at work: dignified, polite and supremely self-assured, even as he is stripped to the bone by Andrew Tyrie. The ancient world boasted plenty of such, and

The grim tales of ‘modern slavery’ that are currently emerging across the UK make one wonder whether ancient Roman slavery was preferable. The fact that it was institutionalised means that it could, if you were lucky, be endurable. There was nothing secretive about slavery in Rome. It was felt to be part of the natural

Prime Minister Cameron has rejected the proposal that the age of sexual consent be reduced from 16 to 15, arguing that it was needed to ‘protect children’. In the ancient world, there was no such notion. Girls were to be protected from rape and seduction, but that was because they were destined for marriage, whose

On 21 November The Spectator is hosting a discussion about addiction — disease or choice? — and how we should best treat it. This neatly coincides with ‘Live like a Stoic’ week (25 November–1 December), which culminates in academics and doctors discussing how far problems of everyday life can be solved by the Stoic practice

‘Democracy has bad taste’, declared potter Grayson Perry in his Reith Lectures on the BBC about art. Tell that to the inventors of democracy. Ancient Greeks would have been appalled at the reverence accorded the views of potters, artists, chefs and other riff-raff about their work, let alone anything else. The satirist Lucian says of

A new book about Colonel Gaddafi goes into shocking detail about his monstrous sexual appetites. He used rape as a political weapon and instrument of blackmail. Viagra was on constant supply for himself and his soldiers. His harem travelled with him under the guise of ‘delegations’ or ‘journalists’ (‘Hi, girls,’ Tony Blair greeted them). It