Ancient greece

The plague that struck Athens in the summer of 430 bc was a killer: it lasted for two years, returned after a year, and carried off a third of Athens’ manpower, including Pericles. From the historian Thucydides’ famous description, the plague — he caught it but recovered — bore certain resemblances to Covid-19 (allowing for differences in severity), but also invites reflection. He is the first Greek to mention two common illness-related phenomena: contagion — he says that, because of their exposure, there was a high death-rate among doctors and among those with the courage and sense of duty to try to care for the sick — and some immunity

The PM is insisting that the briefings he finds in his red box every evening should be, well, brief, and has limited them to four sides of A4. That is three too many. Emperors too had in and out boxes and knew what hard work they could be. Seleucus, Greek king of Asia, was said to have complained that ‘If people knew what a burden it was reading and writing so many letters, they would not bother to pick up a discarded royal crown’. It was a common gripe of Roman emperors, too, who had a remarkably small secretariat — Julius Caesar famously annoyed the crowd at the games when

An impeachment trial is overseen by Congress and Senate, who both make the law and (in this case) sit in judgment on it, ignoring the modern legal principle of the separation of powers. Athenians would have been shocked, not because they believed in the separation of powers (their citizens too made the law in assembly and sat in judgment in the law courts) but because in democratic Athens it was citizens that decided verdicts, and in randomly selected and therefore unpredictable juries. By contrast, two elected oligarchic cabals decide impeachment trials, usually making acquittal a foregone conclusion. Athenians would have been appalled: what was even remotely democratic about that? Statistics

Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to imagine if random political selection would be a good thing today. The answer is a resounding yes. Both Socrates and Aristotle questioned fundamental norms and values, and if they were alive today they would certainly question our acceptance of career politicians who have never had any other profession. (Corbyn, Biden… I could go on.) Socrates was sceptical about many things, especially the arts, because he believed they led us away from the truth. Yet nowadays so-called ‘artists’ influence public opinion as never before. The fact that even numbskull rappers have

Rufus Norris, the National Theatre’s artistic director, has revealed that all those tedious ancient plays will from now on be updated with a ‘modern twist’ to ‘bring in a fresh audience’. By way of example, he assures us that the forthcoming reworking of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 bc) will still be ‘a very valid Greek play’. Valid? What does he mean by that? The original was pretty ‘valid’, with its chorus and three masked male actors playing all the parts, speaking and singing in complex metrical forms in high linguistic register; and it was a serious, elevated medium, inhabited by high-status characters. Most tragedies were drawn from myth. That too was

As soon as the blaze that nearly brought down Notre Dame was extinguished, two questions were asked: how did it catch fire? And how will it be rebuilt? So too with a famous Greek temple. In 560 bc in Ephesus on the west coast of modern Turkey was built a massive temple to Artemis (Roman Diana), the largest building we know of from the Greek world and the first to be constructed out of marble. It was sponsored by Croesus, king of Lydia, a man so rich you could commit suicide by jumping off his wallet. But it was intentionally burned down in 356 bc by a man called Herostratus,