Ancient greece

What to do about today’s Olympic drug cheats? Since ancient Greeks did not do chemistry, drugs were not a problem. They could, however, be banned from competing on many other grounds. The system worked as follows. The one-week games, always staged at Olympia, were overseen by a panel of judges from the nearby town of Elis (36 miles away), and it was these judges who determined the eligibility or otherwise of any competitor. Their key requirement was that every contestant turn up at Elis a month before the games began. Here the athletes completed their final training in the facilities provided for the events (various categories of running, jumping, throwing,

Is the Labour leadership hopeful Owen Smith, who longs to reverse the obviously undemocratic outcome of the recent referendum, aware of the company he is keeping — artists, writers, pop singers and other riffraff? Plutarch would not have rated these know-alls as especially useful allies. Plutarch (c. AD 100) mused on whether classical Athens gained its reputation more from its military or cultural achievements. He agreed that Athens was the ‘mother and well-disposed nurse’ of many arts, inventing some and burnishing others. But it was all a matter of priorities. Take historians and painters: since they lifted their subject matter from military leaders’ famous victories, they had little to add.

Tony Blair has excused himself for the Iraq war by saying that he did what he believed was right. But no one was suggesting that he had done what he believed was wrong. The charge was a matter of integrity: that he deceived Parliament and turned a blind eye to the evidence on weapons of mass destruction. The Athenians knew a sharpster when they saw one. The historian Diodorus described how in 477 BC Themistocles, a man admired by the Athenians but known to be something of a con man, conceived of a plan to turn Piraeus, at that time a rocky outcrop, into a full-blown commercial and military harbour.

Brilliant Oxford undergraduates argue that it is right to prevent us saying things they object to, because speech they do not like is the equivalent of actions they do not like. They had better not read classics, then. There is no safe space there. Greeks made a clear distinction between logos (‘account, reckoning, explanation, story, reason, debate, speech’, cf. ‘logic’ and all those ‘-ologies’) and ergon (‘work, deed, action’). For a Greek, to reject logos was to reject the expression of thought; and so to close down any possibility of people giving an account or reason for why they were thinking and acting as they did; and therefore to prevent any

It does seem extraordinary that the increasingly puce-faced Mr Cameron offered us an ‘in-out’ referendum and is now telling us that ‘out’ would mean the end of the world as we know it. What on earth did he think he was doing? His reaction is to eviscerate MPs who support ‘out’, and intentionally deprive us who will actually make the decision of information enabling us to do so. People power is clearly not for him. One of the great virtues of 5th-century bc Athenian direct democracy was that those who made the policy decisions were citizens meeting weekly in Assembly. Parties did not exist. So there were no such things as

Last week we read that Isis was crumbling, but still a force to be reckoned with. That is true, but its army is by definition a mercenary one, fighting for pay, and when that runs out, so will they. Ancient Greeks knew all about mercenaries. The 6th century bc Cretan mercenary Hybrias proclaimed ‘I have great wealth — a spear, a sword and a fine shield to save my skin. [Ironically] With these I plough, I reap, I tread the sweet grapes and am called master of my serfs. All those that dare not hold athe spear and sword and fine shield to save their skin, all bow and kiss my