Ancient rome

Cicero would have agreed with Putin

Last September Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a ‘unipolar’ world, saying that the national revival of Russia was in line with its foreign policy objective of a multi-polar world and the prevailing of international law over the rule of brute force. How very Roman of him. Cicero pointed out that if one wanted violence to end, the law must prevail; if it did not, violence would reign supreme. To no avail. Every five years, the Roman censors asked the gods ‘to improve and strengthen the position of the Roman people’. There was nothing unique about this. Many states prayed for a similar outcome for themselves, while the historian Polybius

Ancient Rome’s fraudulent foreign students

Foreign students getting on to courses under false pretences, overstaying their welcome and so on are nothing new. Ask the Romans. In the 4th century AD, the Roman empire was tottering, and Diocletian decided to sort it out. The resulting increase in bureaucracy led to a large rise in taxation. This laid a particularly heavy burden on the wallets of the wealthy who ran local government (the decuriones), because it was their duty not only to collect local taxes but also to make up any shortfall. But there were tax exemptions, one of which was for students — a luxury only the rich could afford. The result was a sudden enthusiasm