History

The biggest cruise ship yet built has just been launched, but in like-for-like terms, it comes nowhere near the Syracusia, built c. 240 bc on the orders of the Sicilian tyrant Hiero II. A small ancient Greek freighter might be about 45ft long, a trireme 120ft, a large merchantman 130ft. The Syracusia was nearly three times longer, constructed out of enough material to build 60 triremes. It had three floors. The lowest contained the cargo. On the second were the 30 cabins, covered in multicoloured mosaics telling the story of Homer’s Iliad. The cooks’ galley came complete with a seawater fish-tank, with a 20,000-gallon freshwater cistern in the bow. The

St. Petersburg University in Russia is (desperately?) inviting scholars worldwide to a conference in September celebrating Mikhail Speransky. It was he who, on the orders of the Russian emperor Nicholas I, published in 1830 a 45-volume compilation of all the laws of the Russian Empire, which he reduced to a 15-volume digest by 1839. It was to form the basis of the Tsarist legal system. The precedent for this was, of course, the legal Digest of Rome’s eastern emperor Justinian (AD 533). This was a compendium of 2,000 volumes of Roman law published between the 1st and 3rd centuries ad. Its purpose was to produce a contemporary, definitive account of

Historians in Russia have a long and craven record, now going back centuries, of being economical with the truth about their current regime. The Roman historian Tacitus had a fascinating explanation for why such economy was also the case under the early Roman emperors. First, some background. Livy’s 142-book moral and romantic history of Rome stretched from earliest times to 9 bc, including the end of the republic in 27 bc when Augustus became emperor. Livy saw libertas as a key component of Roman success, and put it down to the way in which, after the expulsion of the kings of Rome (508 bc), a republican system developed in which

Patriarch Kirill is Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church; and one of his flock is that committed Orthodox Christian Vladimir Putin. Kirill applauds Putin’s genocidal assault on Ukraine. Has he never heard of Archbishop Ambrose of Milan and his dealings with the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius? It all began in ad 390, in the important Greek city of Thessalonica, when Butheric, the commanding general of the Roman field army and a friend of Theodosius, imprisoned a popular chariot-racer. The mob, determined to see him racing at the next games, demanded his release. Butheric refused. A major riot ensued, and since much of the

Is Putin a tyrant? Aristotle (384-322 bc) might well have thought so. Seeing the turannos as a deviant type of king, Aristotle tested the distinction under four headings. Was he subject to the law? Did he rule for a set term, or for ever? Was he elected? And did he rule over willing subjects? We may judge Aristotle’s answer from the image he drew of the tyrant as a master of slaves who, knowing that his subjects hated him, did everything in his power to ensure they were incapable of moving against him. First, therefore, the tyrant stamped on anyone exhibiting the slightest independence of mind, since ‘the man who

Was it Socrates who said that chaos was the natural state of mankind, and tyranny the usual remedy? Actually it was Santayana, and boy, did he ever get it right. My friend Christopher Mills has given me a terrific book, The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, about the making and breaking of the Nazi economy. I thought I knew everything there is to know about that period, but I hadn’t thought of global economic realities, the ones that actually won the war. Germany’s limited territory and lack of natural resources led to war. Germans had been starving since the end of the Great War, and needed the corn of

Across oceans and continents, less favoured nations produce more history than they can consume. In these islands, the English — as opposed to the Scots and the Irish — merely consume a lot of well-written military history. The other evening, stimulated by a few decent bottles, someone raised a hoary question. If we could have been born in an earlier century — pre-20th — which would we have chosen? What epoch was worthy to compare with the Antonines and those Good Emperors, as praised by Gibbon? The consensus was that, assuming a strong constitution and plenty of money, the long 19th century in Britain, from the end of the Napoleonic

Yet again ‘doctors’ with no qualifications have been found advertising dodgy but expensive products and treatments, in this case, injections of unregulated Botox variants to remove wrinkles. Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) inveighed against such practices 2,000 years ago. Romans had a love-hate relationship with the Greeks, and medicine was no exception. In his massive Naturalis Historia — a 36-book encyclopaedia of the animal, vegetable and mineral world — Pliny acknowledged the enormous influence of Greek medical theory, i.e. that health required a balance between the four bodily liquids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) and their many associated ‘powers’ in matching groups of four (e.g. heat, cold,

The Prime Minister has been having some trouble with his inner circle of advisers. Tacitus supplies fine examples of how they worked in Rome. Emperors chose whomever they liked to advise them. Augustus, for example, chose men like Agrippa and Maecenas, who had provided excellent service for him while Rome was still (just) a republic. The fourth emperor C-C-Claudius, by contrast, despised by the imperial family but thrust into power by the military, put his trust in politically experienced and highly efficient Greek freedmen (ex-slaves). Pallas was put in charge of the treasury, Narcissus in charge of correspondence (nothing got past him), and Callistus in charge of justice and law.

The great thing about classified ads is that they have not usually been created by an agency — so what you get is the advertiser’s own best efforts to announce themselves, and what they have to offer, in just 20 words or so. You can glean a lot from what they say, and not always in the way intended. Take this particularly telling example from the Spectator personal ads a couple of years ago: ‘Looking to meet woman on HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy).’ That he added (and paid for) the last three words tells you more than he could ever understand. Others are far more engaging — like the ‘charismatic

Whatever the result of Sue Gray’s report on ‘gatherings’ in Downing Street, there is a political lesson to be learned: any excuse will do, even a party, when people are out to get you, as the Roman historian Tacitus (ad 56–c.ad 120) well knew. ad 69: the emperor Vitellius was lying seriously ill when he noticed a mansion with lights ablaze throughout the night. He was told that a ‘lavish, licentious’ party was being held in honour of Junius Blaesus. Critics denounced it and Vitellius angrily agreed (Tacitus commented: ‘There are people on the lookout for signs of the emperor’s displeasure’). Lucius Vitellius, the emperor’s brother, who loathed Blaesus, now

I was recently reading the works of the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, who at one point mentions a ghost craze that had broken out in Cirencester. The ‘apparition’ was reported to have disappeared with ‘a curious perfume and most melodious twang’. Reading this I unconsciously got ready for a man as wise as Aubrey to pooh-pooh the whole thing, pouring scorn on such superstition. But no; while Aubrey does indeed have a correction, it comes via his friend — one Mr W. Lilly — who ventures that the common view is wrong, for he ‘believes it was a fairy’. One of the most familiar joys of reading is the moment

Why don’t today’s children know more about history? In an age when information has never been easier to access, it’s alarming how many youngsters are ignorant about the past. In July, a survey of 1,000 schoolchildren found that four out of ten had no idea what the Battle of Britain was, while another four out of ten had never heard of Cleopatra. More than half didn’t know the Romans spoke Latin. Of course every generation complains that children are ignorant of facts that we used to take for granted. Often it’s simply a question of changing priorities: where children once learned about Walpole and Gladstone, they now learn about the