History

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

The Globe theatre’s project to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, as if that would make plays like The Tempest ‘acceptable’ to them and their audience, would have met with no approval at all from Plato (c. 425-348 BC). For him, all poetry and the arts were corrupt, and in his Republic, a discussion of how an ideal state should be constituted, he called for them all to be banned. Plato’s argument begins from exactly the same position as the Globe’s: that all art, but especially that which deals in words, has an educational effect. In other words, it instructs, whether it likes it or not (and Greeks did indeed argue that this was

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to ‘bind’ the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to ‘hobble’ the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before

So James Bond is back, doing exactly what he always does, inviting the audience into a fantasy world for the pleasure of wondering ‘What if?’ In this respect, Bond films resemble the work of the world’s first recorded comic poet, the Athenian Aristophanes (c. 440-380 bc). His premise was that Athens’s problems could be solved only by little people of no importance, not the greedy, vain and incompetent leaders in the public eye. So the scene was set for the hero(ine) to put them firmly in their place. One favourite subject for his comic fantasies was the long war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc). Take three examples. In 421

In the 18th century, art historians’ admiration for the beauty of white-ish ancient Greek marble statuary led people to draw conclusions, on the back of their belief in classical ‘authority’, about white superiority. This, we are told, turned many classicists into racists. Today some members of the Cambridge Classics Faculty feel the white-ish plaster-cast replicas of those statues in their museum ‘entrench[es] racism’ in the same way. Their proposal is to put up a notice about it. Wow. Go, Cambridge! That’ll show those racists! And surely those still disgustingly white originals all over the world need notices as well. Two things need to be said. This is a modern ‘problem’:

On 11 March this year my father passed away from prostate cancer after several weeks in a hospital in central Athens. As we sat around his bed, I remember thinking that I was watching 3,000 years of Greek history slowly perish before my eyes. My father was an only child, and I am British. His line of Greeks is at an end. Now fires have ravaged Greece and the olive trees that stood in my ancestral village for centuries have burnt to the ground. This year has seen the almost literal burning away of my roots: because if I am British, I am also a Greek — of sorts. This

The Prime Minister is urging citizens not to throw caution to the winds when lockdown ends on 19 July but to behave ‘responsibly’. But there seems little incentive when legions of psychiatrists, lawyers, counsellors, social workers etc appear to insist you must never blame people (only ‘society’ or ‘the Tory cuts’) for anything. Can the ancients help? For ancient Greeks, it was the prospect of public shaming that kept people behaving responsibly. In Homer’s Iliad, the first work of European literature (c. 700 bc), the heroes who always feared what other people would say about them if their behaviour did not come up to what was expected of them exemplified