Has any public figure of recent memory ever admitted to feeling shame for anything they have said or done? As a moral term ‘shame’ appears to have disappeared almost entirely from normal discourse (bar the self-satisfied ‘fat-shaming’). That tells us much about ourselves. Aristotle discusses the term in some depth. He does not see it
For otherwise healthy plebs in the Roman world, survival depended on four Fs: farming (the sole source of food and money), fighting, family and friends. Everything else that made life worth living meant having some degree of political control over your own existence, which could be summed up in a fifth F: freedom, or political
Many years ago, and well retired, I was working in my study at home when the phone rang and a voice said, “This is Tom Stoppard. David West put me onto you.” David was the professor of Latin at Newcastle University and it emerged that Tom used him when he had queries about Latin, but
‘I died of a surfeit of doctors,’ read one Roman funerary inscription. But where did this surfeit come from?
The Greeks are better thought of as overseas settlers, often driven by land hunger, starvation, commerce or simply the search for a better life.
She stands up to her suitors and they admire her trick to delay her marriage
The mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on
