The EU finds it difficult to understand what drives the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Quite simply, he is a fifth-century bc Athenian democrat living in a 21st-century oligarchic world. Ancient Greeks feared two conditions above all that would mark them out as losers and bring undying shame: humiliation (hubris is the key word) and
The combination of terror and outrage with which Brussels has greeted Greek Prime Minister Tsipras’s referendum tells us everything we ever needed to know about the EU, i.e. stuff the people — what have they to do with us? The farmer-hero Dikaiopolis in Aristophanes’ comedy Acharnians (425 BC) felt much as modern Greeks must do when the
Why do Greeks want to keep the euro, or remain in the European Union? The combative, creative, competitive, mercantile classical Greeks throve on independence. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) makes the point about competition by calling it Eris, ‘strife’, which he characterises as painful but also helpful. On the one hand, he said, it
So Cambridge University has accepted £4 million from the makers of Lego (snort) to fund a Lego chair (Argos sells a kit at £8.99) and a research centre into the importance of play (titter). One must not laugh (shriek). Aristotle (384–322 bc) might have approved — in part. At the start of his ground-breaking treatise on animal form
Apparently Fifa emperor Sepp Blatter received a ten-minute standing ovation from his 400 staff when he addressed them after his resignation. But why? Were they expressing sorrow at his departure? Relief? Or prudently watching their backs? Life was never easy around the Roman emperor either, whether he was among the people or in the imperial
In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a letter to a friend about a games festival held in the Roman colony Vienna (Vienne, south of Lyons). Vienna had been celebrating Greek-style gymnastic games as a result of a bequest, when the town’s mayor
Government claims that it will ‘free’ northern cities to turn themselves into ‘powerhouses’. Since most of them are held by Labour, this is obviously nonsense. The tedious tribal backbiting and recriminations will continue as usual. There is a better way. When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 bc, the Greek generals he had left in charge
With Len McCluskey, general secretary of the union Unite, keen to ensure ‘his’ members choose the next Labour leader, and the rail union RMT planning a full-blown strike, the trade unions are again doing what they do best. The Romans knew how to handle them. Romans were always suspicious of gatherings of people on the
The great Robert Harris has defended the pollsters who got the elections so wrong by quoting Cicero on the electorate’s fickleness. Cicero certainly acknowledged the problem when he was defending one Gnaeus Plancius in 54 bc, but made a rather different point. Plancius had been accused of rigging his election to the position of aedile (a
The great Robert Harris has defended the pollsters who got the recent elections so wrong by quoting Cicero on the electorate’s fickleness. Cicero certainly acknowledged the problem when he was defending one Gnaeus Plancius in 54 bc, but made a rather different point. Plancius had been accused of rigging his election to the position of
Whatever the result of the election, it has become clearer by the day that our ‘democracy’ is run by politicians not in the interests of the dêmos but of themselves. If the polls have been right, the most egregious example is even now unfolding before our eyes: the attempts to stitch up a coalition, which
Honduras wants to establish start-up cities to experiment with alternative economic, regulatory, and legal systems. Could this concept help stop mass migration into Europe? Ancient Greeks, living in a time and place when poverty was endemic, were adventurers and readily took to the seas to establish their start-ups abroad, all around the coasts of the
Attack Ed Miliband and sing up the long-term economic plan: that is the now obviously useless scheme devised by the Tory party’s strategy adviser Lynton Crosby, against the best advice of Plutarch and Aristotle. The Greek biographer Plutarch (c. ad 100) could have advised him against the attack-dog tactic. In an essay entitled ‘Turning enemies
Secretary of State for Defence Michael Fallon’s claim that Ed Miliband, having practised on his brother, would also stab his country in the back by not renewing Trident has not gone down well. As a classicist, Mr Fallon should surely know there is a more effective rhetoric at hand. When an ancient Greek wanted to
To judge from elections, the purpose of politics is to win power by promising to make people better off. Plato, feeling this made the politician the equivalent of a procurer or pimp, argued that the purpose of politics was to make people not better off, but simply better — better humans, and therefore better able
Alex Salmond, the ex-first minister who proved incapable of making Scotland independent, has assured the world that he and his handful of SNP MPs will force Westminster to dance to his tune, or else. So his response to humiliating failure is the threat of political blackmail. At least it is now clear what the SNP stands
In the UK the richest 1 per cent — 300,000 — of the working population control 23 per cent of the nation’s total wealth. Austerity and cuts loom. Oxfam says there are 13 million ‘relatively’ poor in the country. But the poor seem rather relaxed about it. The ancients, however, knew the poor could not be ignored.
A ‘prominent liberal cleric’ in London has held an Islamic prayer service in his church, St John’s Waterloo. ‘We all share these traditions,’ he announced, ‘so let us celebrate our shared traditions, by giving thanks to the God that we love, Allah.’ How deliciously pagan of him. One way ancient Greeks tried to make sense of
The Green party’s manifesto appears to make saving the planet only a small element in its otherwise painfully unoriginal agenda. This is a pity. People have been wreaking environmental havoc for thousands of years, Greeks and Romans included. Deforestation and subsequent soil erosion were the most serious example of such havoc in the ancient world. Wood
In responding as they did to the Daily Telegraph ‘sting’, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind may well have done nothing wrong by the letter of parliamentary law. But people’s perception of behaviour is quite another matter. The MPs’ bloated self-importance and Rifkind’s shameful defence of his actions, that no one would want to become