After a damning IMF report on the EU’s botching of the Greek financial crisis, a Eurocrat snootily commented that hindsight was all very well, but…. Had the EU shown a little foresight, it might not have landed us in the current disastrous mess. Ancient Greeks were fascinated by the subject. The myth of Pro-metheus (‘Fore-sight’)
Last week Matthew Parris argued that Ukip was ‘extremist’ because its supporters thought of the EU’s ‘methods, despotism and oppression of them and their daily lives as barely distinguishable from those of the Soviet Union’. All right, if Mr Parris insists; but not all ‘despots’ are like Stalin. We entered the EU voluntarily, but as
Syrians continue to slaughter each other, and seem eager to draw others into the conflict. Thucydides, the great Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), would strongly resist. Thucydides starts by saying that he began his history because he expected the war would be ‘great and very well worth recording’.
So Mr Cameron is offering us the faintest prospect of a referendum on the EU. Ancient Athenians would have laughed him to scorn. Meeting in the Assembly roughly every week, Athenian males over the age of 18 decided all Athenian public policy. But since there were thousands of them, who could hardly just turn up
Sir Alex Ferguson is going to be in big trouble in retirement: how will he control or defuse his famous rages, now that they have no outlet? Ancients took a mixed view of the emotion. ‘Anger’ is the first word of Western literature — the anger of Achilles, with which Homer’s Iliad starts. Even though
Ukip is on the march, and the F word on the lips of every ashen-faced MP in the House — or the NF word, to be exact. What should be NF’s next step? Let the Athenian comic poet Aristophanes insert a tiny thought under his seething trilby. Aristophanes’ Men of Acharnae (425 BC), reflecting the
The Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, has said the arts world must make the case for public funding by focusing on its economic, not artistic, value; it must ‘hammer home the value of culture to our economy’. The ancients would have wondered what she was taking about. There was no concept of ‘the arts’ in the
Every Polly in the country is up in arms about the ‘divisiveness’ of Mrs Thatcher. But for ancient Greeks, opposition, or polarity, was as inherent in the nature of things as it is in our adversarial political system. The first Greek philosopher Thales said: ‘There are three attributes for which I am grateful to Fortune:
Class is back in the news, and the BBC’s online do-it-yourself ‘class calculator’ confirms that wealth is the overriding determinant of class status. No change there, then. The Athenians had a term for a member of the upper class: he was (pl.) kalos kai agathos (shortened to kalos kagathos), ‘handsome and good in action’. It
The new Archbishop of Canterbury has argued against ‘pinning hopes on individuals’. The Roman historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) would have found that most bizarre. Livy’s 142-book Ab Urbe Condita traced the history of Rome from the city’s foundation in 753 BC to the first Roman emperor Augustus (died AD 14). For Livy, it was individuals above
One hundred professors have complained that Michael Gove’s new curriculum will stifle children’s ‘creativity’ because they will have to learn things. How very true! The Roman educationist Quintilian (c. AD 35–100) argued that memory was the surest sign of a child’s ability. So when Cicero said that the purpose of education was to ‘exercise the brain,
The EU’s decision to ignore its own rules and steal money directly from the pockets of the citizens of Cyprus is an important development in the history of an institution that long ago gave up any pretence of being a ‘Union’. It may as well rename itself the European Empire and be done with it.
Every ancient Greek juror would have warmed to their descendant Vicky Pryce, when she admitted in court that she wanted revenge on her faithless husband. Revenge, in other words, did not just happen in Greek myth. It was a splendid reason for going to law. In Plato’s Republic, ‘justice’ was defined as ‘rendering to every
The Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy (Latin caelebs, ‘unmarried’), by which Cardinal O’Brien was bound, is not a dogma, but a discipline. In other words, it can be altered at the rotation of an encyclical. Like much else in the Catholic tradition, it has its roots in the pagan world. Asceticism derives from the Greek askêsis,
So many people’s reputation is under threat these days — from bankers to cardinals to the Lib Dem peer Lord Rennard — that one imagines reputation management agencies, online or otherwise, are doing terrific business. The ancients got there more than two millennia ago. Greeks regularly expressed their desire to be virtuous in terms of
A senior civil servant in the Department of Education, having lost a case for ‘bullying’ brought against its special advisers, took her grievance to a tribunal and was promptly awarded an out-of-court settlement of £25,000. Hacks on a Sunday newspaper were jubilant, devoting three pieces to it: it must have been bullying after all, the
Last week, Stoics applauded the idea that the doctor might in certain situations give the patient a book, not a pill, on the grounds that thinking rationally solved all personal problems. So why was Stoicism associated with the stiff upper lip? What was rational about that? Since Stoics believed that divinity/reason permeated the universe ‘like
It has been proposed that, to deal with certain sorts of emotional problems for which we go to the doctor, we should be given an improving book to read. Quite right too, the Stoic would reply. ‘Stoicism’ derives from the Greek stoa, the portico in Athens where from 300 BC its inventor Zeno (a Cypriot)
Last week Rod Liddle suggested that on Question Time the Cambridge classicist Professor Mary Beard did not distinguish herself on the subject of immigration, and concluded that the BBC hired her only for her looks. Socrates would have had something to say about that. In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, Socrates opens a discussion with the famous
Young girls are constantly being told that they will have failed unless they get a top job as prime minister, CEO of a Footsie company, rocket scientist or cutting-edge TV presenter, preferably all four together. Plato would not have objected, arguing in his Republic that men and women possessed exactly the same innate abilities for