The country ‘needs’ more scientists, but no one yet seems able to crack the problem. Ancient attitudes may suggest a way ahead. The earliest Greek ‘scientists’, c. 600 bc, speculated about how the world was made. They assumed there was a basic stuff (or stuffs) from which everything derived, and argued about what it might
Journalists are paid to be thought-provoking, but something very odd comes over them when they unfold their thoughts on the subject of Latin. Neal Ascherson, for example, once argued in the Independent on Sunday that he had been taught Latin at Eton as ‘a rite of exclusion for those outside, a ceremony of submission for
Elephants have been characterised as highly sensitive, socially aware and intelligent because they have noticed in the mirror a white cross marked on their head. What a pathetic test! Jumbo can do far better than that. The ancients speculated whether animals knew God, had memory, foresight or emotion, could distinguish between the good and the
Whatever the eventual result of the West’s incursion into Iraq, the Iraqi people will have to rewrite their history to make sense of the occupation. Doubtless the West will try to influence the outcome — but surely not as cleverly as the Roman emperor Hadrian wooed the Greek world. It helped that the Romans in
When an emotional Tony Blair bade farewell to the Labour party conference, he said how hard it was to give up, but needs must. The ancients too knew all about the love of power: but at least there was a serious price to pay for failure. Today’s failures simply wind up in the House of
David Cameron, once a PR man for a TV company, has brought all his skills to bear on becoming the epitome of everything New Tory stands for, like, er, yes, of course, families (wow!) and the NHS (no!). Is this why he comes over as little more than a pretty windsock, without an idea in
Craig Brown’s exquisite disembowelling of the ‘publicist’ Max Clifford in the review pages the other week would have reminded the Greek comedian Aristophanes (c. 450–386 bc) of his attacks on a similar pest in the Athenian world — the sukophant
A group of gangsters’ molls in Pereira, which evidently has the highest murder rate in Colombia, has decided to withhold sex from their boyfriends until they give up their guns. Inevitably they have been likened to the women in Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata (staged in Athens in February 411 bc) whose purpose was to persuade their men
Gordon Brown has promised that, when he comes to absolute power, he alone (not parliamentary colleagues, let alone the people) will appoint a cabinet ‘of all talents’ to do his bidding. Even the Romans were more democratic than that. Roman toffs naturally took it for granted that none but they could legislate effectively. As Cicero
The sixtysomething Mick Jagger is currently bringing tears of nostalgia to all eyes as he relives his glory days of 40 years ago, singing pop songs. In one respect, at any rate, Cicero would have applauded him, as he explains in his essay On Old Age (44 bc). De senectute is an imaginary conversation staged
We are hardly out of a long winter and already parts of the country are celebrating the traditional Festival of the Summer Water-Shortage, in which the god Hôspipês and his divine consort Sprinkla are ritually banished from the earth for six months, to be gloriously resurrected in the autumn. All very Demeter and Persephone. Strange
A Guardian journalist seems saddened that the departure of the previous editor could signal that ‘The Spectator’s similarities with the last days of the Roman empire are apparently over’. It is even more saddening to report that they never came close. Elagabalus, Roman emperor ad 218–222, showed what could be done if you put your
It is a general rule that public services rarely work properly, if at all. But over the past 60 years there has been one shining exception — grammar schools. Yet New Labour agrees with great thinkers like the IRA hero and sometime Ulster education minister Martin McGuinness that the single example of our public services
Before the dramatic expansion of Penguin Classics, it was almost impossible to find a translation of anything in Latin or Greek. Schoolboys were reduced to furtively ordering Brodies or Kelly’s Keys from the local bookshop. The great exception was the Loeb Classical Library. This was a series sponsored by James Loeb, a Harvard-educated American banker
Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome on BBC2 ended in nightmare: that, in Boris’s view, only when the EU has the equivalent of an emperor can it hope to emulate the achievements of the Roman empire in uniting disparate peoples under a single banner. But since it will never have an emperor, is the
In view of the new Tory leader David Cameron’s call for ‘social enterprise zones’, where local communities deal with local social problems, it may be worth reminding him of the alimentary schemes that the Romans developed for helping the children of the poor (alimentum, ‘provisions, maintenance’). The general idea was that private individuals and public
The British are about to replace the Americans in Afghanistan. Let us hope they take a good life of Alexander with them — Arrian or Quintus Curtius Rufus will do — because conditions for military campaigns have not changed much since then. When Alexander finally defeated Darius III and his Persian army in 329 bc
The principles behind ‘synthetic phonics’, the latest educational reading nostrum, have been around for thousands of years. Heaps of papyrus exercises, exercise-books (and a primary school textbook) have been found, dating from the Greek world of the 5th century bc. The first thing to be learnt was the Greek alphabet, by means of a metrical,
Eheu, the long, hot summer idyll proved too much for the classical scholars among you. The entries for Round 2, therefore, will be held over to Round 3 (or new entries may be submitted). Rules for the final round to decide the Cup Winners are as usual: 1. Only one entry, in only one section,
A new exhibition of ancient Persian material at the British Museum has brought out the usual affirmations about how wonderfully humane and civilised Persians were, and how vicious the Greeks were in painting a picture of them as slavish, effeminate subjects of an oriental despotism that has helped pervert Western views of the East ever