First Gordon Brown removed billions of pounds from our pensions; now he is about to land 20,000 pensioners with vast tax bills by cancelling a perfectly legal ‘equity release’ scheme. Ancient Greeks and Romans would have thought it beyond belief that the main purpose of modern government was to remove money from its own citizens.
Any ordinary member of the human race is revolted by the beheadings in Iraq and longs for revenge: let us indeed return the people the terrorists want released, but with their heads cut off too. The Roman historian Livy might have repeated a story from his Histories to suggest otherwise. The Romans were besieging Falerii,
The sort of flak that Mr Blair’s recent autocratic performances have drawn was also directed at Julius Caesar in his final year — from Cicero in particular — and we all know what happened to Julius Caesar. At the start of the civil war against Pompey (49 bc) which brought Caesar to power, Cicero was
The middle classes are apparently abandoning the work ethic in favour of leisure. Aristotle would have strongly approved — on condition that they knew what to do with it. ‘The dignity of labour’ is not a concept Greeks would have understood. There are two reasons. First, they did not have any unified concept of ‘work’
Today’s rich are not, apparently, giving enough of their wealth to good causes. The ancients would have known why. Euergesia — ‘benefaction, philanthropy’ — had always been seen as a virtue of the well-born Greek (for Aristotle it was an act that characterised the ‘magnificent’ man). It was, therefore, highly popular among the great and
Is evidence obtained under torture admissible in this country? Yes, argues Lord Justice Laws, as long as it comes from a state where Home Secretary David Blunkett has no powers to stop it, and he does not ‘promote’ or ‘connive at’ it. The ancients understood perfectly well that the value of evidence from torture could
How Francis Crick, discoverer of the structure of DNA, must be enjoying himself in the Underworld! He had so much in common with the early Greek philosophers. These thinkers, who were natural scientists rather than philosophers, debated what the world was made of and how it came to be as it was. They established some
When Plato writes about education, he comes up with a brilliant image of the master-pupil relationship: ‘After a long partnership in a common life, truth flashes on the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark.’ The Labour and Tory education manifestos have very little to say about this ‘rather dodgy’ (© C. Clarke)
Aitios in ancient Greek means both ‘responsible’ and ‘culpable’. Since Greeks were well aware of the distinction, they would have much enjoyed the nuances of the Butler report and the responses to it. The Athenian orator Demosthenes (384–322 bc) comes up with some fascinating general statements about the problem. First, Demosthenes recognises that a wrong
As George Bush continues to battle with the problems of Iraq, he could do worse than read Virgil’s Aeneid (19 bc), in which Virgil applauds Rome’s world-wide dominion, but does not discount its human cost. Defeated by the Greeks, a band of now homeless Trojans under Aeneas flees the burning city and, assured by the
An American has done some ‘research’ to demonstrate what he claims no one has yet acknowledged: that hoi polloi know better than the experts. Ancient Greeks knew that some 2,400 years ago. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato makes Socrates wonder how it can be that, when technical matters like ship-building are being discussed before the
As MPs prepare yet another raft of vital legislation relating to killer dogs, no, sorry, gun-control, no, ah yes, of course, the obesity ‘epidemic’ (or was it anorexia? no, that was a year or so back), they might do well to read what Plutarch (c.ad 110) has to say on the general issue. In one
How would Pericles have dealt with the problems facing America after 9/11? As rationally as ever, no doubt. The great Athenian statesman (c. 495–429 bc) controlled the Athenian Assembly so effectively from the 440s till his death that the Athenian historian Thucydides remarked that Athens at this time was a democracy in name only. Not
Last week we considered a number of the arguments that ancient Greeks and Romans deployed to prepare themselves for death. Once dead, however, they had to be buried, and — more important still — someone had to eulogise them. For status-mad Romans, this was not something to be taken lightly; but help was at hand.
Last week, we observed ancient attitudes to wanting to live for ever. Being against it, the ancients developed many ways of dealing with death. Since there were no scriptures or creeds in the pre-Christian world, there could have been as many beliefs about death as there were believers. What generally emerges from ancient Greek literature
A personal catastrophe strikes, and the cry goes up ‘Why me?’ and ‘Not fair’. The ancients knew all about this, and the 5th-century bc Greek historian Herodotus supplies an answer — of sorts. But first, back to Fronto. Marcus Cornelius Fronto (c. ad 95–166), orator and public servant, was a close friend of emperors, being
American interventions in the Middle East have led many commentators to regard the USA as a new imperial power. But there are many ways to control an empire, as the Romans knew. It is automatically assumed that Rome controlled its empire through its provinciae (a word whose origin is unknown, unless Mrs Wordsworth has been
Philip Pullman, author of the apparently anti-Christian His Dark Materials, and the Archbishop of Canterbury debated the significance of religion, and both enthusiastically agreed that ‘myth’ was an important feature of it. But why? The Greek word muthos originally meant ‘word, speech, message’. It gradually came to mean ‘significant story’. At the one extreme, these
Statistics show that in the United States more people die in hospital because of medical blunders than from Aids, breast cancer and car accidents combined. But who carries the can? Ancient Greek doctors are remarkable for being prepared to describe their failures as well as their successes. We read of one Autonomus who ‘died from
The Gender Recognition Bill plodding its way through the House of Commons does not deal with hermaphrodites. Bad mistake. Hermaphroditus was the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. Ovid tells how the nymph Salmacis fell madly in love with him when she saw him strip and dive into a pool. She did the same, wound herself