Peter Jones

No election manifesto has anything to say about an issue vital to the British understanding of government — the relationship between Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament (forget the people, of course) which has been so badly corrupted by Blair’s ‘sofa’ politics. The Greek historian Polybius (200–118 bc) was greatly impressed by the Roman republican system

The death of the Pope has relit a number of arguments, few more contentious than the status of the foetus. Naturally, on a subject about which the Bible has almost nothing to say, the Church has taken its cue mostly from pagan thinkers. For the early Church, Pythagoras (6th century bc) set the tone, arguing

Great thinkers have recently been grappling with what ‘happiness’ is, and various answers have emerged that have surely never occurred to anyone before: ‘love and friendship’, to which ‘respect, family, standing and fun’ have been added. Who would have thought it? Ancient Greeks would have narrowed those six down to three. They would have matched

A Lithuanian girl arrived in England looking for work and was promptly sold for £4,000 to an Albanian. He raped her and put her in a brothel. She escaped, was recaptured, sent to another brothel, then sold for £3,000, escaped again, was recaptured again, sent to London, traded several more times and finally fled to

The IRA now revealed as the criminal gang the government has been desperately trying to pretend it is not, there can be no more pretence of democratic dealing with Sinn Fein–IRA and its leaders Adams and McGuinness. So what next? The collapse of the Roman republic in the 1st century bc was largely down to

Last year there was one Classics Cup on offer. This year there are no fewer than three: one for the Open competition (any 200-word piece from The Spectator in Latin or Greek prose or verse); one for undergraduates (200 words in Latin or Greek on the theme ‘Tony and Gordon’); and one for school pupils

The problems relating to asylum-seekers have hit the headlines again. The concept of asylum is ancient, and the problems not new. Asylum derives from the ancient Greek asulos, ‘inviolable’ (noun asulia). Its basic meaning was ‘protection against the right of reprisal, especially seizure of goods’, and it could be granted to a wide range of

All lovers of elective oligarchy will applaud last month’s ballot in Iraq, but that will not stop debates about America’s role there. Athenians of the 5th century bc, committed like America to the idea of freedom, obsessively debated how to justify the power which they exercised over their empire. In his early speeches, Pericles condones

The government ardently denies that its proposal to allow 24-hour drinking will lead to streets filled with drunks. It then legislates to, er, deal with streets filled with drunks. Nothing could more perfectly exemplify Plato’s brilliant image of law-makers as people ‘slashing away at a kind of Hydra’ — the many-headed monster which grew two

The Archbeard of Canterbury has proclaimed that the tsunami disaster in Asia justifies people’s doubts about the existence of any God, let alone a good one. If he needs comfort on the matter, Seneca (the millionaire philosopher and adviser to Nero, d. ad 65) will provide it. Since the world and its gods were formed

Whenever the subject of the EU comes up, someone is bound to compare it to the Roman empire. If the comparison relates to the beginning and subsequent development of that empire, it fails. But the end of the Roman empire in the West in the 5th century ad may well offer quite a good model

Old age is in the news at the moment because people may not be financially prepared for retirement. But old age has much more interesting questions to consider, and none more interesting than its conclusion. The Roman philosopher-statesman Seneca (ad 1-65) makes some most interesting observations on the matter. Seneca, being a Stoic, takes the

Government advisers are suggesting that religious education in schools should teach Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh beliefs. The purpose is to encourage ‘tolerance and respect’. Greeks and Romans would have found this incomprehensible. In the absence of divine and therefore authoritative scriptures, monotheistic, jealous gods did not exist in the ancient world, let

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 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