Peter Jones

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

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.