Ancient and modern

"I died of a surfeit of doctors,” read one Roman funerary inscription. But where did this surfeit come from? Let Pliny the Elder (d. AD 79) explain. Pliny devoted book twenty-nine of his Natural History (a vast encyclopedia of Roman life) to the history of medicine. Claiming that no discipline “undergoes more frequent changes, and none is more profitable either,” Pliny pointed the finger at Greek doctors. These had been welcomed into Rome from the third century bc with their fancy philosophical ideas — all different — which their eloquence persuaded people immediately to adopt in place of the good old experience-based Roman herbal treatments, overseen by the trusty master of the house.

The word “colony” meets with a sharp intake of breath these days, but “province” raises no eyebrows. How very odd. The ancient Greeks invented the western notion of the colony. But “colony” is the term the Romans applied to it and is of Latin derivation, from colo, “I cultivate, inhabit” and so colonia. The ancient Greek term was apoikia, literally “a home apart, away”, or perhaps a “home from home.” Greeks established these apoikiai widely around the Mediterranean, mainly from the 8th to 6th centuries BC, clustering along the coasts of Turkey, northern Greece, all around the Black Sea, southern Italy, the eastern Adriatic, Sicily, parts of southern France and Spain, and Cyrene, as Plato said, “like frogs around a pond.

Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the Ancient world, the purpose of the curse was to “bind” the person you disliked — i.e. frustrate them from achieving the end they wanted and you did not. It was written on a thin lead plate, rolled up tight, sometimes twisted (to “hobble” the victim) and pinned (to constrain him), then placed into the tomb of someone who had died before his time. The belief was that the dead man, resentful of his early demise, would be happy to enact the curse against the named victim.