Ancient rome

What with the threat of global warming and nuclear war, the new year might start with a big bang. The Greeks were preoccupied with this possibility as well and called it the apocalypse (apokalupsis), meaning ‘uncovering’ or ‘revelation’. It has a long history behind it. The Greek farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) introduced the idea of a sequence of five ages – golden, silver, bronze, heroic, iron, each worse than the other – repeated five times and ending in total destruction. In his magnificent On the Nature of the Universe, the Roman poet Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC), who was an atomist, described how a world made of atoms would

Donald Trump has knocked down the east wing of the White House and is turning it into his Golden Ballroom. Might he be tempted to go a step further and build a Golden House (Domus aurea), as Nero did? Nero was as besotted with gold as Trump is. He wrote poems in gold, preserved his first beard in a golden box, possessed a golden fishing net, had a golden box of poisons and golden chamber pot, and shod his second wife’s mules in gold. When the king of Armenia visited, he had the theatre of Pompey – the stage, the walls, everything – somehow gilded. In 64 bc a devastating

Whatever Prince Andrew has done, the succession to our throne is secure. How envious the Roman emperor Augustus would have been! In vain did he offer rewards for faithful marriage and punishments for adultery and such like. The mildest punishment was temporary expulsion from Roman territory; the harshest, banishment in perpetuity to an ‘island or oasis’, with loss of property and citizenship, and death for returning. But Augustus’s only child, Julia, who had five children, took advantage of her husband’s lengthy spells abroad and had (it appears) many lovers, and even assignations in the middle of the forum. She explained the improbable fact that all her children were the very

The Roman historian Tacitus commented that the visit of an Armenian king to Rome to clinch a deal in ad 66 demonstrated ‘that the king did not understand how we Romans value real power, but disdain its vanities’. What about Donald Trump’s recent visit, then? The imperial powers of Rome and of Parthia (modern Iran) were cagily cautious of each other, and both sides wished to control Armenia, which separated the two. The Parthian king put Tiridates on the throne of Armenia to maintain local control, while Rome determined its foreign policy. When Tiridates and his retinue arrived in Puteoli, Rome gave him a daily allowance of 800,000 sesterces, and

Since, in the absence of border posts, people in the ancient world could come and go at will, refugees and asylum seekers were as common as they are now. But then the notion of ‘citizenship’ came into play. Roman plebs were indeed proud to be citizens, but the ruling oligarchic elite, intent on expanding Rome’s control over land and people (the ancients’ sole resources, bestowing power and wealth), were reluctant to give them any political say. Democratic Athens, however, took citizenship very seriously. All males with Athenian parents, and aged 18 or above, met weekly in assembly to take all political decisions by majority vote. The idea that any Tom,

‘Proscription’ appears to be the current word of the month. But what does it mean? The Latin scribo means ‘I write’ and generates a root in script-. Since the Latin prefix pro carried the idea of ‘bringing something into the open’, the noun proscriptio meant ‘a written notice announcing a sale’. In the 1st century BC, a culture of corruption, bribery and political violence in a fight for power led by wealthy dynasts with private armies at their back resulted in civil wars and the complete collapse of Rome’s traditional institutions. One feature of this collapse was to be particularly significant. In 88 bc the current strong man Lucius Cornelius

Will Pope Leo turn out to be a lion or a pussycat? That depends on what he has to confront, but one hopes he will do better than Pope Siricius (384-399), let alone Kirill, current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. When the Roman emperor Constantine published a letter in 313 allowing freedom of worship to pagan and Christian alike, it opened the door to Christian leaders taking over the function of the old Roman elite. This at once presented a problem: if there really was one true God, whose will only bishops could interpret, was the emperor lord over the church or the church lord over the emperor? In

Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who raised their arms in a final straight-armed salute. The enduring cultural and political relevance of Hitler’s death hardly needs restating. It gave us online parodies of the rant scene in the film Downfall and, of course, a wild range of conspiracy theories. I once hoped that my book Hitler’s Death: the Case Against Conspiracy might

Donald Trump’s obsessive ‘awhairness’ makes one wonder: why is it so important to him? The topic was of some interest in Rome. The emperor Domitian wrote a treatise on baldness. So too did Cleopatra, who offered the following remedy: ‘For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as much as it will bear. Put on a rag and apply, having soaped the place well first. I have mixed the above with a foam of nitre, and it worked well.’ Pompey had himself depicted in statuary wearing a hairstyle associated with Alexander the Great, with a lock of hair brushed back from the forehead.

A Today programme presenter used the term imperium (cf. ‘emperor’) with reference to Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland. To a Roman, it meant the authority to give orders that must be obeyed, no matter what. Anyone invested with that power by the Roman state was accompanied by lictors, attendants carrying the fasces, an axe bound inside a collection of wooden rods, suggesting what might happen to someone who refused the order. That was certainly one way to get people to obey you. But what about in normal life? This topic forms the subject of the opening scene in Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes. Agonised after being bitten in the foot by

Generation Z(oomer), aged roughly between 13 and 28, have expressed a desire to be ruled by a dictator. That term derives from the Latin dictator, which referred to an official given absolute power (i.e. he was above the law) for a fixed term to do whatever he thought necessary to deal with a clearly identified problem. Take the famous example of Cincinnatus. A soldier of repute and a very able ex-consul, he had been left penniless by paying off a debt incurred by his son, and was living the life of a peasant ‘in a deserted hovel across the Tiber, like a banished man’. In 458 bc he was at

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and his chosen Attorney-General, Baron Hermer, both professional lawyers, seem to take the view that lying is just an aspect of public relations and parliament an irrelevance. As the Roman republic collapsed under the assault led by Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony, Cicero reflected, in those perilous times, on the nature of the relationship between civil law (ius civile, the term given to the bulk of statute law in Rome) and government and how it might be enabled to control the situation. He turned, for example, to the jurists. These freelance experts in law, though they had no professional standing whatsoever, provided opinions on

I was in Washington D.C. during The Election, living halfway between the Capitol and White House. Concerned friends suggested I move to some boutique hotel in Virginia for election week, in case of ‘trouble’ in Washington. Or at least, they said, I should stock up the freezer, as I might not be able to get safely to the shops for several days if the results were bitterly contested. I took the freezer option (plus an enhanced cellar) and planned a week of working from home, to follow the news from each swing state, fortified by my supplies. It was all for nothing. By the time I woke up on the