Platp

Princess Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, appears to be out for revenge for the treatment of his sister by the King, particularly for a phone call in which he claimed that Prince Charles, as he then was, said :‘Rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough.’ Aristotle would have been delighted at how precisely the Earl’s reaction matched his analysis of the angry man. The emotions, said Aristotle, especially anger, alter one’s judgment, causing both distress but also pleasure. At this point Aristotle quotes Achilles who in the Iliad (the epic of Achilles’s destructive wrath) acknowledged anger as ‘far sweeter than oozing honey, spreading in a man’s heart and expanding like smoke’ (what an image!).

The problem with Nigel Farage is that he seems to be something of a chancer and, as a result, tends to attract chancers to his cause. The notion that ‘like attracts like’ goes back to the ancient world. It first occurred in Homer’s Odyssey, and was picked up by Plato, for whom good people are naturally attracted to other good people. The philosopher Democritus even observed how mixed pebbles of different types, when agitated, naturally resolve themselves into groups of the same size and shape. Aristotle saw three categories of friendship. One sort is driven by usefulness, the advantage that two people can bring each other. But once that mutual benefit disappears, the friendship disappears with it.