Peter Jones

Virgin East Coast, reneging on its franchise, is not in anyone’s good books at the moment, but since it is the only direct service available from Newcastle upon Tyne to London, many in the north-east have no option but to use it. The service in my experience is pretty good, and even better when it is possible to book well ahead and thereby, with use of the Old Gits’ railcard, treat oneself to a seriously cheap first-class advanced ticket. This offers excellent value for money, the food and drink far better than that on the West Coast equivalent. But the icing on the cherry is the quiet coach.

D(is) M(anibus) Regina liberta(m) et coniuge(m) Barates Palmyrenus natione Catuallauna an(norum) XXX ‘To the spirits of the dead, and to Regina, his freedwoman and wife, of the Catuvellauni, aged 30 years, Barates of Palmyra erected this.’ There Regina sits, in all her Roman finery. You cannot make out her face because the great stone funerary monument in which she has been sculpted is 1,800 years old, very worn in places and the face mutilated. She looks straight out at you from her wicker basket-chair — a nursing chair, perhaps? Uncomfortable, too: she sits on a cushion.

Whatever the government decides about post-EU regulations on animal sentience, the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch (died c. ad 120) was fascinated by the comparisons between man and beast and, almost uniquely, argued for the ethical treatment of animals. Some earlier thinkers contended there was a ‘kinship’ between men and animals because animals had flesh, passions and (being alive) souls. Therefore man should neither eat nor sacrifice them. But then Aristotle (d. 322 bc), who invented the discipline of biology, stepped in. He agreed that animals had desires which caused them to behave in certain ways that looked human, but denied that this was evidence of the ability to reason.

Some MPs have been exploiting their power by their sexual fumblings with the lower ranks. The result is that when the fumbled finally pluck up the courage to reveal all, or are eventually believed, the situation does no one any favours. It should all be quite different. The MPs could up their game. As Rome’s finest love-poet Ovid made clear, sex was supposed to be fun, and mutual fun too. No one gets that from groping and lunging. His Ars Amatoria, decorated with amusingly ironical examples from the gods and heroes of ancient myth, offered top tips about how to find and keep a lover, even a married one.

Students eager to pull down statues and silence debate on topics of which they disapprove — and vice-chancellors who pusillanimously cave into them — would do well to consider the history of such censorship. The Roman historian Cremutius Cordus was on the sharp end of what can happen. In 44 bc, Brutus and Cassius led the conspiracy to kill Julius Caesar. In the ensuing civil war, Caesar’s heir Octavian took his revenge on the conspirators, and eventually emerged as the first Roman emperor, Augustus (27 bc–14 ad). Clearly, Augustus would not have regarded Brutus and Cassius with much favour; nor did his successor, and stepson Tiberius.

Before he died, the former Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, reassured his diocese that he was ‘at peace and [has] no fear of what is to come’. But surely, as a sinner facing a god of judgment, he should have been terrified out of his wits? In ancient literature, it was only cowards or second-raters who were terrified of death. Philosophers had no qualms. As Socrates (5th C bc) said: ‘To fear death is to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know.

Last week, Brendan O’Neill described in this magazine how students regulate ‘unacceptable’ political views with ‘no platform’ policies, safe spaces and trigger warnings. Two weeks ago a student Latin course (Reading Latin, P. Jones and K. Sidwell) was ‘outed’ by an American PhD student, because the text featured three goddesses, each confidently stripping off, determined to win the golden apple from Paris, and two rapes. Such ‘offensive’ choices, she said, did not help the cause of Latin, ‘or make the historically racist and classist discipline of classics any more accessible’. Both rapes featured in a foundation myth of early Roman history.

As his obituaries pointed out, my brother David made a name for himself with his unrideable bicycle; his ‘perpetual motion’ machine — a bicycle wheel still rotating in a frame on our mantelpiece (it attracted 1.1 million hits on a German website); and his theory that the arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair and fingernails was down to his wallpaper. The papers naturally got all this wrong (‘Napoleon killed by wallpaper’ they intoned, as did Andrew Roberts), and the image of the potty prof emerged. In fact, his purpose was serious. He was equally serious about our children — after a failed marriage, he had none of his own, to his great regret — and at lunch every Sunday the idiosyncratic scientist and dedicated uncle came together.