Peter Jones

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.

Doctors have analysed how the mucus of a certain type of slug gives it protection against its being levered off a surface. From this, they have developed a new water-based gel for surgical repairs and wound healing. Aristotle would have been punching the air, had he not been too busy inventing logic, literary critical theory and almost everything else — in this case, biology. In the introduction to his On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle (384-322 bc) contrasted the study of the heavens, which the ancients regarded as imperishable and eternal, with that of the earth. The former, he said, however scanty the evidence, gave most pleasure, in the same way that just half a glimpse of the person you loved was more delightful than a complete overview of anything else.

Public health specialist Sir Michael Marmot has blamed ‘the cuts’ for the rise in dementia among the elderly, resulting in a decline in the rising rate of life expectancy. But parroting ‘the cuts’ does nothing to treat the cause. If Sir Michael wants to tackle that problem, the ancients can tell him how. It has to do with lifestyle. Ancient medicine, like ancient Gaul, was divided into three parts: drugs, surgery and lifestyle. This last part permeated every aspect of life. Food and exercise were taken to be the most important, but sleep, sex, bathing, massage, mental activity, and so on — even clothing — could all come into the equation.

Whether the youth vote had any serious impact on the result of the general election or not, Jeremy Corbyn knew how to exploit it in a way both Plato and Aristotle would have understood. In his Republic, Plato argued that democracy resulted in rulers behaving like subjects and subjects like rulers, with teachers pandering to the young, and the young in turn despising them. As a result, youths make ‘every conversation or action into a trial of strength with their elders’, while their elders ‘patronise them, exuding bonhomie and a sense of fun, and imitate them, because they do not want to appear disagreeable or despotic’: Corbyn rapping with assorted ‘grime artists’ to a T.