Peter Jones

A Guardian journalist seems saddened that the departure of the previous editor could signal that ‘The Spectator’s similarities with the last days of the Roman empire are apparently over’. It is even more saddening to report that they never came close. Elagabalus, Roman emperor ad 218–222, showed what could be done if you put your

It is a general rule that public services rarely work properly, if at all. But over the past 60 years there has been one shining exception — grammar schools. Yet New Labour agrees with great thinkers like the IRA hero and sometime Ulster education minister Martin McGuinness that the single example of our public services

Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome on BBC2 ended in nightmare: that, in Boris’s view, only when the EU has the equivalent of an emperor can it hope to emulate the achievements of the Roman empire in uniting disparate peoples under a single banner. But since it will never have an emperor, is the

In view of the new Tory leader David Cameron’s call for ‘social enterprise zones’, where local communities deal with local social problems, it may be worth reminding him of the alimentary schemes that the Romans developed for helping the children of the poor (alimentum, ‘provisions, maintenance’). The general idea was that private individuals and public

The British are about to replace the Americans in Afghanistan. Let us hope they take a good life of Alexander with them — Arrian or Quintus Curtius Rufus will do — because conditions for military campaigns have not changed much since then. When Alexander finally defeated Darius III and his Persian army in 329 bc

Craig Brown’s exquisite disembowelling of the ‘publicist’ Max Clifford in the review pages the other week would have reminded the Greek comedian Aristophanes (c. 450–386 bc) of his attacks on a similar pest in the Athenian world — the sukophant

Eheu, the long, hot summer idyll proved too much for the classical scholars among you. The entries for Round 2, therefore, will be held over to Round 3 (or new entries may be submitted). Rules for the final round to decide the Cup Winners are as usual: 1. Only one entry, in only one section,

A new exhibition of ancient Persian material at the British Museum has brought out the usual affirmations about how wonderfully humane and civilised Persians were, and how vicious the Greeks were in painting a picture of them as slavish, effeminate subjects of an oriental despotism that has helped pervert Western views of the East ever

In his Investigation a few weeks ago, the editor turned his thoughts to the poet Horace and his ‘special relationship’ with the emperor Augustus. He pointed out that, while the emperor’s largesse obliged Horace to turn out a good deal of praise poetry, Horace himself, while genuinely grateful, nevertheless exercised a good deal of ingenuity

Two weeks ago, we wondered how Tacitus, that pillar of the Roman establishment, was able to get away with putting a speech in the mouth of the Caledonian ‘terrorist’ Calgacus to his troops that sounded so sympathetic to him and his cause. This week concludes the extracts and offers some comments. Note that Calgacus admits

These days the ability to understand and explain in public prints the aims of the people perceived as public enemies is likely to get you deported. So one wonders what our government would have made of that pillar of the Roman establishment Tacitus — consul, provincial governor and historian — who invented an extraordinarily sympathetic

Given the fault-line between religion and politics in the Muslim world and the priority of Sharia over secular law, what can Muslims do to reassure us that they understand their responsibilities as British citizens? Pliny the Younger and Daniel Stylites may be able to help them. In the absence of an imperial policy towards Christians,

Six former chiefs of the defence staff have rounded on politicians and lawyers for threatening to prosecute soldiers who are simply trying to do their best in life-or-death situations. Romans would have been aghast. The two cardinal virtues demanded of Roman soldiers were virtus (‘manliness, courage’) and disciplina (‘obedience to orders’), and the two frequently

In our youth-besotted blame culture, the newly recovered poem by Sappho (600 bc: only our fourth complete one) has a point to make. I translate in plodding prose (square brackets = restored words): ‘You, children, [rejoice in] the beautiful gifts of the violet-robed Muses/ [and the] clear, song-loving lyre./ As for me — old age

A reader, Mark Savage, points out to me that there are comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Cleopatra — both wily, mysterious Easterners needing eradication because (according to the spin-doctors) they posed such terrible threats to a Western way of life. But that makes George Galloway, whose passion for Saddam was such a rare and precious

No election manifesto has anything to say about an issue vital to the British understanding of government — the relationship between Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament (forget the people, of course) which has been so badly corrupted by Blair’s ‘sofa’ politics. The Greek historian Polybius (200–118 bc) was greatly impressed by the Roman republican system

The death of the Pope has relit a number of arguments, few more contentious than the status of the foetus. Naturally, on a subject about which the Bible has almost nothing to say, the Church has taken its cue mostly from pagan thinkers. For the early Church, Pythagoras (6th century bc) set the tone, arguing

Great thinkers have recently been grappling with what ‘happiness’ is, and various answers have emerged that have surely never occurred to anyone before: ‘love and friendship’, to which ‘respect, family, standing and fun’ have been added. Who would have thought it? Ancient Greeks would have narrowed those six down to three. They would have matched