Our brave comedians spend much of their time fearlessly attacking politicians, to little or no effect. So did the comic playwright Aristophanes (5th century bc), but he also attacked his audience too if, when meeting in assembly as the dêmos (cf. dêmo-kratia, ‘people-power’), they were in his view too easily persuaded by politicians he hated,
In ad 115 Antioch (Antakya) was destroyed, as today, by a huge earthquake, described dramatically by a historian 100 years later. In ad 178, Smyrna (modern Izmir, west Turkey) suffered the same fate. The next day one of its sons, Aelius Aristides, wrote to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius: ‘Smyrna, the jewel of Asia that beautifies
If Dominic Raab has been bullying, he must think it was to his advantage. Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, thought so too. At the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, he brutally dismissed the old priest of Apollo who had offered a huge ransom for the return of his daughter. So the priest prayed
A fast-food restaurant in Wrexham will play classical music during the evenings in a bid to stop antisocial behaviour. While some ancient Greeks denied that music per se provided anything for you apart from an unimportant kind of pleasure (though the words of a song might make a difference), others thought that music could have
One MP pays a tax fine, one borrows money from a relation and one is accused of bullying staff. More ‘corruption and sleaze’? Romans might have seen it as a matter of basic values. In 443 bc, Rome established the prestigious office of censor, to be held by two men, usually ex-consuls. As well as
Where should the Elgin marbles be on show? Their display in the Duveen gallery of the British Museum is not impressive. To put it crudely, a Greek temple consisted of a sturdy shoe box surrounded by columns. The purpose of the shoe box (cella) was two-fold: to support the massive weight of the roof, and
Google provides information easily, which the ancients did as best they could. But what would they have made of ChatGPT? Ancient education drew on information about the past to help deal with the problems of the present. Take the Romans. Future statesmen were taught to scour sources – both myth and history – for learning
The antics of Harry and Meghan would not have gone down well in the ancient world, where the family and its future flourishing were an absolute priority. Harry’s proposal to marry Meghan would have been a matter of some negotiation – Roman orators argued that the paterfamilias (‘head of the family’, with absolute authority over
As Vladimir Putin’s war grinds on, how does one make the case for peace? Around ad 100, the ancient Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (‘golden-mouthed’), persuaded the citizens of Nicomedia in the Graeco-Roman province of Bithynia (N. Turkey) to make peace with their bitter local rival Nicaea. His central theme was praise of harmony. While discord splits
Christmas is a time of feasting. So too was the Roman festival of Saturnalia, held in honour of the god Saturn, which took place between 17 and 23 December, when even a poor peasant might kill a pig fattened up for the occasion or, if not, hope to join the company of someone who had.
Whatever Netflix touches will almost certainly turn into trash. It’s the only way they know how to make money. In its latest example, it takes the fictional story of a ‘lost city’ called Atlantis and turns it into a ‘documentary’, a crock of evidence-free eyewash about a world-saving intellectual master-race. It was Plato (d. 348 bc)
Gary Lineker has unfolded his thoughts on the World Cup in Qatar (Romans called them Catharrei). ‘It’s a delicate balance between “sports-washing” and trying to make change,’ he intoned. Actually, the issue is quite different. Let Herodotus (5th C bc), the first western historian and a man of inexhaustible curiosity and vitality, put you right.
These days technology rules the roost and robots take questions in the House of Lords. In the West at least, the Greeks (as ever) got there first. Like the Romans, they were fascinated by hydraulics, springs, pistons, gears, sprockets, pulley-chains – and experimented with them to produce a whole range of lifting, digging, and propelling
The charity Classics for All staged its annual moot in the Supreme Court on the question of Alexander the Great: hero or war criminal? (Search for ‘Classics for All Moot Trial’.) The prosecution drew masterfully on the Nuremberg trials (1945-6) for war crimes and crimes against humanity to condemn him; the defence thought this anachronistic
Did Boris Johnson lie to the House about partygate? The Privileges Committee decided to investigate, but refused to take Mr Johnson’s ‘intention’ into account. However, Lord Pannick QC (now KC) has since claimed that ignoring ‘intention’ would be ‘unlawful’ in determining whether there had been a violation. The Committee disagrees. Could the ancients help? Argument
Nine exceedingly passive ‘activists’ glued themselves to the floor of a Volkswagen factory in Germany and complained about being humiliated, left overnight in the cold and the dark and without ‘facilities’. Should they not have rejoiced at such deprivations to which the whole world ought, in their view, to accustom itself if it is to
Liz Truss was spot-on in arguing that the only way in which a state can flourish is by combining low taxes with economic growth. But she failed to persuade her audience that she knew how this could be achieved. If only Dr Kwarteng, a classicist, had drawn her attention to Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (4th
Meghan Markle has been urging women to define themselves as they see fit, with ‘your full, complete, whole-layered, sometimes weird, sometimes awesome but always best and true self… you’re so much greater than any archetype’. But that all depends on the self-definition you come up with. Hers (if she had the slightest self-awareness) would clearly
The Labour MP Rupa Huq, of Pakistani heritage, has been suspended for suggesting that Kwasi Kwarteng, of Ghanaian heritage, was only superficially black and did not sound black on the radio. The ancients would have been baffled by her comment. They were fascinated by their world’s many different cultures, but colour held no significance for
The German branch of the ‘green’ organisation Peta (‘People for the ethical treatment of animals’) is demanding that, until men stop eating meat – apparently they cause 41 per cent more pollution than female carnivores – women must deny them sex. The same sanction had its origin, of course, in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata (411 bc),
