Peter Jones

Cicero would have been quick to end the lockdown

(Getty Images) 
issue 09 May 2020

The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus) of the people be the supreme law’. No surprise there: he had just returned from his sick bed. But as he knows very well, that injunction was military: salus meant ‘security, safety’.

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