Last week’s column ended with a Roman funerary inscription: ‘I died of a surfeit of doctors.’ But where did this surfeit come from? Let Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) explain. Pliny devoted book 29 of his Natural History (a vast encyclopedia of Roman life) to the history of medicine. Claiming that no discipline ‘undergoes
Research in the USA has shown that it is possible to do something about grey hair. But ‘grey hair’ stands for ‘old age’, and there is nothing we can do about that, except make it easier to live with. Modern medicine certainly helps. There was no such luck in the ancient world, where the playwright Sophocles
After much debate it was decided that the people would not be ordered to reciprocate the King’s oath of allegiance. This was wise. As ancient Greeks knew, oaths have serious implications. For them, to take an oath was in effect ‘to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting
Baroness Benjamin has suggested that King Charles’s choice of her to join the coronation procession demonstrates that he is in favour of ‘diversity and inclusion’. What would the ancients have made of that, let alone of ‘equality’ and ‘identity’? ‘Equality’ had little purchase. Politically, male citizens had a vote in democratic Athens and (of sorts)
Elon Musk’s Twitter motto is Vox populi, vox Dei (‘The voice of the people, the voice of God’). This obviously appeals to the lawyer in Sir Keir Starmer since Twitter (being the voice of God) cannot be sued and therefore gives him scope to sail close to the wind. There is much he can learn
Refugees and asylum seekers are always with us. In the ancient world too, exiles, criminals, refugees, sometimes whole communities were on the move. There were three main conventions in place to help them. For an individual there was the act of supplication. If you knelt before someone – no Greek would willingly wish to appear
The Guardian is worshipping at the shrine to its own piety with even more self-satisfaction than usual because it is paying millions in reparations to African-Americans based in Georgia and Jamaica, whose slave labour 200 years ago underpinned the wealth of the newspaper’s founders. But where is the justice in that? Aristotle argued that justice,
Charlie Mackesy’s bestselling and Oscar-winning stories about a boy, a mole, a fox and a horse deal in aperçus such as ‘Nothing beats kindness. It sits quietly behind all things’; ‘always remember, you’re enough, just as you are’. The ancient Greek Aesop – whoever and whenever he was (6th century bc?) – is the West’s inventor
In the ancient world, where life was insecure and refugees and asylum seekers not uncommon, there were no border posts, and free people could mostly come and go at will. But a concept of citizenship, technically differentiating ‘citizen’ from ‘non-citizen’, then emerged among the autonomous communities (‘city-states’: there were hundreds) of the ancient Greeks. Take
Boris Johnson wants to give his father a knighthood. How very classical of him! Xenophon said that it was ‘the mark of a man to excel his friends in benefaction and his enemies in harm’ and no one was more of a friend than a man’s father. This mantra to do good to your friends
The leaked WhatsApp messages about Covid tell us little of relevance to the handling of the disease (but much about personalities) because we all know what policies they resulted in and who was responsible for them. They have simply encouraged many journalists to proclaim (again) how they were completely right all along about lockdowns, and
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
