The ex-Speaker John Bercow has been found to be a serial bully and serial liar. The ancients would have had views on both counts. Bercow’s bullying seems to have arisen from his uncontrollable temper. The philosopher Seneca (an adviser to Nero) painted a memorable picture of the physical results: ‘The eyes blaze and flash, the
Last week Aristotle offered a lesson in tyrant theory. This week Tacitus (ad 56-c.120) offers one in tyrant practice. Tacitus was a Roman historian who enjoyed a successful political career, rising to consul and provincial governor. He admitted that he laid its foundations under the tyrannical emperor Domitian (d. ad 96) – he memorably contrasted
Is Putin a tyrant? Aristotle (384-322 bc) might well have thought so. Seeing the turannos as a deviant type of king, Aristotle tested the distinction under four headings. Was he subject to the law? Did he rule for a set term, or for ever? Was he elected? And did he rule over willing subjects? We
Virginia Giuffre may well be a heroine among all those abused in their youth. Ancient reactions compare interestingly with ours. It would have been one thing had she been a high-class courtesan (hetaira), who was her own woman, dealing in ‘gifts’ from ‘friends’ who wanted to ‘benefit’ her, with no going rate of exchange. Fickle
German archaeologists have found ancient Egyptian tablets covered in repetitive writing exercises and ask — were they pupil punishments? But if classical examples are anything to go by, they sound more like normal education. For elite Roman boys, education began with elementary reading, writing and numbers. From about the age of nine, they developed these
Yet again ‘doctors’ with no qualifications have been found advertising dodgy but expensive products and treatments, in this case, injections of unregulated Botox variants to remove wrinkles. Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) inveighed against such practices 2,000 years ago. Romans had a love-hate relationship with the Greeks, and medicine was no exception. In his
The Prime Minister has been having some trouble with his inner circle of advisers. Tacitus supplies fine examples of how they worked in Rome. Emperors chose whomever they liked to advise them. Augustus, for example, chose men like Agrippa and Maecenas, who had provided excellent service for him while Rome was still (just) a republic.
The singer Cher, now 75, has announced that, because she refuses to appear old, she is not going to allow her hair to go grey. But the ancient view was that there was nothing inherently wrong with old age, as long as one prepared for it, accepted it and respected it for what it was,
Whatever the result of Sue Gray’s report on ‘gatherings’ in Downing Street, there is a political lesson to be learned: any excuse will do, even a party, when people are out to get you, as the Roman historian Tacitus (ad 56–c.ad 120) well knew. ad 69: the emperor Vitellius was lying seriously ill when he
The statue of the Bristol merchant Edward Colston is apparently guilty of a hate crime. Let us hope that the four charged with pulling him down are indeed, for their sake, ‘on the right side of history’, as they claim, since statues have a habit of getting their own back on those who dishonour them.
Saturnalia was a period of Roman fun and games held just before our Christmas. Macrobius (c. ad 430) composed a series of conversations enjoyed by cultured Romans over this festive period, covering a vast range of topics, one of which featured amusing true stories. What better way to start the year? The emperor Augustus, tired
Problems about the misuse of history, especially on subjects such as race and colonialism, have been running for a long time. But when it comes to the ancient world, there are also problems about the misuse of literature. Dame Mary Beard’s ‘manifesto’ Women and Power (2018) contains an example of the problem. Her thesis is
Time to settle the Great Omicron Question. First, there is no word omikron (and no c) in ancient Greek. Second, the classical Greek (5th-4th centuries BC) name for omicron was an accented ou. In the 2nd century AD it was replaced by the name o mikron (‘little/short o’), when Greece was under Roman rule. So
A teacher wanting to teach Latin has enquired whether it is worth doing because the subject has ‘such a bad reputation’. As ever with such assertions, it is always wise to ask, ‘In whose eyes?’ The bizarre fact is that, both here and in the United States, the answer is in those of a certain
The ‘globally outstanding’ University of Durham has plans to help its undergraduates who pay their way by prostituting themselves. Three heavyweight ancients, all from different perspectives, might have rather approved of the scheme. St Augustine, looking at the world as it was, regretted his conclusion but decided that if prostitutes were banned, society ‘would be
Greta Thunberg and her supporters were loud in protest at COP26, but one wonders to what end. They demanded deeds, not words, but words were all they had to offer, except when they were so devoutly letting down the tyres of SUVs. Ancient Greeks were extremely interested in the distinction between word (logos, cf. our
MPs are not exactly attracting plaudits for their recent attempts at governing. Perhaps Cicero’s three-book work On Duties (De Officiis) might be of assistance. It was written in 44 BC, a few months after the tyrant Julius Caesar was assassinated. Seeing life as a complex of obligations to others and oneself, Cicero picks apart the
The ‘social mobility tsar’ Katharine Birbalsingh has suggested that children, born evil, ‘need to be taught right from wrong and then habituated into choosing good over evil’. The Twitter mob is equally certain that all children are born ‘good’, and it is their environment that spoils them. Ancient Greeks, ignorant of St Augustine, did not
The Globe theatre’s project to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, as if that would make plays like The Tempest ‘acceptable’ to them and their audience, would have met with no approval at all from Plato (c. 425-348 BC). For him, all poetry and the arts were corrupt, and in his Republic, a discussion of how an ideal state
Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be Heard. When it isn’t, they express their frustration through abuse and threats or by blocking roads. In this way, the mentality of the ancient curse-tablet lives on. In the ancient world, the purpose of the
