Ancient greece

In last week’s Spectator, Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith, was reported to be proposing that we should create in Britain ‘1,000 little city states, and give power right down to all the bright, energetic people everywhere who just feel superfluous’. What did they teach him at Eton? The ancient Greek city-state (polis, source of our ‘politics’, etc.) was certainly ‘little’. There were at any one time about 1,000 of them dotted round the Mediterranean, most consisting of a city plus its surrounding countryside; and because of the nature of the terrain and the limited resources it could command, the average polis was c. 5,000 strong. The explanation of Athens’ power

Last week Matthew Parris argued that Ukip was ‘extremist’ because its supporters thought of the EU’s ‘methods, despotism and oppression of them and their daily lives as barely distinguishable from those of the Soviet Union’. All right, if Mr Parris insists; but not all ‘despots’ are like Stalin. We entered the EU voluntarily, but as this column noted a few weeks ago, Athens quickly turned a voluntary agreement among Greeks in 478 BC to keep the Persians at bay into something like a tyranny under Athenian control. In 429 BC Pericles acknowledged this, arguing that Athens had no option but to continue down that path ‘because of the danger from

Ukip is on the march, and the F word on the lips of every ashen-faced MP in the House — or the NF word, to be exact. What should be NF’s next step? Let the Athenian comic poet Aristophanes insert a tiny thought under his seething trilby. Aristophanes’ Men of Acharnae (425 BC), reflecting the feelings among ordinary, farming people during Athens’ long war against Sparta (the Peloponnesian War, 431–404 BC), opens with the hero farmer Dikaiopolis waiting for the democratic Assembly (all citizen males over 18) to begin. The war has been going on for six years now, and like everyone else he is cooped up inside Athens’ impregnable

The EU’s decision to ignore its own rules and steal money directly from the pockets of the citizens of Cyprus is an important development in the history of an institution that long ago gave up any pretence of being a ‘Union’. It may as well rename itself the European Empire and be done with it. The impetus behind the EU was the prevention of war. So with the Athenian empire. After the Persian Wars (490-479 BC), the Greek city-states decided to form a defensive alliance to end for ever any renewed threat from that part of the world. Each Greek state therefore agreed to donate ships or cash to provide