Biden should approach ageing like the Romans
Last week, Lionel Shriver wrote a characteristically sharp piece about the narcissism of the ageing Joe Biden, egged on by his wife, in standing again for the presidency of the United States. The Roman poet Lucretius (1st century bc) might well have offered a similar opinion, but he would have presented it as an example of a universal and destructive human failing which he described in his magnificent poem On the Nature of the Universe – the dread of death. Romans, Lucretius claimed, feared the whole idea of dying, because they believed that they had an eternal soul which, after death, would be subject to hideous tortures and punishments if they had been
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