History

Divorcing couples are being given vouchers worth £500 to settle their problems by mediation rather than going to court. It was the ancient Greeks who produced the first examples of mediation in the West. Since the ancients had no police force or Crown Prosecution Service, all prosecutions were brought privately. There were no barristers or judges or witnesses — just the two litigants, giving a single speech of fixed length (with witness evidence read out), after which the jurors voted, with no further discussion. But since jurors (201, 401 or 501 depending on the case) were paid by the state, it was an expensive business. So every effort was made

Meghan Markle seems to see herself as a ‘victim’. Had she called herself a victima in Rome, it would have been a matter of some surprise, since the ancients used that image solely with reference to animals for sacrifice. But our ‘victim’ is used as if one genuinely were as helpless as a victima. Ancients would have none of that. In place of our ‘victimhood’, they used words like ‘wronged, betrayed, worsted, dishonoured, neglected, injured’. Even the classical terms for ‘suffer’ meant at root ‘undergoing/enduring an experience’ of some sort. Ancients, then, were not for relapsing into supine self-pity, but for taking action against the humans who had wronged them.

Even before the first census was made in 1801, the plan was regarded with fear, hatred and ridicule. And this year, on 21 March, households have another chance to mock, embrace or ignore the census. When parliament debated a bill in 1753 for an annual census, Matthew Ridley, MP for Newcastle, warned that his constituents ‘looked on the proposal as ominous, and feared lest some public misfortune or an epidemical distemper should follow’. They were aware that, by the Bible’s account, ‘Satan rose up against Israel and caused David to take a census of the people of Israel’. God was so angry that he gave the King three choices: seven

The British Museum has announced the appointment of a curator to study the history of its own collections. On the face of it, nothing could be more anodyne. The history of collecting has been a fashionable topic in academic circles for decades. What sort of people collected, why, and how, tells us much about their cultural assumptions and their ways of seeing the world. It would be mildly surprising that the BM has been so slow to catch on – except that there seems more to it than scholarly pursuit of knowledge. While the research will indeed cover ‘wider patterns’ of collecting, the Museum announced that it is ‘likely that

When it comes to natural history, Sir David Attenborough rules the airwaves. Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) who, as general of the Roman fleet, ruled rather less compliant waves, composed a 37-volume Natural History 2,000 years ago, expressing exactly the same concerns about the relationship between man and nature. For Pliny, the earth was divine, and the word ‘god’ meant not some being with shape and form, but Natura, ‘Nature’. Man’s natura, however, was imperfecta, and as a consequence, though Romans were the supreme masters of the world, they and god/Nature were often in conflict. This was disastrous, Pliny argued, because Nature was providential, as even man’s abuse of

Did you know that February is LGBT+ history month? If you have a ‘progressive’ employer you probably do. Banks, universities, local councils, NHS services and train operators are all getting on board. Rainbow flags are flying high above buildings across Britain. But do lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people really need their own month to reflect on the past? Or is this more an occasion to virtue signal in the present? To be fair to the Bank of England, when it raised the rainbow flag on Threadneedle Street on 1 February, it was also commemorating Alan Turing. A war hero, who was gay, it is believed Turing took his own life after undergoing chemical

Thursday 3 April 1721 was an unremarkable day in political London. No fanfare or ceremony surrounded King George I’s appointment of Robert Walpole as First Lord of the Treasury (Prime Minister), merely a paragraph buried in the press: ‘We are informed that a Commiffion is preparing appointing Mr Walpole Firft Lord…’ Yet here was the start of what has become the longest-lasting head of government job in the democratic world — and its 300th anniversary falls on 3 April this year. Expect no fanfare or drone pyrotechnics in political London to mark the occasion. Our leaders will, inevitably, be attending to the pandemic and other pressing concerns. But that does

Diversity is ‘about empowering people by respecting and appreciating what makes them different, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education and national origin’. If this means making their differences the most important thing about them, it fails to answer the question about what such empowering will enable them to do. A famous story about Heracles illustrates ancient priorities. He was on the cusp of manhood and wondering what path in life to take. Vice and Virtue approached him and made their different pitches. Vice (‘but friends call me “Happiness”’) offered a life of endless pleasure, Virtue something very different. ‘Men will get no fine or noble

In his 37-book Natural History, Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) wondered why we wished people ‘Happy new year’ (primum anni diem laetis precationibus faustum ominamur), or said ‘Bless you’ (sternuentes salutamus) when someone sneezed. Was this mere superstition, or something else? Pliny devoted a lot of time to denigrating all forms of superstition and magic, arguing that they were attempts to control the uncontrollable in human affairs, and citing Nero as an example of someone whose interest in magic was nothing but an ‘overwhelming desire to force the gods to do his will’, as if such a thing were ever possible. Beliefs about such phenomena, whose origins Pliny found