The Peloponnesian war

We all have our own vision of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, for one, seems to have treated it like Harrods. Hoping to decorate his Scottish stately home with the Marbles, he wrote long instructions to his agent: ‘The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs and the remains of the statues… Would it be permissible to speak of a Caryatid?’ The Greek gods must have thought not, because Elgin’s fortunes rapidly took a turn for the worse. He lost some of the Marbles in a shipwreck in 1802; was imprisoned in a French fortress by Napoleon; his wife had an affair with his best friend; and he lost

‘War – what is it good for?’ asked Edwin Starr on his 1970 single of the same name, before answering his rhetorical question:   ‘Absolutely nothing.’ In this, Starr was not only excoriating America’s contemporary folly in Vietnam. He was implicitly endorsing the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s recommendation that humanity could and should trade up from endless war to perpetual peace, and the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s suggestion that war was not natural to our species. In 1940 she wrote: War is just an invention known to the majority of human societies, by which they permit their young men either to accumulate prestige or avenge their honour or acquire loot or wives or