Now that parliament has decided to decriminalise abortion, it is interesting to see what the ancients made of the matter. The question for them was, as for us – when did the foetus become ‘human’? The answer was when it developed a psukhê (‘soul’). Some Greek philosophers argued that the foetus was fully ‘ensouled’ from
Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill has generated much talk about the ethics of suicide. As far as the ancients were concerned, it was only in life that you could make your mark. The Christian passion for embracing, even rejoicing at, death made no sense to them. Ancient thinkers generally did not fear an afterlife. Although
Flattery will get you everywhere, as the sycophants that surround Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping know. Which makes Elon Musk’s defection rather interesting. Trump’s policies meant that Musk simply could not flatter him any more just to satisfy his inexhaustible self-love, which, says the Greek essayist, biographer and diplomat Plutarch (d.
It is embarrassing to compare Thames Water’s efforts even to the Greeks, let alone the Romans. Most Greek cities got their water from public fountains fed by springs. Doctors new to a district examined the supply to determine likely ailments (one spring was said to make your teeth fall out). A few towns had piped
Writing in a lesser organ, Matthew Parris wondered whether most ancient Greeks ‘really, sincerely, did believe in their bizarre pantheon of gods’. Belief in a single god was at that time limited to two peoples: Jews and Zoroastrians (and Egyptians once, briefly). To everyone else, perhaps the sheer variety of the world, the extraordinary generative
The Sunday Times rich list would have excited the male citizens over the age of 18 who determined state policy in the Athenian assembly in the 5th century bc. The reason is that Athens levied taxes on citizens by their wealth, as judged by the property they owned. The most important tax was the leitourgia
Will Pope Leo turn out to be a lion or a pussycat? That depends on what he has to confront, but one hopes he will do better than Pope Siricius (384-399), let alone Kirill, current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. When the Roman emperor Constantine published a letter in 313 allowing freedom of worship
This week we celebrated VE Day. When Pericles remembered the dead from the war against Sparta in his famous Funeral Speech of 431 bc, he was not celebrating victory – the war would end in 404 bc with Athens’s surrender – but doing something quite new: he was reflecting on what Athens stood for and
An 1,800-year-old cemetery on the outskirts of the Roman legionary fortress town of York has been found to contain a skeleton whose pelvis was bitten by a lion. Since most of those buried there were decapitated young men, the victim was surely a gladiator. That lion must have been a major entertainment coup for the
It is not surprising that Donald Trump holds the law in contempt. That is what happens when you have a criminal as President. His treatment of Harvard University is an example: he has cancelled a very large grant, saying Harvard is guilty, as charged, of doing nothing about student riots, on the back not of
Donald Trump’s obsessive ‘awhairness’ makes one wonder: why is it so important to him? The topic was of some interest in Rome. The emperor Domitian wrote a treatise on baldness. So too did Cleopatra, who offered the following remedy: ‘For bald patches, powder red sulphuret of arsenic and take it up with oak gum, as
The young in Canada are said to be taking up astrology. But why? Do they think Mark Carney is a star? The ancients saw astrology as a form of divination, which Cicero debunked in 44 bc. The debunking is in the form of a debate with his brother Quintus, who defines divinatio as ‘the foreknowledge
A Today programme presenter used the term imperium (cf. ‘emperor’) with reference to Donald Trump’s desire to annex Greenland. To a Roman, it meant the authority to give orders that must be obeyed, no matter what. Anyone invested with that power by the Roman state was accompanied by lictors, attendants carrying the fasces, an axe
‘Make America Great Again!’ cries Donald Trump. ‘Do Britain Down Again!’ (DOBRIDA!) screech our academic historical institutions. That was not the Roman way. In ad 31, Valerius Maximus completed his nine books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Roman world. They were enormously popular and became a sort of handbook of Roman moral standards
A hadith attributed to Muhammad said that there would be 73 sects of Islam (of which only one would reach heaven). However many there are, they seem as likely to kill each other as they do the infidel. The one virtue of classical religion was that it embraced all gods, come what may. So when
The criminals Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin both believe that might is right. The whole question fascinated the ancient Greeks. In his famous history of the long war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), Thucydides (d. c. 400 bc) explored the question through speeches on both sides, but on one occasion – when Athens demanded
We await the full details of Donald Trump’s ‘take it or leave it’ solution to the Ukraine war, but at least Romans liked that sort of clarity. Take the war between Rome and the Carthaginian Hannibal, begun in 218 bc. Rome had already defeated Carthage in a long drawn-out battle over the possession of Sicily.
Nearly six million people are on out-of-work benefits. It is claimed that, for most of those, going back to work would not be financially worth it. Aristotle would have agreed with them because for him, leisure was the most important possession a man could have. The ancients generally had no concept of the dignity of
‘I get along with him well. I like him a lot,’ Donald Trump has said of Sir Keir Starmer. ‘He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far. I may not agree with his philosophy, but
Generation Z(oomer), aged roughly between 13 and 28, have expressed a desire to be ruled by a dictator. That term derives from the Latin dictator, which referred to an official given absolute power (i.e. he was above the law) for a fixed term to do whatever he thought necessary to deal with a clearly identified
