Scientists at Cambridge University have made the astonishing discovery that repressing your emotions might have something to be said for it. The ancients turned their analytical minds to that, and much else, long ago. In the 7th century bc the ancient Greeks invented natural philosophy, arguing about the physical world in rational terms, excluding gods.
Excited crowds of youth, encouraged by adults who should know better, take the view that opinions with which they disagree should not be debated but subject to control by the mob. In the ancient world we know of only a handful of examples. Socrates’s trial is the most famous: at a politically fraught time in
It is apparently an increasingly popular idea that we can ‘cosmically attract’ success to ourselves. Many ancients, with their beliefs in divination and so on, might well have agreed. Not Cicero. He published his two-book De Divinatione in 44 bc, soon after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In it he takes on his brother Quintus,
The government is supplying the obese with a slimming drug Wegovy. But the ancient world was dominated by the emaciated, and the fat were extremely thin on the ground. They were therefore the subject of considerable interest. A degree of corpulence was the sign of a rich, healthy and prosperous man. But obesity turned one
Whatever the problems involved in building, let alone finishing, HS2, it is hoped that it will replicate what was ultimately achieved – prosperity, intentionally or not – by the 53,000 miles of roads with which Rome covered its empire (and so successfully that prosperity is now found wherever networks of Roman roads were established across
The American firm B Corp offers businesses the chance to win a ‘kitemark’ by a box-ticking process showing that they are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, and Coutts decided to go for it. Given how that turned out, one wonders how they reached that decision. Had they followed Aristotle’s advice
For most people in the ancient world, holidays meant local public festivals – in Rome there were 135 a year – when politicians staged extravagant games and theatrical shows. But the elite mostly spent summers in their own or their friends’ villas, well away from the stench, heat and mosquitoes of Rome. We tend to
SOCRATES: I was walking back from the gymnasium when I saw Keir Mather, the new MP for Selby, on his way there. I had been told he was young and good-looking and went to a world-famous Oxford College, so I have been very keen to meet to him. Hello, O Keir. MATHER: And you too,
The ancients were as fascinated by rumour as, to judge by recent events in Russia and the BBC, we are. Homer called rumour ‘the messenger of Zeus’, with a fondness for racing through crowds. Virgil described it as a winged monster, with an unsleeping eye under every feather, a mouth and tongue never silent and
It is encouraging to see Sir Keir Starmer taking a leaf out of the ancients’ book by putting oracy (from Latin orator) on the curriculum. Indeed, on the ancient curriculum, there was little else of such importance. State education did not exist. It was an entirely private operation, designed to supply the elite with the
Daisy Goodwin, a 61-year-old married novelist and TV producer, has alleged that ten years ago she was molested by Daniel Korski, and said she felt ‘entirely justified’ in describing the alleged incident a decade later. She claimed that other women had come forward with ‘very interesting stories’ on the topic. What would the Athenians have
How secure is Vladimir Putin? His Presidential Security Service consists of 2,500 personnel, his Federal Protective Service of 50,000 troops and the National Guard, essentially his personal army, of 350,000. What could possibly go wrong? Roman emperors might have had a view. It was Augustus who invented the Praetorian Guard (27 bc), a personal, prestigious
SOCRATES: I was walking through the agora after having had a discussion with an impetuous young man who argued that a good orator could win a debate on any subject, even though he knew nothing about it. This left me rather baffled, so it was a pleasure to fall in with the lawyer Lady Hallett,
What does a king do when his privileged but dysfunctional son turns against him, flees to America and spends his time there attacking the monarch and his family? King Charles’s reaction has been to let him get on with it. But given what he might have done, the Stoic philosopher Seneca (d. ad 65), and
What would ancient Greeks have made of the current protests relating to the oil industry and identity reassignment? Very little indeed. The Greek invention of democracy (‘people power’) emerged in the late 6th century bc after strong popular demand for more political control over tyrants and oligarchs. The result was a system in which all
Classical literature has the reputation of being pretty serious stuff, far removed from the world that Jeremy Clarke inhabited. But he would have felt perfectly at home in Pompeii. Take the conversation decorating the grave monument of the bar-owners Lucius Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas (beat that, Frankie Howerd!): ‘Innkeeper! The bill!’ ‘You’ve had a
Last week’s column ended with a Roman funerary inscription: ‘I died of a surfeit of doctors.’ But where did this surfeit come from? Let Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) explain. Pliny devoted book 29 of his Natural History (a vast encyclopedia of Roman life) to the history of medicine. Claiming that no discipline ‘undergoes
Research in the USA has shown that it is possible to do something about grey hair. But ‘grey hair’ stands for ‘old age’, and there is nothing we can do about that, except make it easier to live with. Modern medicine certainly helps. There was no such luck in the ancient world, where the playwright Sophocles
After much debate it was decided that the people would not be ordered to reciprocate the King’s oath of allegiance. This was wise. As ancient Greeks knew, oaths have serious implications. For them, to take an oath was in effect ‘to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting
Baroness Benjamin has suggested that King Charles’s choice of her to join the coronation procession demonstrates that he is in favour of ‘diversity and inclusion’. What would the ancients have made of that, let alone of ‘equality’ and ‘identity’? ‘Equality’ had little purchase. Politically, male citizens had a vote in democratic Athens and (of sorts)
