Friends of Classics

Ancient and Modern: 2001

13-10-2001	A leading theologian of the Church of England has announced that the Harry Potter books, rather than being works of the devil (as some have claimed), convey deep Christian truths. It may seem feeble of the Church, even in these straitened times, to prop up its teaching with the assistance of children's stories about witches, but such tactics have an ancient ancestry.
20-10-2001	The supermodel Elle Macpherson has evidently stuck up neatly typed notes round her kitchen reminding her how to treat her child - presumably in case she forgets. One of them says, ‘Avoid language which evaluates. Instead use words which describe how you feel.’ This dopey philosophy, as if children should be taught that the one important thing was to make other people feel good, might on certain conditions have drawn applause from the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bc).
27-10-2001	The home secretary David Blunkett is planning a crack-down on jokes about religion that may offend sensibilities. Ancient Greeks might have thought he had the wrong target.
3-11-2001	The Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ is a weasel phrase: how will we know when the ‘process’ is ended and ‘peace’ delivered? If there is currently a ‘truce’, we must eventually have a treaty.
10-11-2001	East has fought West since the Trojan War, but the roots of the current 'war' against terrorism have specific origins unrelated to the Graeco- Roman world: the peculiar demands of monotheism.
17-11-2001	A fifteen year-old is leading a three hundred-strong private army against the Taliban. But that's youth for you, Aristotle (384-322 BC) would argue. In his ART OF RHETORIC, he devotes considerable space to discussing the points one can make on a whole range of topics to persuade your audience to agree with you. One such topic is the young.
24-11-2001	Geologists claim to have explained the frenzied rantings of the priestess (the Pythia) at the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi. They argue that ethane, methane and ethylene issued from the spring which once flowed under the oracle. Since the first stages of ethylene inhalation (widely used as an anaesthetic in the past) induce in patients a 'frenzy', they conclude that was how the Pythia generated her aperçus
1-12-2001	Last week, the Delphic oracle was shown to have acted in large part like a Citizens' Advice Bureau, with a strong rational streak to it; stories about a foaming, ranting Pythia were simply not true. But that is not the whole story.
8-12-01	Simon Heffer has been arguing that Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech was warning against the dangers not of racism but of multi- culturalism. But what does multi-culturalism mean? If its opposite is mono-culturalism, no westerner has lived in a mono-culture for a very long time.
15-12-2001	It was business as usual in the Roman Empire on that first Christmas, and it was not a pretty sight
29-11-2001	As the happy people of Europe link hands, singing and dancing, to welcome the bright new dawn of the euro, they might consider the judgment of Tacitus on the British acceptance of Roman ways in the 1st century ad: ‘the ignorant called it civilisation: it was in fact a mark of their servitude’.

Every week in the London Spectator, Peter Jones compares something that has happened in the week's news with the way things were done in the ancient world.

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