Friends of Classics

Ancient and Modern: 2008

12/01/2008	One moment laws against ‘religious hatred’, the next against smoking in cars, now mobile phones. What next? But then, law-making has been expanding ever since Romans drew up their XII Tables
19/01/2008	‘Change’ is the latest buzz-word of contemporary politics. It is, of course, quite meaningless until one knows what (precisely) is being changed and to (precisely) what; and, for a government in power for ten years, it leaves hanging in the air the objection ‘If you want to keep on changing things, it rather suggests that you have kept on getting things wrong’.
2/2/2008	Last time we saw that the currently fashionable buzz-word ‘change’ was anathema to the Romans, because they looked for stability and permanence, and change implied failure. Romans reinforced this perspective by using the past to act as a guide to the present. The technical term for any particular instance was exemplum.
1/3/2008	Macavity-like, Brown was never there when he was Chancellor, and rarely seems to be there now he is Prime Minister.
22/3/2008	According to Mohammed Fayed, the Princess of Wales was murdered on the orders of Prince Philip working in cahoots with some thirty named individuals
18/4/2008	The sight of Chinese thugs invading the streets of our capital in the name of the Olympic Holy Flame Protection Unit should banish once and for all the idea that the Olympic Games are not ‘political’.
3/5/2008	Boris Johnson has vowed as mayor to emulate his hero Pericles, turning London into ‘an education to Britain’ as Athens was (Pericles claimed) to Greece.
31/5/2008	Hamid Karzai’s government is said to control a mere thirty per-cent of Afghanistan. The rest is in the control of tribal leaders and the Taliban. As David Miliband says, we will ‘win’ only by diplomacy.
14/6/2008	We are happy that terrorist suspects be held for twenty-eight days without charge. So there is no problem about the principle. But government now wishes to extend this to forty-two days, and all hell breaks loose.
19/7/2008	Whether Muslims want elements of sharia law to have the force of civil law or not (not, it is argued in last week’s Spectator), the principle of different jurisdictional codes existing side by side has been with us for thousands of years.
2/8/2008	The recent exchange of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers for five living Hezbollah (and much else) has produced outrage in some sections of the Israeli press.
16/8/2008	The Anglican bishops have met and reached their grave conclusions on a number of doubtless vital issues – except one. What about the Olympic Games? Are they not pagan rituals? And was it not for that excellent reason that the Church banned them?
23/8/2008	The debate between creationists and anti-creationists is nothing new. As David Sedley shows in his extraordinarily interesting Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (California), it raged as strongly in the ancient world as it does in the modern.
30/8/2008	Last time we saw how Socrates and Plato were among the majority of ancient thinkers who supported the ‘creationist’ explanation of the world. But there was an ‘anti-creationist’ lobby too, led by the 5thC Athenian atomists Leucippus and Democritus.
6/9/08	Apparently some scientists believe that the patterns in which bumblebees search for food - ‘geographic profiling’ is the technical term - could help detectives hunt down serial killers. The ancients would not have been in the slightest bit surprised.
13/9/2008	The military-backed President Musharraf of Pakistan has been dragged, screaming and kicking, into retirement. He doesn’t know how lucky he is.
27/9/2008	A group of c. 200 pagan worshippers gathered recently at the Parthenon to beg Athena not to allow material to be removed from her temple and relocated in the new, specially designed museum nearby. The goddess was obviously not impressed. One cannot blame her.
18/10/2008	As banking chaos looms, we should recall the words of the American president Thomas Jefferson: ‘the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a grand scale’.
1/11/2008	Last time we saw that the Romans did not have anything like a banking system i.e. a machinery for creating credit through various negotiable instruments. What they did have was minted coin – and that was the sole monetary instrument.
15/11/2008	It is a relief that there is one magazine in which one will not be hauled up on a charge of libel or sexual harassment for writing that Barack Obama, the President-elect of the United States, is a novus homo.
22/11/2008	Barack Obama has risen to power on the back of an enviable oratorical ability. But it is a two-edged sword.
6/12/2008	In the last two columns we have considered Barack Obama as novus homo and orator. But what about his mixed race?
13/12/2008	Andrew Motion’s tenure as Poet Laureate is about to end, and the search for a successor has begun. It is accompanied with the usual tidal wave of claptrap about this not being ‘the sort of job which any real poet would want’ and the importance of not involving public opinion in the choice.
20/12/2008	Christmas Double Header: The Today programme would call her iconic, but since she is a 16.1-centimetre high gold and ivory (‘chryselephantine’) statuette, it would not be saying much. She stands there, erect, shoulders back, thrusting forward impressive bare breasts (one nipple the tip of a golden nail), both hand holding snakes that, twined round her arms, stretch outwards from her, tongues flickering. The best known of all the ancient Cretan snake goddesses, she has graced the covers of, and been reproduced in, a thousand books.

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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