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.

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.

Responses to the columns and further articles from the current Spectator are contained in the Spectator's website, to which you can travel by clicking the logo below: