Peter Jones

When Covid-19 first appeared, its similarity to Sars made some assume it could not mount a pandemic; others that it would be infectious, but mild. Assumptions with unhappy consequences are nothing new: some can last millennia. Take the West’s understanding of malaria. This deadly fever, widespread across the ancient world and mentioned in Homer, is

The actor John Cleese has been wondering if we should destroy Greek statues because Greeks believed ‘a cultured society was only possible if it was based on slavery’. That was not a Greek belief, but might the existence of ancient slavery suggest that their statues deserve to be knocked down anyway? Two points: first, the

When the PM’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, was discovered to have made his fateful journey to Durham during lockdown, there was uproar. Now that Durham police have judged that trip legal, one might have thought the issue would disappear. But as ancient Greeks knew, such hatreds last a long time. They would have seen three

Education is cumulative. The idea that it will be lost on a generation because, for one out of 42 terms of schooling, pupils will have to take more responsibility for their own learning, is obvious tosh. Indeed that term may yield considerable benefits for all, especially older, pupils, whatever their future plans. Let Plato explain.

The speed with which ‘model’ Nightingale hospitals have been designed and erected across the UK reminds one of the experts in this sort of thing: the Romans. Legionary fortresses provide a good example. All were designed on roughly the same pattern, and all had a hospital (valetudinarium). The fortress built at Inchtuthil in Scotland offers

The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus) of the people be the supreme law’. No surprise there: he had just returned from his sick bed. But as he knows very well, that injunction was military: salus meant ‘security, safety’. The consuls must

The Spectator’s 10,000th hebdomaversary (hebdomas, ‘a group of seven’: a weekly cannot have an anniversary) will surely be celebrated with the same enthusiasm that units of a thousand evoked in the ancients. But for them a thousandth-year celebration had to be symbolically significant. That required careful manipulation of dates. For example, the really big moment

When a major crisis strikes in the modern world, the state and international bodies such as the IMF and World Health Organisation come to the rescue. The ancients in such situations had recourse only to a culture of personal or public benefaction, self-help and (where relevant) legal action: when in ad 27 a ramshackle stadium

It must be infuriating for those who see the Prime Minister as a prisoner of a rigid elitist mindset that he is reacting to the pandemic not by crushing the workers but by doing what needed to be done, however radical. Pericles, his hero, was equally pragmatic, as the historian Thucydides said — and reaped

Those with signs of Covid-19 are being asked to ‘self-isolate’ (Latin insula, ‘island’). But do they have the mindset for it? That requires self-sufficiency, for which the Greeks had a word: autarkeia (our ‘autarky’; contrast ‘autarchy’, ‘absolute rule’). Such a mindset was essential in the ancient world, where the threat of starvation, disease or disaster

The plague that struck Athens in the summer of 430 bc was a killer: it lasted for two years, returned after a year, and carried off a third of Athens’ manpower, including Pericles. From the historian Thucydides’ famous description, the plague — he caught it but recovered — bore certain resemblances to Covid-19 (allowing for

Last week Ross Clark expatiated on the hysteria and panic generated by Covid-19 that threatens to send the world into lockdown. These are aspects of the emotion of ‘fear’, and the Greeks certainly had words for that. The root of Greek deos ‘fear’ meant ‘two’, and was cognate with the Latin dub- (cf. ‘dubious’), i.e.

The PM is insisting that the briefings he finds in his red box every evening should be, well, brief, and has limited them to four sides of A4. That is three too many. Emperors too had in and out boxes and knew what hard work they could be. Seleucus, Greek king of Asia, was said

The PM was filmed introducing his new cabinet by getting them to answer in unison how many hospitals, how many buses etc. he was planning to provide. This is ‘performance politics’, the remanipulation of a ‘stage’ (here the Cabinet Office) and its ‘performers’ (MPs) to send a message to an ‘audience’ (us). Another example would

An impeachment trial is overseen by Congress and Senate, who both make the law and (in this case) sit in judgment on it, ignoring the modern legal principle of the separation of powers. Athenians would have been shocked, not because they believed in the separation of powers (their citizens too made the law in assembly

Lord Heseltine’s electrifying hair once whipped the party faithful into paroxysms of euphoria. But since today he sees his hopes of staying in Europe finally squashed, he is a shrunken, diminished figure, and low lie his leonine locks. Let Dikaiopolis restore their vibrancy and bounce. Dikaiopolis was the hero of a Greek comedy composed by

There are as many explanations for Harry and Meghan’s problems with the royal family as there are commentators. May as well let the ancient Greeks have their say. Greeks placed enormous importance on philoi, those with whom one made common cause: and one’s prime philoi were one’s family. So when an Athenian citizen put himself

The candidates battling for the leadership of the Labour party never stop banging on about ‘social justice’ and ‘equality’. But they never define them. Plato did. In his final work, Laws (c. 350 bc), three men, led by the unnamed ‘Athenian’, discussed general principles behind governance and the law. The Athenian then applied them to