Party conferences always provide the most agreeable spectacle of politicians desperately trying to appeal to both the diehards among the party faithful and the soft underbelly of the general public. Aristotle (384-322 bc) lived at a time when democratic and oligarchic groupings within any polis (city-state) were regularly in conflict to impose their system of government, and was all too aware of the problem.
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Peter Jones’s Veni Vidi Vici, a history of Rome, is now published (Atlantic Books).
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