Cicero
There was more to real-life gladiators than fighting
Many commentators have criticised the film Gladiator II on technical aspects of the fighting. But there was so much more…
Our new MPs should read Cicero
It would make a pleasant change if every elected MP was to make it their ambition to be honestus, Latin…
The ancients knew they couldn’t turn back time
The singer Cher, now 75, has announced that, because she refuses to appear old, she is not going to allow…
How to be ‘liberal’, according to the ancients
Certain parts of academia seem to wish to turn the study of classics away from a historical, language- and evidence-based…
What would BLM make of Cicero’s views on mutuality?
The Black Lives Matter website (different from the new Black Liberation Movement) mostly presents an image of an organisation of…
The ancients knew the value of the natural world
The ancients knew nothing about global warming, but they still reflected on the relationship between man and nature. In the…
Cicero would have been quick to end the lockdown
The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus)…
The rejection of the people’s mandate – then and now
The Transport Secretary Chris Grayling may be quite right (not words one often reads) to warn that failure to deliver…
John McDonnell might soon regret handing out copies of Cicero
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has given all his cabinet a copy of Cicero’s advice on how to win arguments. This…
BBC2’s Civilisations seems unable to decide what civilisation is
The presenters of the BBC 2 programme on civilisations seem unable to decide what civilisation is. Socrates would therefore wonder…
Britain’s fight with European law goes back 750 years
It is no surprise that the laws imposed on the UK by a European parliament in Brussels should so infuriate…
Cicero could have told you all about the MPs’ standards committee
As Sir Kevin Barron, chair of the MPs’ ‘Standards’ committee, steps down so that his own MP-packed body can adjudicate…
Jean-Claude Juncker speaks to Britain like a Roman emperor
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the EU Commission, made a typically brilliant intervention in the EU referendum debate by arguing that…
Take up and read Augustine’s Confessions
I usually throw away dust jackets but Robin Lane Fox chose his for a reason. He originally encountered Augustine of…
Is your quotation secretly Nazi?
I couldn’t help laughing when I found that an Australian senator, Cory Bernardi, had deleted all his tweets from Twitter,…
How the world's first great republic slipped into empire and one-man rule
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than…
Why Cicero would have liked shadow health secretary Heidi Alexander
Heidi Alexander, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow health secretary, has emphasised how important it is ‘to weave into [Labour’s] language, our narrative…
Ancient and Modern: Juvenal and Cicero on whether grunting has a place in sport
What a pleasure it was to watch the men’s final at Wimbledon contested with a minimum of grunting, exclaiming and…
Cicero’s advice for defeated politicians (Alastair Campbell, take note)
The great Robert Harris has defended the pollsters who got the elections so wrong by quoting Cicero on the electorate’s…
How the Romans went about their business
When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch…
The fall of the Roman republic and the rise of Alex Salmond
Alex Salmond, the ex-first minister who proved incapable of making Scotland independent, has assured the world that he and his…
Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
Ancients on oldies: tips on ageing from the Romans are all Greek to Richard Ingrams
A few months ago I went to a lunch at Univ, my old college in Oxford, to celebrate the 95th…
Cicero’s advice for Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw
In responding as they did to the Daily Telegraph ‘sting’, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind may well have done…
Old age is not for sissies
The secret of eternal youth, according to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, is arrested development, and the penny dropped last week. The…
