Philip Womack
Eulogy to Euergetism
Vote for Caesar: How the Ancient Greeks and Romans Solved the Problems of Today
By Peter Jones
Orion 272pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
Peter Jones has done much to publicise and popularise the Classics – his easy-going introductions to Latin and Greek and his selection of passages from Ovid spring to mind, all of which have been marked by clarity, rigour and accessibility. Here he turns his attention to ‘the issues of today’: immigration, bent politicians, religion, the Olympic Games and so on. Anything that we can come up with, the ancients have already dealt with in a much more successful manner, seems to be Jones’s thesis. I am not sure how valid an exercise it is to try to solve complex political and social issues by reference to the Greeks and Romans. Leaving aside Louis MacNeice’s view (‘It was all so unimaginably different / And all so long ago’), there are just too many factors to consider.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2