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The dramatic impact of the Coronavirus has highlighted how thankfully rare pandemics are in the modern world. The Roman empire, by contrast, suffered from regular bouts of contagion, among the most deadly of which were the Antonine and Justinianic plagues. How would the Romans have reacted to the risks posed by the arrival of a […]
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“If it bleeds, it leads” – the cynical motto of the modern media, which uses fear and sensationalism to drive up ratings and sell advertising. But were medieval and Byzantine narratives sources much better? They also tend to focus on unusual events and personalities, on political strife rather than peaceful business as usual, and on […]
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Covid-19 has had many people reaching back to the plague which Apollo sends on the Greek army at the very beginning of Homer’s Iliad; Western literature begins with a devastating disease of unknown cause. The Greek commander, Agamemnon, had in fact wronged and abused Apollo’s priest, Chryses: disease is a hidden enemy which must have […]
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On Friday March 20, the Roman poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) turned 2062. In the last decade of his life he was exiled by the emperor Augustus for offences known and unknown to a small frontier town on the Black Sea. There he knew all about the disappointments of spring – and of a spring […]
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In addition to the medical and economic aspects of the current crisis, the psychological challenges it poses have over recent weeks increasingly claimed our attention. Even if one is not affected personally, how does one cope with this crisis mentally? How does one deal with its consequences in everyday life, with the anxieties and concerns, […]
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The village of Barrington, in Cambridgeshire, presents the viewer with a quintessentially English rural scene: with its thatched cottages and village pub, and one of the best-preserved and extensive village greens in the country, it could not feel further removed in space or time from the Mediterranean world in the ‘Age of Justinian’. Yet this […]
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In the preamble to his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides declares that the twenty-year conflict between Athens and Sparta was a war like no other, an object lesson for humanity involving what for him was the whole known world. His purpose in writing was to discover by careful research the truth about events in […]
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Toilet paper has become the unlikely posterchild of the coronavirus. Toilet paper, and its absence. Much has been written about what seems, at first sight, an unlikely association: after all, diarrhea is not one of the disease’s side effects. Hypotheses abound, from the sociology of herd response (copy-cat behavior) over the economics of panic buying […]
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