The Moderns Between the Greeks and the Romans: Tony Blair's Athenian Bithday

Author(s):

• Stothard, Sir Peter

Subject Area: Political Science

Series Name: Michigan Paper Series

Publication Date: 2005

Description: The idea of being a modern Athens to a modern American Rome lies deep in the minds of British Prime Ministers. Harold Macmillan said it out loud. Margaret Thatcher believed it. Tony Blair didn't want to believe it - but found he had little choice. It has been a convenient thought. How can Blair be 'Bush's poodle' if he comes from a so distinguished a line of 'President's philosophers'? British journalists too have always liked the phrase. It seemed to give us a sort of superiority - and in the world of words where journalists do their work. So once Winston Churchill had been allowed to exaggerate his influence, Harold Macmillan to hype our family ties to the Kennedies and Thatcher to give the impression that she was the co-pilot in Reagan's bombing raids over Red Square, it became one of those ill-defined 'givens' of Downing Street, sometimes debunked, always deniable under pressure of events but never truly disbelieved. What did the phrase ever really mean? It is normally not much use to ask a politician. Did Plutarch, for example, write his parallel lives to show that the great Greeks were just as warlike as the great Romans, not merely philosophy teachers on the make? Some classicists might argue that - but not many politicians would try. The late First Century AD is a good time to examine the notion of 'the thinker on a dog lead' - but even those who studied classics at school tended to end, not begin, with the death of Nero.

Author Bio: Editor of the Times Literary Supplement

Notes/Comments: Sir Peter Stothard gave a lecture at the University of Michigan on, "The Moderns between the Greeks and the Romans." The lecture aimed to address comparisons between the contemporary world and modernity’s distant beginnings in Greco-Roman times and examines the Hellenic and the Latin worlds as legacies for our own times. Co-sponsored by the Centers for European and European Union Studies, the Department of Classical Studies, its Modern Greek Program, and Contexts for Classics.