Those who apply the label of demagogue to Huey or to other politicians hardly ever trouble to invest the term with any precise definition. It was coined by the ancient Greeks, who were sorely afflicted by rabble rousing orators and who described them scornfully. The demagogue, said Euripides, was ‘base-born’, ‘a man of loose tongue, […]
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Tags:Campaigning·Democracy·etymology·History·Political Communication·Politics·The Greeks
Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, ‘The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.’
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Tags:History·religion·The Greeks
The panzer troops were horrified when they found that they had been firing at women. Few members of the Sixth Army seem to have heard about the Sarmatae of the lower Volga – an interbreed of Scythians and Amazons, according to Herodotus – who allowed their women to take part in war.
Plato said that men could find their true moral development only in service to the city. The Athenian was saved from looking at his life as a private affair. Our word “idiot” comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters. Pericles in the funeral oration reported by Thucydides […]
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Tags:Civic Duty·Democracy·Duty·Politics·The Greeks
Athens at its maximum, about 430 B.C., is estimated to have numbered about 230,000 (including slaves), and the surrounding territory of rural Attica probably contained a rather smaller population. Never before or since has anything approaching the same proportion of the inhabitants of any area shown itself capable of work of the highest excellence. In philosophy, […]
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Tags:History·philosophy·The Greeks