Good morning ,
Our Lead Story is about how often "grown men think about the Roman Empire"
- apparently, a lot! And by way of some explanation, the Washington Post cites an Oxford historian who points out that there were "multiple gender expressions and identities, as well as various sexualities" in Rome. Is it that Oxford has gone completely woke or did the Washington Post search around desperately for an historian who would satisfy the demands of the woke in the US?
By way of contrast, I attach a review published in The Australian of a Melbourne University conference on 'How Republics Die: creeping authoritarianism form the ancient to the modern world', written by RSA Fellow Paul Monk. The conference was organised by my friend professor Frederik Vervaet and - from the one day I spent there - was a fine example of how expert academics
hailing from a variety of universities can come together and deduce lessons from history that resonate in the modern world. And yes, they did talk a lot about the Roman Empire.
