It is the prerogative of every society and every era to believe it is uniquely afflicted by existential threats, whether natural or self-inflicted, ruled by unprecedented waves of criminals and corrupt incompetents, and saddled with a feckless and foolish spoiled younger generation of popinjays.
Ours is a hag-ridden age in which the unlimited fears afforded by apprehension rule our lives. Ancient Rome, the most sophisticated political, military and economic state of antiquity, turns out to be like looking in a mirror.
Roman writers loved to celebrate the great men of the Roman past who spurned luxury and indulgence and bemoaned the decadence of their own times when wealth and consumption had become the only measures of success. They exulted in a fantasy of the good old days, a paradise when Rome’s farmers, their hands encrusted with grime, dropped their ploughs to pick up swords and fight a war for freedom and security and then return to the fields.
Roman historians like Livy and Tacitus became obsessed with the idea that Rome’s military success had brought so much wealth it was corrupting the minds and bodies of the Roman people who were sinking into a world of excess and indulgence. Rome had become “burdened by its magnitude”, said Livy. Banqueting descended into decadence with haute couture cooks, a profession once derided as suitable only to the “most worthless of slaves”, and female musicians. These were, Livy warned darkly, trifling compared to what was to come. A writer called Quintilian poured scorn on how a natural appearance had given way to using curling irons and caking on cosmetics “so that it really seems as if physical beauty depended entirely on moral hideousness”.
In the first century BC, during the late Republic, the politician Sallust identified the growth of avaritia (avarice), especially for money, and how “virtue began to lose its lustre”. In his description avaritia is a miasma, a poisonous substance in the atmosphere that pervaded a man’s body and soul and “effeminated” him.
Sallust had enough self-awareness to realise he was no different. He looked back to his own early political ambitions:
Dishonest behaviour, bribery, and a quick profit were everywhere. Although everything I saw going on was new to me – and I looked down on them with disdain – ambition led me astray and, having all the weakness of youth, could not resist. Regardless of my efforts to dissociate myself from the corruption that was everywhere, my own greed to get on meant that I was hated and slandered as much as my rivals.
Sounds familiar? The statesman Cicero observed that men needed money in the first instance to pay for necessities, but that for the most ambitious their love of money was all about power and having the means to stump up for favours or bribes, or even bankroll a private army.
One day in the mid-50s BC the general Pompey was standing near to where the elections for the aedileships (a junior magistracy) were taking place. With so much at stake and the jealous factionalism that Rome was riven with at the time, an explosive fight broke out, resulting in fatalities. Pompey was showered with blood so members of his staff quickly provided him with clean clothing (this must have been a normal part of the baggage of a man of substance out on business in Rome) and rushed the soiled garments back to his house.
In 54 BC Cicero was outraged by how bribery and corruption had taken off yet again, and how a large sum of money had been lined up to bribe the voters who were entitled to cast the first votes in the comitia centuriata. “The whole matter was an inferno of ill-will,” he said.
Under the circumstances it is not entirely surprising that within less than 25 years the Roman world had passed under the control of one man, Augustus. Although he pretended to have restored the Republic after the civil wars of the 40s and 30s BC following the assassination of his great-uncle Caesar in 44 BC, he had established a despotic monarchy. Tacitus said everyone went along with the pretence for the sake of peace.
Under the Emperors who followed, the Empire did enjoy a couple of centuries or so of relative stability punctuated by a couple of bouts of civil war. But ordinary people in Rome had very good reason to gibber in their sandals.
When your house is closed, and your shop locked up with bar and chain, and everything is quiet you’ll be robbed by a burglar, or perhaps a cut-throat will wipe you out quickly with his blade.
So said the poet Juvenal. Rome was a tense place to live, even for ordinary individuals trying to go about their business. Many of them were crammed into dangerously crowded and badly built tenement blocks. Contrary to the popular belief that the Romans were magnificent town planners, Rome had expanded without any controls.
Men and women alike were vulnerable to attacks on the streets of Rome or any other city, though custom and the paternalistic society did mean that women were much less likely to be out alone after dark, especially women of high status. Lethal violence could erupt without warning, to say nothing of the Roman habit of hurling broken pots out of the window. Oddly, the available evidence suggests that much the most dangerous cutthroats were often young men from aristocratic families.
Juvenal said that there were so many such hazards in Rome that anyone who went out to dinner without making a will first was guilty of sheer negligence. The poet Horace mentioned how easy it was to be taken for a fool by a beggar loitering at any one of Rome’s numerous road junctions pretending to be lame.
During the reign of Domitian (81-96) there had been an outbreak of a sinister new offence, not only in Rome but also elsewhere. The perpetrators’ modus operandi was to spread poison on needles and then prick anyone they could with them. This extraordinary story of the original spikers sounds like something from the Sherlock Holmes stories, but Rome had no celebrated sleuth, fictional or otherwise, to solve the crimes. The result was that many victims died, most of them unaware of what had happened to them.
Some of the needle killers were informed on, caught and punished. The mystery is what the motive was. The historian Dio, who recorded the outbreak, suggests it was some sort of crooked business, but there is no suggestion that the murderers were after money. The wave may have been driven by nothing more than a malicious desire to spread panic. If so, it succeeded.
Even taking a bath was risky. Vibbenius and his son were notorious clothes thieves at a baths in Rome. The poet Catullus called the anonymous son a cineaedus (‘sodomite’) which might simply have been an insult or instead implied that perhaps the son distracted selected willing members among the clientele while his father emptied out the lockers and made off with the loot.
Prostitution was rife. At Isernia in central Italy between Rome and Naples one innkeeper and his wife set up a monument to their business which they operated under what were evidently trade names. He was called Lucius Calidius Eroticus and she was Fannia Voluptuas. The names scarcely need translating. At Pompeii hints on where to pick up prostitutes were everywhere. More references to prostitution have been found on Pompeian graffiti than any other profession by a considerable margin. One was inscribed at the rear entrance of the House of the Menander, of the town’s most extravagant houses. In this case the advertisement was for Novellia Primigenia, a prostitute who worked in a nearby town called Nuceria “in the prostitutes’ quarter”.
On and off for over 20 years in the 160s to 180s the Roman Empire was hit by plague. Today little is known about the disease because there is no surviving detailed record of the symptoms, but smallpox is often suggested. By 166 the plague had reached Rome. The contagion struck Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus’s army on campaign against the Marcomanni tribe across the Danube in late 165 or early 166. Once the disease reached the congested population of Rome it was bound to take off rapidly.
The plague clung on, apparently recurring with a major outbreak in Rome again in 189 during the reign of Commodus when Dio said as many as 2,000 people died in a single day, making it the worst of any plague he had any knowledge of. The historian Herodian also referred to this incident, describing it as having hit the whole of Italy “but it was most severe in Rome which, apart from being normally overcrowded was still getting immigrants from around the world”.
The Romans were ever vigilant, watching out for omens that served as portents for the future. Anything that seemed deviant was recorded and scrutinised, whether it involved a meteor falling from the sky, a talking cow, a swarm of bees, a maidservant giving birth to a boy with only one hand, or anything else that looked or sounded peculiar.
By such signs, promising or ominous, the Romans ruled their lives. Particularly popular was the examination of entrails of sacrificial victims for appropriate indicators of impending doom or great prospects. Cicero wondered whether the superstitious observations and the attention paid to omens and their interpretation amounted to self-induced imprisonment. A comet was, for example, “the evil sign of war”.
Pliny the Elder, the natural historian, called the earth a “dot in the universe” and bemoaned how “here we fill positions of power and here we covet wealth and put mankind into a turmoil repeatedly and fight wars, even civil wars, and empty the land by killing one another”. He described this as the “outward madness of nations”.
His nephew, Pliny the Younger, wrote to a friend after experiencing a terrible storm. “Here [in Rome] we have incessant gales and repeated floods. The Tiber had burst its banks and wrecked homes and many people injured and killed.”
Pliny the Younger finished up, “When disaster is actual or expected, the effect is much the same, except that suffering has its limits but apprehension has none. Suffering is confined to the known event, but apprehension extends to every possibility.”
He couldn’t have described the fear and despair promoted at every opportunity in our own time better. The only difference is that now it’s turned into an industry.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Much as I appreciate DS, please stop with these articles on masks and lockdowns and whether they “work” or not.
They are plain wrong on their face; no further analysis required. It was known from the start that Covid was a mild for most virus in the realms of a bad strain of flu, that was fatal almost exclusively for the frail.
We simply cannot shut the world down and stop living normally for such things.
This is just a rabbit hole.
Quite, how we can ensure this never happens again is far more pressing..
And hold the perpetrators to account!
LOL you saved me a comment. I’m bored shitless with all of this harping on about lockdowns, masks etc. It’s all been done to death, the jury was in a long time back on these matters and things have moved on significantly. Time to worry about the things coming down the pipeline in our future ( if not present ), not keep dredging up the past.
Hear, hear.
100% agree tof. I was just about to post:
Give it a bloody rest!
You said it all.
I disagree.
We need to keep trying to convince people that the world over-reacted, and that the reaction was not effective or necessary. We need to present concise, coherent arguments so that people can convince themselves that if only they had known *whatever* they would have behaved differently. Telling people they’ve been stupid is not going to be effective – they need to believe they’ve been fooled by the people they followed. It is important that people have a chance to save face as they convert from supporting the restrictions to protesting them. People need to hear the arguments or they will never convert.
Even the complicit media need to be allowed to claim ‘we were only following orders’ or some other excuse. If they aren’t allowed that fig-leaf they won’t convert until hell freezes over.
Presenting convincing arguments is key. We have to start with simple things like did lockdown work ‘here’? And go on to did they work anywhere? When did masks become a thing? Unless and until other media outlets start carrying these stories DS and the like must do so – and no matter how disheartening we have to keep offering these alternative views without alienating our audience.
Discussing whether lockdowns and masks work is a distraction and a rabbit hole. Our very own MTF is a perfect demonstration of that. Covid was never an emergency and saving lives at all costs is futile and immoral and unnatural. Those are all the arguments you need. As soon as you start arguing about what measures “worked” you more or less concede that “something” needed to be done.
The fact that Covid was never an emergency is not accepted by far too many people; we need to prove that to them somehow. Then we can move on to showing that authorities were whipping up fear to make it appear to be an emergency.
I need to have the necessary rebuttals in mind when people state that lockdown ‘worked’ in Wuhan. To counter that one I have previously relied on stating that we can’t trust China’s figures. It’s good to have additional ammunition from articles like this.
Only later will many people be ready for complex ideas like ‘don’t just do something, stand there’. Or that gathering data before deciding on anything is doing something.
Yes of course hardly anyone believes Covid was not an emergency and hardly anyone believes that saving lives at all costs is wrong and hardly anyone believes that doing nothing is often the best option. I remain convinced that these must be the starting points for any discussion of Covid and the wider subject of collectivism versus personal freedom. I think it’s really a philosophical debate about how you see life. Picking over the minutiae of whether lockdowns worked is a rabbit hole you will never come out of. If you really want a ready rebuttal then ask them to prove lockdowns worked using worldwide real world data and they will not be able to find any pattern that shows they did – another important concept which is that the burden of proof is on the lunatics imposing untried and dangerous measures.
the burden of proof
isshould be on the lunatics imposing untried and dangerous measures.But it isn’t yet for far too many.
Indeed
Sadly I don’t think Covid was some
one off aberration but an extreme manifestation of a drift that has been going on for decades
I fully agree.
So I want to get a majority on board to try to stop that drift.
Amen. We need to refute the specious utilitarian calculus entirely, root and branch, not merely say it was calculated incorrectly, if we want to prevent this from ever happening again. Lockdowns are wrong not only because they are all pain and no gain, but *a fortiori* because they are inherently a blatant violation of basic human rights and civil liberties.
And on that note, the specious notion that “rights are merely a social construct” needs to be jettisoned as well.
Talking of worrisome things coming down the pipeline, this looks slightly concerning, and worth more energy expenditure than flaming ( yawn ) lockdowns for the squillionth time. mRNA in milk!
Yes, it’s ruddy China at it again;
”From a scientific perspective, these experimental steps taken by the Chinese were a stunning success. However, given the damage mRNA vaccines have generated in terms of injuries, disabilities, and deaths, these data raise considerable ethical issues. The COVID States project has shown that 25% of Americans were successful in remaining unvaccinated. This group would have strong objections to mRNA in the food supply, particularly if it was done surreptitiously or with minimal labelling/warnings. Children could be targeted with easily administered oral vaccine dosing or potentially get mRNA through milk at school lunches and other unsupervised meals.
For those who have taken one of the COVID-19 vaccines, having milk vaccines as an EUA offering would allow even more loading of the body with synthetic mRNA which has been proven resistant to ribonucleases and may reside permanently in the human body.
These observations lead me to conclude that mRNA technology has just entered a whole new, much darker phase of development. Expect more research on and resistance to mRNA in our food supply. The Chinese have just taken the first of what will probably be many more dangerous steps for the world.”
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/chinese-load-cows-milk-with-mrna
Very disturbing news Mogs which certainly points to a dark and limited future for many.
Wow that is horrifying!
The answer is obviously no. The real issue is that that they were attempted in the first place, and the gross over reaction, and the abuse of the authority of politicians and servants etc. This includes the opportunism that has been evident in various branches of the medical trade.
The long term effect of that could well be that lots of potentially useful organisations have lost their reputation with intelligent citizens; we’ll see. What it has done is to encourage worthwhile organisations like this site!
LDs worked at; killing old people, destroying businesses, annihilating our immune systems, destroying our freedom, rendering families, increasing suicides and divorces, psychologically damaging children, handing unfettered power over to Health Nazis and effacing our constitution,.
NO. NO. NO!
Even if it were a pandemic, which it was not, they still wouldn’t work!
Indeed, they are all pain and no gain, and the therapeutic window is closed from the start.
I doubt that any DS regulars will read this article. Sorry guys… There are so many other topics to research.
Whether lockdowns ‘worked’ medically is now beside the point.
No cost benefit analysis prior to their introduction, no coherent after action review of the health, social and economic cost of their introduction now that the data is available.
Incompetent, inhuman, irresponsible, arguably criminal, definitely bovine, moronic government at home and globally, with few, notable, exceptions.
‘What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.‘ Melinda Gates Dec 2020
Pathetic.
Amen
To repeat an old German joke I brought up in relation to this topic somewhat early: What’s that? It’s hanging on the wall and ticks and when falls down, the garden door opens? Answer: Happenstance. See also post hoc non est propter hoc and cum hoc non est propter hoc.
MTF would probably frame this as something like But if the only thing we have is handwaiving and we absolutely must do something, what other options are available?
However, this approach is wrong. Something with numerous obvious downsides whose supposed positive effects cannot be reliably assessed is something which must not be done. Not even when thousands of dimwitted hysterics demand it. These are prone to demanding anything some motormouth sold them as miracle cure for their largely imaginary problems.
Very well-said. Taiwan is another example. They had strict border controls but NO lockdowns and barely any other restrictions, and had no meaningful Covid wave until April 2022. Lockdowns are clearly an unnecessary add-on that is all pain and no gain.
You mention the five million who allegedly flew round the world (particularly to ‘Belt and Road’ terminals like Lombardy.
But you forget that, at that very time, internal travel in China was strictly banned.
And let’s not forget the Milan Mayor: – ” Go hug a Chinaman”.
I can honestly see the logic in ‘stop the spread’. But, isolation only works if its 100% controllable, which it never was. This is something airborne, and unless you can stop air circulating, it is facile and ridiculous. The fact that so many educated people appear to have been taken in by this is mind numbing. Like face screens with their large gaps at the sides. I just wanted to ask the wearers how big they thought the virus was, like the size of an apple..?
I can honestly see the logic in ‘stop the spread’.
I still think this sounds like Something must urgently be done about Marmite! If the people who kept repeating this had been serious about it, they would at least have gone to the lengths they did go to during the most-recent Ebola epidemic.
I appreciate the DS to a good part for giving us the two sides of a story. It is obviously biased towards the sceptical side, which I appreciate even more, but thereby it has laudably avoided becoming entirely an echo chamber of and for fanatics.
But I also agree with some of the criticism here, in that the really big points in such discussions are.and.must remain:
Lockdowns might or might not have worked in the meaning of delaying the spread a bit, but they have not and cannot ever ‘work’, if their multiple harms are incorporated, which proper scientists like Henderson and politicians recognized and therefore adhered to up until 2020, and, above all, there is simply zero legitimacy for state or other actors to infringe upon peoples natural rights and freedom.
Or in short: no one has the right to deem anyone or anyone’s business to be ‘essential’ or ‘not essential’.
And the very same goes for masks, test, vaccine mandates&co. and anything else related to ones sacrosanct bodily autonomy.
This is non-negotiable and non-discussable.
Straying from that line got us where we are at with regard to wokeness, free speech, the trans/women farce, man-made climate change/CO2 hoax etc..
“Do Lockdowns Work?”
No!
Good article, until I got to this sentence: “The question we’re looking at here, though, is not whether strict border controls can keep out the disease – I think the evidence suggests they can, for a time.”
Come on. The UK is supposed to have had this big covid wave in early 2020 – but we know now from FOI requests that only around 1000 people died OF covid in 2020 so the whole idea that there was a big covid wave is nonsense.
As Will rightly mentions covid was spreading all around the world before Wuhan locked down. I remember in 2020 watching reported death rates all around the world going up and up but China’s staying at a few hundred. Who can believe China’s own figures?
As for New Zealand, did they REALLY keep the virus out as they claimed to have? Loads of people were sick in NZ in March 2020 with some kind of bug as we were here at around the time we all went into lockdown. And then after that did nobody in New Zealand get a respiratory infection in all that time their borders were closed? I very much doubt it. And there were reports that they banned the immunity tests so that people wouldn’t realise they had already had it and were immune.Planes were still arriving, ships were still coming and going all that time. Even Antartica couldn’t keep covid out. It is just far too much of a stretch to believe that New Zealand actually kept covid out as it claimed to have.
And then there is the question if “covid” even exists at all or are the covid tests just picking up cold/flu bugs?