Why bother about ancient Greeks and Romans? Dead languages, dead societies, dead boring. I don’t care about Homeric heroes and their queer values, and I’m not interested in plays. What of it if Euripides was a feminist and as for Aeschylus fussing about the sins of the father being visited on succeeding generations, yawn, yawn, or Sophocles going on about a girl putting her principles above the law, where’s the hard cash there? And we’ve got democracy. So what’s it to us how the Athenians developed it and what Aristotle thought of it and how rarely the Romans didn’t. And as for people like Herodotus getting around the non-Greek world and writing about the Persian Invasion without decent maps, and photographs and proper records, what’s so smart about that? And that Thucydides is a bit too smart and a bit too tart for me. I’ve no objection to Socrates and Plato going on about the Good but I’m not an intellectual and I can’t be bothered with all that stuff. I want things straightforward and practical. Like the Romans, building roads and bridges and cities and running the whole of their world. No, I can do without them and all their law. They may have established Europe but we can now manage it without them. And don’t give me Horace. I’m too young to read his wisdom. Or Virgil indeed. You may call it the book of life but I can live without reading that sort of thing or for that matter big talker Cicero. Not my sort of chap. I like straight talk and no pretence, and he’s too clever and too civilised by half. I’m not going to go on. The Greeks and Romans are all very well for those who want to know where we came from and how we got here and where we might be going to, but I’m content with my lot and I’d rather be a pig than discontented about Socrates and all that. I really like being an ignoramus. Alexander and Hercules by gad! Don’t you start fussing about all that or you’ll get hooked and reek rather less satisfied with yourself.