I’ve long been tempted to have a regular extra blog post, collecting together recent howlers about the ancient world presented to an unsuspecting audience by journalists etc who should know better. What has tended to put me off is the “let who is without sin . . .” principle. That is to say, everyone makes mistakes, and if you name and shame someone today, they’ll do it to you the next time you make a slip.
Anyway, I’ve given up those scruples just for a while.
A colleague emailed me the other Saturday morning to tip me off about an interview with the Margaret-Thatcher-loving, tv-historian Dr David Starkey, in the back of the Guardian’s Guide section. Starkey, it turns out, is a real Roman hater (odd that – I’d have predicted the reverse). “What did the Romans ever do for us?” asked the interviewer:
