The suffragettes Mary Leigh and Edith New on their release from Holloway Prison, London in 1908. They had been arrested and sentenced to two months’

The endless battle over his legacy testifies to his great authority – and the power of his thought to make the world better

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2024-11-28 20:30:02

The suffragettes Mary Leigh and Edith New on their release from Holloway Prison, London in 1908. They had been arrested and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for breaking the windows of the prime minister H H Asquith’s house in Downing Street. Courtesy the LSE Library/Flickr

The suffragettes Mary Leigh and Edith New on their release from Holloway Prison, London in 1908. They had been arrested and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for breaking the windows of the prime minister H H Asquith’s house in Downing Street. Courtesy the LSE Library/Flickr

is professor of Classics at Durham University. She has published more than 30 books, broadcasts frequently on radio and television, and publishes widely in mainstream and academic journals and newspapers. Her latest books are A People’s History of Classics (2020), Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism (2021), and Facing Down the Furies (2024).

I’m an Aristotle scholar but also an enthusiast for his ideas. I’ve studied his work in the original Greek, and even made a pilgrimage to his birthplace and the various places he lived. He was the most brilliant philosopher ever to have lived. I believe that his Nicomachean Ethics offers us a guide for how to live good lives and flourish. Oddly, though, for a writer whose thinking was so clear and, in many ways, modern, people with radically different stances have tried to claim him for their own.

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