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privacy story...
Hi all
A story on Privacy, with some relevance to the Internet from the
weekend's Sydney Morning Herald.
Cheers
David
Blues brother
At work, at play, at home, in bed, the snoops are closing in. But for
all their high-tech gadgets, they may as well be back in ancient
Rome, writes Peter Toohey. Even then, they were making the populace
depressed.
Privacy was next to non-existent in ancient Greece and Rome. It did
not matter whether you were a slave or free. If you were free, much
of your daily activity was carried out either in the company of your
family members or in the presence of your slaves. If you were not
free, well, then you could expect to spend nearly all of your time in
the company of other slaves, or perhaps in the company of your
master's family. It's no surprise that in the literature of the
ancient world, loneliness is a theme that has virtually no currency.
It is the presence of slaves that makes things seem so different.
Slaves would wake you in the morning and attend to you at bedtime.
They would bring you your meals as well as prepare them. They would
read to you while you ate and, if they were educated, they would look
after your financial accounts.
If you were a baby, they would breastfeed you. And they'd have been
there when you were created. It wouldn't have been easy to carry on a
relationship, legitimate or not, without the complicity of one or
another of your slaves. They'd have been there watching you in the
act, in flagrante delicto, ready to bring you a restorative drink.
For the full article, see
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0107/14/spectrum/spectrum2.html.
=====
David Goldstein
2/3 Belmont Ave, Glen Iris 3146, Australia
email: Goldstein_David@yahoo.com.au
phone: +61 3 9885 0601 (home)
+61 418 228 605 (mobile)
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