FT253

BOB RICKARD welcomes a new encyclopedia of extraordinary social behaviour and wonders just what it is about humans that makes us fall prey to everything from daft fads to mass hysteria. Extracts by HILARY EVANS and ROBERT BARTHOLOMEW.


The Roman senate, in the 2nd century BC, expressed horror and anxiety about the way the public following of the Bacchanalia was getting out of hand. It began in Greece as a harmless daylight gathering of women, but by the time it took hold in Italy it had become a continuous orgy of indiscriminate sex, violence and crime. The senators were so convinced that this breakdown of law and order presaged the end of civilisation as they knew it that they authorised imprisonment and executions on such a scale that, according to Professor Norman Cohn, it set the precedent for most of the awful pogroms of the last two millennia.