Render unto Tony Blair all that is Caesar's, never mind Nero's

And for beach reading? Oh, a little Suetonius, actually. Lives of the Caesars, translated by Robert Graves. Holiday reading at its best. What a record of depravity, murder, horror, slaughter and greed. What ingenious cruelty, what fundamental perversions! Only time can render them comic.

Nero's father, criticised by a knight in the Forum, gouged one of the fellow's eyes out there and then. Think what the modern sketchwriters could have done with that.

Nero's mother held such a fascination for him that he was said to commit incest with her every time they rode in a litter together, "the stains on his clothes when he emerged, proved it". Why weren't we taught about this in school?

Nero himself treated worse those he liked than those he didn't. He doted on his wife Poppaea, and one day when she was ill and pregnant and remonstrating with him for coming home late from the races, he kicked her to death.

"He had a plan to set fire to the city again" (that "again" is very well-placed) "but first letting wild beasts loose in the city to hinder the citizens from saving themselves." Qualis artifex!

But what has this to do with Tony Blair, you ask? Nero is hardly the most obvious comparator for our church-going, public-school Prime Minister (not that there aren't comparisons to be made, but we'll come to them at another time).

No, our leader was brought to mind by the first Caesar, the greatest caesar of them all, Julius. Generous, masterful, merciful. His achievements were enormous and his deficiencies limited to really only one. How very like our own Prime Minister.

Militarily, he carried all before him. A terrific entertainer. The greatest orator in a time of great orators. A great reformer. He modernised the Senate by creating new patricians. He brought the calendar up to date. He cleaned up the voting register. He dissolved many workers' guilds and cracked down on crime. He rationalised the Civil Code. He planned a massive investment in Rome's infrastructure, roads, canals, libraries, theatres.

The plans never came to anything, but Tony Blair would recognise that too.

Julius wasn't particularly honest in money matters, but we share an indulgent attitude to that, now as then.

When he fell over, landing in Africa, he turned an unfavourable omen into a favourable one by crying: "Africa, I have tight hold of you!" That's spin at the highest level. Suetonius tells us it was hard to say which was the most remarkable thing about Caesar, his caution or his daring. So it is with Mr Blair.

Caesar was the most successful leader of his or any other times. And he was assassinated. Why? Only one reason. He was ambitious. All his virtues, all his achievements, all his record counted for nothing. He fulfilled Rome's highest potential but his colleagues just couldn't stick his ambition.

As Tony Blair succumbs to his presidential practices, we must hurry to warn him of the Ides of March.

Being a world away does not mean you're in a world apart

Yes, I'm on holiday. Let's see if we can guess where I am from the roadside clues. We have billboards for Nescafé and Camel cigarettes ("Slow Down, Pleasure Up"). A mobile phone ad says, "One, Two, Free!" There's Davidoff ("The more you know"). A Sprite girl says, "Zero Sugar, Zero Limits!" Pet City. Mini Mokes. Wash and Drive. There's "Brown-Eyed Girl" on the car radio and Alpen, Special K and Hi-Bran in the supermarket window.

Where are we? Cornwall? Singapore? Norway? Could be, could be, it could be any of those places. Peter Stuyvesant, the International Cigarette, gives it away, perversely. It has a copy line in Greek. That's not very international of it. Yes, all right, we're in Greece. And while it is obviously Greece when you look at the bare, dry, rocky hillsides, the set-dressing is all this news-from-nowhere, multinational branding.

How much do they matter, these omnipresent messages, if they matter at all? How much of a point do the anti-globalisers have? How far do these corporate messages erode the sense of what it is to be Greek, English or Norwegian? How much do people such as me – fat, white, English tourists – debauch the local fishermen, olive-growers and shepherds by encouraging them to become waiters? Is it tourism, or the creeping embourgeoisement of the world? Certainly we can defend ourselves by asserting that shepherds are better off as waiters. Looking after remote hill-country sheep may offer more opportunities for casual sex, but cafés are much warmer in winter.

But globalisation is, by definition, everywhere. All the island tavernas serve Lipton's tea. There is Colgate in the supermarket. They have feta cheese, just as in Sainsbury's. My mobile rings and it's someone from England; when I tell them I'm in Greece they're not surprised. The cash machines work as if we were in the Cornmarket. We don't even smell different now that deodorants have been globalised. They've got euros too. More news from nowhere. At least they're called Eypo.

Are we, as they say, converging? The looks of old Greeks differ from those of old people in Burnley. You can still tell where they're from and, to some extent, who they are, just by their moustaches. The Greeks, that is. But the young on both sides wear the same baseball caps, the same T-shirts, the same running shoes and use the same phones. They watch the same films, and talk about the same zombies.

It's the result of the great imperial effect of free trade. And while it might be initially depressing (it's not what you go to Greece for, is it, to drink Lipton's and eat Special K?) it takes only a week to realise that these people are fantastically foreign.

In the mall at the top of Piraeus, a skirling burst of Greek music, crazed with ancient Asian wailing calls up a history of thousands of years. In an instant our differences well reassuringly. Anyone who worries about our global hegemony can be consoled with the knowledge that empires fall just as fast as they rise.

Ocford's St. Scholastica's Day riot was a fine, wide-ranging, three-day event 650 years ago which the town won 63-0. That is, 63 students were killed and thrown on dunghills. The battle cry went up: "Styke herde and give goode knockes!"

The town, in the form of its councillors, had to parade bareheaded through the streets every year for the next 500 years and pay in a penny for every student killed to the university chest.

You might not be interested in all that, and that's just as well because this is not some celebration of town vs. gown disputes but a high-minded linguistic item to justify the use of the Grocer's Apostrophe. You know: Video's. Tin's. Tomato's.

The battle cry of St Scholastica's Day shows mocked apostrophes have tradition on their side. The grocers may be drawing on some ancient folk memory, some mystical sense of pre-Shakespearean English.

Apostrophes are fossils from the Middle Ages. They represent a missing letter. They stand in for the "i" in "that's" and "it's". (I'm spelling this out for readers under 28 to whom most of this is news.) In early days, a terminal "e" also helped form the genitive. As the "e" disappeared it was replaced by the apostrophe.

We can apply the same missing-letter logic to "knockes". In modern English you'd remove the "e" and replace it with an apostrophe to show a letter had gone missing, to produce "knock's" the plural of knock. "Tomato's" is substantially correct under this theory. The absent "e" is replaced by its apostrophe. Most important: the plural of DVD would have been, in medieval times, DVDes.

The missing "e" is remembered in every market in the country, memorialised by the ancient apostrophe. I feel much better having figured this out; and much calmer when grocery shopping.