Roads, public libraries, and a respectful and helpful police force are all key, helpful features of a healthy state–and this is generally how the middle class experiences things. The government, however, has a more invasive, regulatory presence in the lives of people who lack power.
In the past month I’ve read loads of Greek classics. It was a really depressing month filled with people killing their kids, kids killing their parents, people marrying their parents, people stabbing other people in their eyes or at least stabbing themselves in their eyes. It seems like these things were so common in ancient Greece that sacrificial infanticide became unimportant enough that Homer left it out of why the Achaeans won the Trojan War.
