To the harsh dry south wind that blew Saharan dust over them in summer, the Romans gave the name Auster. Today it is called the sirocco. In personifying the wind as a desiccating god they borrowed from the word austerus – bitter, harsh – which they had acquired from a Greek original describing the effect on the tongue of sour wine.

With this etymology, austerity has a bitter connotation indeed, especially when necessity makes it follow times of indulgence. People quickly become accustomed to excess, and even those who have lived beyond their means, and stepped across moral boundaries in order to do so, feel aggrieved at having to retrench.

We are told that the austerity we are facing now, in the UK and those parts of Europe that have lived beyond their means, is necessary. The austerity is a matter of policy, running contrary to the Keynesian wisdom that says we should spend in recessions and keep austerity for booms. Austerity seems to be in fashion: even the new Pope, unusually for his kind, goes in for it, opting not to live in his palatial official residence. There is this difference: the Pope’s austerity is a form of simplicity, which he is said always to have embraced, while the austerity advanced by the chancellor of exchequer is a form of retrenchment, which removes rather than continues what went before.