In a way, that’s obvious. The fallout from the Epstein files has been building and the need for justice, particularly for those who were so horribly and adversely affected by all that. But there’s a subtler point.

You might say that on Thursday, a privileged person has met the full force of the law. I put it that way deliberately, because this notion of privilege and this notion of what a person is, and this notion of what the law is, have a deep history. They’ve evolved over time, and somewhere in the collective unconscious there’s an awareness in the drama of this moment of how these things have emerged over history.

Just to give a little taster: the notion of privilege, for example, is actually a relatively recent thing. It’s 12th century, and “privilege” comes from two Latin words, meaning private and law. And so the privileged person was someone who had a private law, not the general law that governed them.

But of course, Thursday shows that privilege doesn’t involve being above the law, quite the opposite. So there’s a kind of shift there, and this resonance of the word privilege, which has currency in modern times, is echoing that kind of shift.

But you get an even deeper sense, I think, of the momentousness of the moment when you think about the word “person”, a privileged person meeting the full force of the law. Because “person”, too, is a word that has a deep history. You may well know that it comes from, probably, a Greek word, prosopon, maybe Etruscan, which meant a mask. You put a mask on your face when you went onto the stage, for example, to play a person, but that actually referred to the mask.

Then, in the Roman period, it shifted a bit and it became the personal rights or duties that the individual had, often because of their status, most obviously whether they were free or a slave. But it was still a long way from what we mean by a person now.

A really crucial shift, which was a theological turn, came in the Christian period, when the word “person” from the Roman was used to identify the persons of the Trinity in the Christian conception of God. It was the kind of different qualities of this three-in-one notion of the divine.

And then it was through the notion of the image of God, and we humans being made in the image of God, that in the 13th century – again, quite recently – you have this notion of the individual, or a human person.

Now, it wasn’t settled down at that point, though. You get a lot of conflicts in the modern period that, again, I think help resonate with the momentousness of what’s happening today. The most obvious one to point to is in the American Civil War in the 19th century, when there was the question of whether property can be a person: i.e. can slaves be called a “person” in the legal sense? And that was one of the deep legal aspects, anyway, that led to the American Civil War in the 19th century. When the American Constitution says, we hold these things, these truths to be self-evident…  it’s not at all. These things are very hard-won and emerge over long periods of time.

Hence, I think, the momentousness of today. But in the modern world, of course, now a person means a human, an individual, a legal entity. And in a way, that’s what’s been stress-tested today. Amid everything else that’s going on in this arrest, there’s the arrest of a person with privilege. And I hope this little etymology excursus can give you the deep sense of just how significant that is.

There’s no privilege now, in the old sense of legal exception. The notion of the person is strong, meaning everybody: it’s not a mask, it’s not about rights, it’s not about the divine. It’s about us all. So, in a way, you can say that today is good. Of course, mostly for the victims of the Epstein horrors, but for subtler reasons, it’s good for us all.

Mark Vernon presents a new Thought for the Week at every “A Drink with the Idler”.