Cicero: The first politician

[T_i_B]

Dunno of this is of any interest to you lot but I'll post it anyway.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2339656.html

The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is one of those curious historical figures of whom almost everyone has heard, yet almost no one can tell you anything about. At first glance this is not surprising. He was hardly a hero, certainly not in the conventional sense. He hated soldiering and was regularly accused of cowardice: he was too squeamish even to enjoy the deaths of the wild beasts in the games. He was prone to attacks of panic. He was an unromantic, workaholic prude married to a nagging wife. He could be devastatingly rude, both to the faces of his enemies and in catty remarks behind the backs of his so-called friends. He was boastful, conniving, slippery, avaricious and devious: indeed, the astonishing archive of more than 800 of his letters that has survived, and which provides us with the most penetrating insight we have into any personality of the ancient world, may well have been published posthumously precisely in order to discredit him.

And yet, having conceded all his flaws, there remains some bewitching quality about Cicero — a charm that dazzled his contemporaries and which one can still feel even now, across the chasm of 2,000 years. It is, I think, in part the charm of the consummate politicial operator, which might be defined as the ability to say things which both he and his audience know to be not quite the whole truth, and yet to say them so eloquently, and with such apparent sincerity, that all but the most hardened listeners are willing to suspend their disbelief in admiration of the performance.

Among contemporary politicians, Bill Clinton was a master of this talent, and so, until his touch began to desert him recently, was Tony Blair; David Cameron is already showing promising — or, depending on your point of view, alarming — signs of its presence. But Cicero had it before any of them. They are his heirs, so much so that when he writes breezily — as he did in 54BC — that “unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in great statesmen . . . It is our aim, not our language, which must always be the same” — one hears the authentic voice of a Clinton, a Blair or a Cameron, exactly as they might have sounded five decades before the birth of Christ. Cicero, in other words, was a recognisably modern political leader, gladhanding his way among the voters, ever alert to the shifting winds and tides of popular opinion. He made much of his undistinguished name — derived from cicer, meaning chickpea — which he recognised had the merit of being memorable, and he therefore had images of chickpeas engraved onto dishes, boasting that he would make it the most famous in Rome. He is, if not exactly a hero for our times, a character astonishingly in tune with them.

[intaglio]

1. I find this parallel disquieting

For perhaps 8 years now I have held that the current state of the US is like that of late republican Rome with Europe playing the part of Greece.

You know what happened to Rome after Caesar and Cicero :(

[orpupilofnature57]

2. Caligula ain't got nothing on Crawford! L.B.J was Brutus and the last 40yrs

have brought us to this.