Posted on 03/30/2016 7:21:27 AM PDT by C19fan
In what might be the world’s oldest recorded awkward situation, the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero spent much of his term as Cilicia’s governor trying to ignore a very specific request from his former legal client Marcus Caelius Rufus. In several letters sent over the better part of a year, Caelius repeatedly begged Cicero to capture and send him a group of local leopards. He needed the animals, he explained, because he was trying to launch his political career—and nothing won over voters’ hearts better than live exotic animal hunts in the arena. Caelius’s opponent Curio had no trouble collecting exotic animals from his governor friends—why couldn’t Cicero spare a few of his local beasts?
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
AT some point, toward the last third of the Roman Empire existence....I think they had one major epic spectacle every other day. You can figure that this daily event would take four hours of time and keep everyone talking about some gladiator episode or folks being thrown to the lions...rather than being disenchanted with the state of Roman politics.
You can do the averages, but there’s probably at least one or two wild lions/tigers/leopards being thrown into the pit every single day. Has to be daily vessels coming up and delivering these animals.
Human nature does not change. Benjamin Franklin understood that “voters” in a democracy had a never ending appetite for free stuff. That is why at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention he quipped “We have given you a Republic. If you can keep it.”
Interesting article, but the author needs to retread his bible, if he owns one:
“One type of wild animal show, known as damnatio ad bestias became a trope of Christian martyr stories, like Daniel and the lions den.”
What Franklin said was “When the people discover that they can vote themselves money democracy will cease’’.
Obviously we can’t.
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