Senator Dick Turban
Friend of the mujahadeen and Protector of al Qaeda
Posted on 06/16/2005 12:48:22 PM PDT by milbuf
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. "For the traitor appears not a traitor – he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear." – Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 B.C
bump
Was this regarding the Cataline Conspiracy?
Durbin's ancestors ??
Illinois GOP should demand his resignation. This is a chance for them to get some traction (they desperately need some).
Thanks for digging up this wonderful quote. How appropriate. It is right on the money. Unless the left is utterly destroyed, it will destroy us from within. The left is pure evil.
Ping
Cataline conspiracy was in 63 BC, if mem'ry serves. The conspiracy certainly was during Caesar's life, and Cicero's role in its termination didn't exactly endear him to Caesar.
If I remember my history, Caesar argued for leniency to the conspirators (let them remain imprisoned for the remainder of their days so that they might have a long time to rue their fate) while Cicero argued for execution. Later, Cicero reported the conspirators' fate to the Senate with "They have lived." Rather chilling.
I suspect that Cicero is talking about Antony, given to ascribed time of the quotation.
In other words, Durbin may not be a traitor but he is just as useful to the enemy.
And what did Cicero do with traitors?
He probably fed them to the lions in the Coliseum.
Interesting to reflect on the years that led up to that statement:
Cicero, like men throughout Italy, panicked in the weeks after Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January, 49. Pompey was arming legions to defend the Senatorial position in the Civil War; Caesar, moving quickly south, was accepting the surrender of town after Italian town. Caesar or Pompey? Which side would win? In his letters to his beloved friend, the financier Atticus, Cicero bares his frenzied doubts rather endearingly. In the end, he left his wife and beloved daughter, Tullia, safely in Italy and traveled east with Pompey's forces. Although Caesar himself visited him at Formiae in March, strongly urging Cicero join the rump Senate of Caesar's supporters, Cicero found the courage to refuse. Unhappily but firmly, he joined the senators at Pompey's camp in Greece, but was depressed with what he found there. Rather than statesmen, Cicero found complacency, greed, and a dismaying lack of idealism or commitment to the principles of the Republic in the senators clustering about his old patron, Pompeius. And in his private correspondence, Cicero found Pompey himself surprisingly slow and uncertain as to how to proceed against Caesar.
After Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus, Cicero refused further Republican command and, pardoned by Caesar, returned to Rome; he may have technically made peace with the dictator, but he was utterly unsympathetic to his regime. He kept a low profile, making only the significant Pro Marcello speech in the Senate in favor of Caesar's clemency in pardoning former enemies (46 BC) He had now so clouded his position with both sides by attempting to straddle the political fence, that he was not asked to join the conspiracy to murder Caesar in early 44. In fairness, it may also be urged that Cicero would probably have disapproved of assassination, no matter how distraught he was at Caesar's actions.
The last time the two old opponents met was in December, 45; Caesar and 2,000 troops stopped by Cicero's villa in Puteoli, staying the night over an excellent dinner and cordial talk, not of politics, but of literature (Cicero to Atticus, XIII.52). Three months later, the world turned upside down again.
DEATH OF A PATRIOT
After Caesar's assassination, Cicero moved back into the political forefront, instantly approving the action and the conspirators in undertaking it. He openly urged the Senate to destroy others, like Marc Antony, whose ambition represented continued threats to the restored Republic, thus incurring Antony's hatred. Cicero wrung his hands over the conspirators' lack of follow-through after Caesar's death. He had the prestige of a senior consular, but his judgment was imperfect; he apparently was willing to bet on the guarantees of Caesar's 19-year-old heir, Octavian, that he would be temperate moving against the "liberators." He supported him enthusiastically in his early moves against Antony and, indeed, until the very moment where the uncloaked young Caesar marched on Rome with seven legions, forced through his own election to the consulate at age 19, and reconciled with Antony.
From September, 44 to April, 43, Cicero made his last great cycle of speeches, the so-called "Phillipics" (based on Demosthenes' speeches against Philip of Macedonia centuries before), supporting Octavian and urging the Senate to declare Antony a public enemy of the Roman state. In fourteen different orations, his temerity in savagely attacking Antony before his peers and eulogizing the dead Republic earned him undying admiration for undaunted courage. Antony, already his enemy, surely marked him mentally for death with the words Caesar spoke to a rapt Senate:
[To Antony] "But what frightens me more than such imputations is the possibility that you yourself may disregard the true path of glory, and instead consider it glorious to possess more power than all your fellow-citizens combined - preferring that they should fear you rather than like you. If that is what you think, your idea of where the road of glory lies is mistaken. For glory consists of being regarded with affection by one's country, earning praise and respect and love; whereas to be feared and disliked, on the other hand, is unpleasant and hateful and debilitating and precarious. This is clear enough from the play in which the man said, 'Let them hate provided that they fear.' He found to his cost that such a policy was his ruin." "
Cicero, The First Philippic Against Marcus Antonius.
When Antony and Octavian later reconciled, forming the Triumvirate with Lepidus, the young Caesar made no real effort to save Cicero when Antony immediately proscribed him. He had been informed, privately, of Cicero's quip to friends (when it appeared Octavian had served his purpose in hamstringing Antony) that the young man "must get praises, honors - and the push." (Letters to His Friends, 401 (XI 20). In December, 43, almost two years to the day from his dinner with Caesar, Cicero was caught by Antony's soldiers in a halfhearted escape attempt. His brother Quintus and nephew had already been murdered. Cicero died bravely. His head and hands, cut off, were brought back and nailed to the Rostra from which he had so often moved the crowd. Fulvia, Antony's remarkable wife, drove pins through the golden tongue which had so often pierced other Romans.
In spite of vacillation and doubt, Cicero was staunch throughout his entire career in his determination to bring back the informal constitution of the Republic. The issue is whether that conviction was based on a realpolitic understanding of the viability of the Republic in the new age of empire. As Everitt writes, "His weakness as a politician was that his principles rested on a mistaken analysis. He failed to understand the reasons for the crisis that tore apart the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, with the pitiless insight of genius, saw that the constitution with its endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal rather than structural terms. For Caesar the solution lay in a completely new system of government; for Cicero it lay in finding better men to run the government and better laws to keep them in order." Everitt, Cicero, 312.
Cicero's political career, poignantly, never brought him the intimacy or respect of his peers; he was too compromising for Cato's faction, too adamantly Republican for Caesar's. Of all his contemporaries, perhaps Caesar, with awful irony, actually liked and respected him best. Cicero's multifaceted personality also included warmth, tolerance, an urbane enjoyment of life, and a wit famous in its own time (to his detriment, he never could pass up a public witticism the minute it sprang into his head). Never really accepted by the Optimates, in the end Cicero stood alone as the last man, perhaps, who really believed the Republic could be saved. His judgment was not immaculate, but was exceptionally human. He comes down to us as a three-dimensional, admirable, flawed man who lived through and attempted to mold perhaps the most famous decades in the history of Rome. Ironically for a man so typical of his age in grasping after immortality, his longtime scribe and slave, Tiro, did much to immortalize Cicero than perhaps any man living by editing and publishing his speeches and works; similarly, Cicero's friend Atticus saved and published many of his letters. The human being was gone; the warmly wise, polished, impeccably elegant orator and thinker lived in to become the very model for the greatest of Roman patriots. Cicero would have loved that.
His epitaph may well be spoken, ironically, by Augustus Caesar:
" A long time afterwards, so I have been told, [Augustus] Caesar was visiting the son of one of his daughters. The boy had a book of Cicero's in his hands and, terrified of his grandfather, tried to hide it under his cloak. Caesar noticed this and, after taking the book from him, stood there and read a great part of it. He then handed it back to the young man with the words: 'A learned man, my child, a learned man and a lover of his country.'"
Plutarch, Life of Cicero , 49.
http://heraklia.fws1.com/contemporaries/cicero/
Why would this thread get pulled? I can see why they would ban you, but I can't see why this thread would get pulled.
I wonder what Marcus Tullius Cicero would think of Trent Lott? or John McCain? or John Kerry? or Ted Kennedy?...
(or if any of them would amount to anything beyond a dung heap in his time)
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