A Two Thousand Year Old Warning

[Rubyshoo]

Link to tweet

[claudette]

1. Who is

that who said it?

[Rubyshoo]

3. Cicero... 42 BC

Still have to learn how to make the entire image show up in DU, sorry.

[FakeNoose]

12. Full image

The trick is to right click on the image and "open image in new tab."
When the full image is displayed in the new tab you can save it on your desktop as something else.

[generalbetrayus]

21. I just left-clicked on the image and the entire image popped up.

[claudette]

22. Thank you!

Surely worth knowing the quote and who said it! Thanks

[TommyT139]

4. Cicero (cut off by the excerpt frame)

I hate waiting forever to for Twitter to load. But a right click on one of these posts saves the image so I can see it there.

[SamKnause]

2. Who said this ???

[Rubyshoo]

5. See Post #3

[hatrack]

6. Marcus Tullius Cicero

.

[Hugin]

7. Although a good quote...

It isn’t 2000 years old.

It was made by Taylor Caldwell in “A Pillar of Iron”.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33210-a-nation-can-survive-its-fools-and-even-the-ambitious

[WhiskeyGrinder]

8. Not a 2,000-year-old warning, not from Cicero.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/may/03/facebook-posts/no-roman-statesman-did-not-give-warning-about-trum/

We traced the quote down to a 1965 fictional novel by Taylor Caldwell called "A Pillar of Iron." On page 661 of the book, it attributes the passage to a speech Cicero made in the Roman Senate in 58 B.C. as "Recorded by Sallust."

While the novel often includes recorded speeches and letters of Cicero, it is a work of fiction, and the passage could not be located in online archives or compiled works of Cicero’s writings and addresses.

Catherine Steel, professor of classics at the University of Glasgow, told PolitiFact she has not come across this quote in any of Cicero’s work.

"I'm not aware that this is translation of any work of Cicero," Steel wrote in an email. "The idea of an internal threat does surface in his speeches against Catiline from 63 B.C., particularly e.g. 2.11, but there aren't any close parallels in terms of language."

[cyclonefence]

10. I wonder what a "fictional novel" is

[paleotn]

15. The words themselves may be fictional, but the ideas attributed to Cicero are not.

See the Catilinarian orations. Cicero and his compatriots dealt with a similar situation we are now faced with. Lucius Sergius Catilina's activities rhyme quite well with Donald J. Trump's. Brings up the question.... is it OK in times of crises to step outside the constraints of rule of law in order to save and preserve rule of law? That's a conundrum, with the added wrinkle of the recent SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity.

I'm an intractable pragmatist, and side with Cicero on that question. The purists among us will vehemently argue that I'm wrong. My response is, enjoy patting yourself on the back for your pity while rotten in an authoritarian prison cell or worse. In that situation, tell me, of what use was your ideological purity?

[spike jones]

17. The local library has a category named Christian Fiction. I used to move one of the Bibles from the main

stacks and shelve it in the Christian Fiction section, until they told me to stop doing that.

[Igel]

24. I'd opt for "historical fiction" as a translation from archaic English to contemporary. n/t

[cyclonefence]

33. I think a "fictional novel" is like an "imaginary friend"

A novel is by definition fiction. To say something is fictional is to deny its existence in reality. IMO. I think it's pretty funny.

[et tu]

9. what! i'm appalled

you can't trust all search engines on the net and social media
oh the horror-

[Igel]

25. Indeed.

https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

And who can forget the classic Wiki subversion of the

Bicholim Conflict

https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/5/3839946/wikipedia-hoax-about-bicholim-conflict-deleted-after-5-years

?


But rampant are edits that viewers don't realize are edits. Things like interactions between people that show the last 2 minutes but not the 5 minutes leading up to it--but since the last 2 minutes are outrage-inducing, and since we've already been primed by what linked to that video or by the text associated with the video as to how were are to interpret it and understand it to be "correct," questioning context is hard, esp. when it taints the person we want to believe and are trying to convince ourselves is the innocent victim.

Some Internet falsities are imposed on us (the Bicholim Conflict, the NW tree octopus) but some we talk ourselves into and love to have it so. (Well, it's really a kind of gradient or spectrum--the NW tree octopus is pretty unbelievable to start off with and requires some credulity, the Bicholim Conflict is obscure and nothing about it screams, at least to me, implausible. Other things just require assuming that absolute strangers that we know nothing about are mean-spirited, hateful malicious A-holes based on externalia, things like uniform, skin color, sex, or facial expression in the first 2 seconds of video we see, or even accompanying after-the-fact narrative as to what we're going to see and so what we expect to see.)

Years ago (by which I mean decades ago) I read something and it concluded with a phrase that the Internet shows is novel and unattested anywhere, "Skepticism serves our interests best." (Maybe it was "scepticism," still Google draws a blank.) Skepticism is at the core of critical thinking, whatever the argument's conclusion (we like, we don't like--be skeptical). Feynman had the same basic idea but said for science it's to be first turned inward to claim we make. You wonder if you're being garden-pathed as you watch a video, find the unedited video; when in doubt, don't trust claims taken from headlines, look at original documents. You think that Renaissance piece shouldn't end on a Picardy third? Find the ms. You wonder if Project 2025 really says something, find the text and the context. (But, a la Feynman, distrust most the things you most want to believe. Yeah, this makes life f**king hard.)

[et tu]

29. i believe you!

[ShazzieB]

34. What??

Well, I never!

[Timeflyer]

11. Whoever said it (and it was a woman--yah, girl-power) it describes the Gilded Turd very well.

[DeepWinter]

13. Something I once heard

Not terribly religious, but my parents were. Spent a lot of time in Church. One thing as a teen the Pastor said that stuck with me (to paraphrase)

"When the Anti-Christ comes back, he'll be good looking, a nice smile, a sparkle in his eyes, firm handshake, and say all the right things you're wanting to hear. He is after all, the Lord of Lies."

Hello, Donny. (Giving him too much credit, he's nowhere near good looking, but is a hell of a liar.)

[Upthevibe]

19. DeepWinter,,,,

.......He is all these things to his fans.

"When the Anti-Christ comes back, he'll be good looking, a nice smile, a sparkle in his eyes, firm handshake, and say all the right things you're wanting to hear. He is after all, the Lord of Lies."

[Igel]

30. Well, obviously that "anti-Christ" sucks at it.

[twodogsbarking]

14. Yogi Berra said "I didnt really say all those things I said".

[MaryMagdaline]

26. Love this! Way to start my Saturday afternoon

[paleotn]

16. Ain't Cicero but the ideas are taken from his writing and he would agree.

He and his compadres dealt with some of the same bullshit we are. And history does rhyme. Thus, Franklin's famous quote..."A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

[Igel]

31. A lot of people don't like the republic.

They want a strong central authority, where you may have 3 branches but two of them support the stong leader. Structurally both Russia and Venezuela are kinds of republics and a form of democracy, but since two branches are lickspittles to Putin or Maduro, they function as near-dictatorships. A written Constitution and set of laws that are specific enough to be applied fairly straighforwardly are also desiderata.

[ShazzieB]

35. Here's what I don't understand about people who think they want a dictarship...

Doesn't it ever occur to them that the dictator they want to put in power isn't going to live forever? And that they might possibly not like the guy who takes his place?

To me, it seems like a ridiculously huge leap of faith to support a would be dictator. No matter how much you may like the prospective ruler that you're trying to install, there is absolutely no guarantee that he'll be succeeded by someone you'll like or that the next guy will be. And then what? You can't vote him out. Are you really up for a possible revolution, or at least a coup, every time power has to be transferred to a new head of state?

Seems like these folks are indulging in a lot of magical thinking if they can't see the dangers inherent in turning a constitutional republic into a totalitarian state.

[Upthevibe]

18. kick. n/t

[Martin68]

20. Totally apropos.

[peppertree]

23. And if you need a modern-day example: there are few better than Argentina

Permanently derailed and bankrupted by a elite-backed dictatorship that took on a mountain of foreign debt - which they mainly used to allow elites to dollarize and offshore everything.

Leaving Argentina, "the richest poor country in the world."

And to "cope," they depress everyone else's living standards and condemn the economy to a near-constant depression.

When you talk to RW Argentines, they're never really "Argentine."

"Oh - I'm Italian..." or French, or Basque - but never Argentine (perish the thought!).

In a word, a bunch of Jared Kushners and J.D. Vances.

[generalbetrayus]

27. Words of wisdom

https://postimg.cc/yJygSk8c

[LetMyPeopleVote]

28. Thank you for posting this

TFG wants to eliminate elections

[dobleremolque]

32. We called that "reverse plagiarism" back in my day;

write something in your paper that struck you as profound, then attribute it to a historical figure obscure enough not to have a topic expert on the faculty. Back in my day = uphill both ways, when we did our papers with quill pen and berry juice for ink.

[eppur_se_muova]

36. Berry juice ? Did they relax the blood requirement ? nt

[RipVanWinkle]

37. This Twitter post is questionable. Cicero's date of death was 7 December 43 BC.

The Twitter quote is dated 42 BC.