“Thucydides, however, tells of history, wars and battles, in a noble and strong way, but nothing he writes can be transferred to forensic or political use. Those well-known speeches have so many unclear and odd phrases that they barely make sense, something which is probably the worst offense in public address.
Do humans possess so much perversity that we will eat acorns after grains have been discovered? Is it possible that the human diet could be changed thanks to Athenian invention but not oratory? Who of the Greek orators, moreover, ever used Thucydides’ work as a model? Surely, he’s praised by everyone. I concede this. But he is praised as a wise explainer of events, a no-nonsense, serious man of the kind who did not pursue cases in court but described battles in history. For this reason, he has never been counted as an orator and would not, indeed, have gained any fame if he had not written history, even though he was noble and elected to office.
Still, no one can really imitate the weight of his words and ideas—but when some people articulate a few broken and unrelated statements, which they could have done even without a teacher, they imagine themselves to be a new-born Thucydides.”
Thucydides autem res gestas et bella narrat et proelia, graviter sane et probe, sed nihil ab eo transferri potest ad forensem usum et publicum. Ipsae illae contiones ita multas habent obscuras abditasque sententias vix ut intellegantur; quod est in oratione civili vitium vel maximum. Quae est autem in hominibus tanta perversitas, ut inventis frugibus glande vescantur? An victus hominum Atheniensium beneficio excoli potuit, oratio non potuit? Quis porro unquam Graecorum rhetorum a Thucydide quicquam duxit? At laudatus est ab omnibus. Fateor; sed ita ut rerum explicator prudens, severus, gravis, non ut in iudiciis versaret causas, sed ut in historiis bella narraret. Itaque nunquam est numeratus orator, nec vero, si historiam non scripsisset, nomen eius exstaret, cum praesertim fuisset honoratus et nobilis. Huius tamen nemo neque verborum neque sententiarum gravitatem imitatur, sed cum mutila quaedam et hiantia locuti sunt, quae vel sine magistro facere potuerunt, germanos se putant esse Thucydidas.
When I was in kindergarten, I concocted an elaborate and entirely sincere plan to run away from home so that I could avoid entering first grade. One day, a first grade teacher named Mrs. Hunt strode into my kindergarten class and announced, with all the malicious savagery she could muster from the shriveled remainder of her heart, that we had better enjoy kindergarten while we could. “Once you get to first grade, play time is over. There’s no more snack time, and no more naps – we work!” Oh, what cruelty we inflict upon children! Our first year in school is a savage trick. We are offered up a wholly illusory vision of life: here is a world of play and dreams – but it will not be yours. Perhaps the fact that I am writing this with a better grasp of English than a kindergarten education would have instilled is sufficient proof that I did not drop out of school at age 5, but the loss of naptime was one which I would never get over.
Years ago, I was a cog in the stage machinery of the gig economy, and made a fair amount of money painting houses. One of these was a twelve-hour overnight job painting a few rooms in the palace of a local TV news colossus, who would be moving in the following morning. By the time that 6AM rolled around, I was literally falling asleep as I painted, but somehow managed to finish the work. When he was paying me at 8 that morning, this Jupiter of local TV infotainment asked me how I felt, and when I responded that I was in all likelihood going to take a nap when I returned home, he informed me with Olympian certainty, “I don’t believe in naps.”
This is a common enough attitude, yet still surprising and difficult to explain. Did such a busy and ostensibly productive person as Winston Churchill not take naps every day? (Perhaps those were necessitated less by his labors and more by his drinking.) It would be easy enough to attribute hostility to napping and other casual adventures in somnolence to some vague and all-explaining specter like the Protestant ethic, but the association of sleep and moral character can be traced back to antiquity. Homer, of course, is a right-minded and reasonable poet, and so regularly describes sleep as sweet. But Homer is also content to describe other patently enjoyable activities like sex and eating as sources of delight and not signs of moral corruption. As with so much in more remote antiquity, we find ourselves in a sensuous world uncomplicated by the ethical guilt of enjoying oneself.
Yet, later in antiquity, the assault upon sleep served as a standard rhetorical trope in moralizing invectives. In the 5th century, Democritus finds something morally unpalatable in sleeping during the day:
Sleeping in the day is a sign of trouble in the body or else anxiety, laziness, or ignorance of the soul.
Typically, the moral assault on sleep is paired with an assault on the pleasures of the table, as in Sallust’s memorable opening to his Bellum Catilinae:
Many people, given entirely to their stomachs and to sleep, have passed through life uneducated and uncultivated, as strangers…
multi mortales, dediti ventri atque somno, indocti incultique vitam sicuti peregrinantes transiere
Centuries later, the Historia Augusta formalizes this censure of somnolence into a part of the stereotype of the bad emperor. All of the weak, cruel, or ineffectual emperors can be identified in that narrative by a passion for one or all of the following: sex, food & drink, or sleep. Gordian I is lightly reproved for a kind of constitutional indolence:
He was a man of excessive sleep, such that he would even sleep without shame in the dining room if perchance he had invited some friends that night. He seemed to do this from nature, not through drunkenness or excessive living.
Somni plurimi, ita ut in tricliniis, si forte apud amicos ederet, etiam sine pudore dormiret. Quod videbatur facere per naturam, non per ebrietatem atque luxuriem.
The description of Gordian might put one in mind of Joe the fat boy in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers:
Fastened up behind the barouche was a hamper of spacious dimensions—one of those hampers which always awakens in a contemplative mind associations connected with cold fowls, tongues, and bottles of wine—and on the box sat a fat and red-faced boy, in a state of somnolency, whom no speculative observer could have regarded for an instant without setting down as the official dispenser of the contents of the before-mentioned hamper, when the proper time for their consumption should arrive.
Mr. Pickwick had bestowed a hasty glance on these interesting objects, when he was again greeted by his faithful disciple.
‘Pickwick—Pickwick,’ said Mr. Tupman; ‘come up here. Make haste.’
‘Come along, Sir. Pray, come up,’ said the stout gentleman. ‘Joe!—damn that boy, he’s gone to sleep again.
Though much is made of Joe’s corpulence (the phrase fat boy is used 123 times in the book, compared to the 51 times that ‘Joe’ is employed), the boy’s somnolence is his defining and memorable characteristic throughout the book, and in Dicken’s characteristically caricaturist treatment, we have in Joe something which is more a combination of unsavory comic attributes than a believable person. Yet behind the ostensibly humorous intention is a grimly moralizing tone directed against both gluttony and rest – a moralizing tone which is hardly confined to the 19th century.
As with much of intellectual history, it would be impossible to identify with certainty the origin of the crusade against daytime sleep, though it is clear enough that it was a wide-spread rhetorical trope among the writers (i.e. the elites) of antiquity. Stemming as it does from those privileged with the leisure to write, it is but another instance of the hypocrisy which characterizes most apparently philosophical moralizing in Greco-Roman antiquity. Just as a Cicero or a Seneca could afford to scorn money as only the rich can, so too those with the requisite leisure to write books could readily enough heap scorn upon that most innocent of pleasures, the nap.
Livy tells us that centuries earlier, Menenius Agrippa in no way disguised the fact that the ruling elite of Rome were idle consumers. In the parable of the stomach and the limbs, Agrippa noted that the apparently gluttonous and all-consuming stomach was actually the most important organ in allowing all of the other parts of the body to perform their functions correctly. That is, someone had to be the idle consumer of all lest the social fabric be torn apart. At least Agrippa could hardly be accused of hypocrisy! The dietary paradox of modern American life is that one needs to be reasonably wealthy in order to consume fewer calories. So too, one requires a substantial amount of wealth just to rest briefly before trudging back down the hill to push the rock up it anew. This brings to mind the exchange between Lawrence and Peter in that veritable bible for life in late-stage capitalist society, Office Space:
Lawrence: Well what about you now? what would you do [if you had a million dollars]?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I’d relax, I would sit on my ass all day, I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he’s broke, don’t do shit.
We may laugh at the apparent rhetorical truth in the claim that you can be broke and not do shit, but in practice, being broke means being locked to the yoke of wage servitude simply to eke out subsistence – you really might need a million dollars just to do nothing. How many of us are ever afforded the simple pleasure of a nap anymore, uncomplicated by a sense of shame or guilt?
Joel once told me that he found that the chief danger in working from home lay in the Siren song of the nap. The Siren song – tempting the industrious sailor over the choppy waves of modern life with the prospect of ruin upon the sofa’s shoals. It is Sunday, and my ears are not stopped with wax; I yield to that seduction knowing that far greater people than I have succumbed to the temptation before, and I protect from the Democritean hatred of Mrs. Hunt my unsullied realm of dreams.
“And so, life passes. Each day, something is read or is written. Then, since I owe something to my friends, I eat with them–not beyond the law, as if anything is these days, but just a little short of it and clearly so. You don’t need to fear my visit at all. You’ll find a guest who eats little, but has many jokes.”
Sic igitur vivitur. cottidie aliquid legitur aut scribitur. dein, ne amicis nihil tribuamus, epulamur una non modo non contra legem, si ulla nunc lex est, sed etiam intra legem, et quidem aliquanto. qua re nihil est quod adventum nostrum extimescas. non multi cibi hospitem accipies, multi ioci.
Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 281 (XII.40)
“Well, you write that you fear that my reputation and my respect is depleted because of my mourning and I don’t understand what people are criticizing or what they expect. That I not feel grief? How’s that possible? Should I not be laid out because of it? Who was ever less paralyzed than me? When your home was lifting me up, who did I refuse? Who came and was offended?
I left from you for Astura. These pleasant folks who criticize me can’t even read the number of pages I have written. How well they would do it is another matter, but it is the kind of writing that no one with a truly depressed spirit could accomplish. So, I spend thirty days at “the garden”. Did anyone go lacking seeing me or enjoying my easy conversation?
Right now I am reading things, I am writing things even as those who are with me are managing leisure worse than I handle work. If anyone asks why I’m not at Rome it’s because it’s vacation.”
Quod scribis te vereri ne et gratia et auctoritas nostra hoc meo maerore minuatur, ego quid homines aut reprehendant aut postulent nescio. ne doleam? qui potest? ne iaceam? quis umquam minus? dum tua me domus levabat, quis a me exclusus? quis venit qui offenderet? Asturam sum a te profectus. legere isti laeti qui me reprehendunt tam multa non possunt quam ego scripsi. quam bene, nihil ad rem; sed genus scribendi id fuit quod nemo abiecto animo facere posset. triginta dies in horto fui. quis aut congressum meum aut facilitatem sermonis desideravit? nunc ipsum ea lego, ea scribo ut hi qui mecum sunt difficilius otium ferant quam ego laborem. si quis requirit cur Romae non sim: quia discessus est
“With the exception of that dream about Marius, I don’t remember any one clearly. How many of the nights during my long life have been useless! Now too, thanks to a break in my political work, I have stopped studying at night and I have added daytime napping—which I never used to do at all. But I am neither bothered by any dream in so much sleep—and certainly not concerning these great affairs, and nor do I ever think more to myself that must be dreaming when I actually see the magistrates in the forum and the senators in the senate.”
Mihi quidem praeter hoc Marianum nihil sane, quod meminerim. Frustra igitur consumptae tot noctes tam longa in aetate! Nunc quidem propter intermissionem forensis operae et lucubrationes detraxi et meridiationes addidi, quibus uti antea non solebam, nec tam multum dormiens ullo somnio sum admonitus, tantis praesertim de rebus, nec mihi magis umquam videor, quam cum aut in foro magistratus aut in curia senatum video, somniare.
Theocritus, Epigram 19
“Be bold and sit down—if you want, take a nap”
θαρσέων καθίζευ, κἢν θέλῃς ἀπόβριξον
Philostratus, Heroicus 16
“For he happened to be sleeping there at midday…”
ὁ μὲν γὰρ ἔτυχε καθεύδων μεσημβρίας ἐνταῦθα
Warning…
Apuleius, Metamorphoses 4.27
“To start with, only false dreams accompany naps during the day and, in addition, even nighttime dreams often prophesy the opposite facts. For example, crying, being beaten or even sometimes having your throat slit in dreams actually predicts profitable or prosperous futures. Laughing or scarfing down honey-sweet treats or having sex, on the contrary, will foretell someone being troubled by depression, physical exhaustion and other kinds of curses.”
Nam praeter quod diurnae quietis imagines falsae perhibentur, tunc etiam nocturnae visiones contrarios eventus nonnumquam pronuntiant. Denique flere et vapulare et nonnumquam iugulari lucrosum prosperumque proventum nuntiant; contra ridere et mellitis dulciolis ventrem saginare vel in voluptatem Veneriam convenire tristitie animi, languore corporis, damnisque ceteris vexatum iri praedicabunt.
Martial, Epigram 3.44.16
“Exhausted, I am trying to sleep—you keep wake me when I lie down.”
lassus dormio: suscitas iacentem.
Lucian, A True Story 2. 26
“I was not there for I happened to be taking a nap at the dinner party”
“I would not be able to live here, where the night and day return and depart in equal turn, if I did not split the difference with my customary midday nap.”
Ego hic, ubi nox et dies modice redit et abit, tamen aestivo die, si non diffinderem meo insiticio somno meridie, vivere non possum. Illic in semenstri die aut nocte quem ad modum quicquam seri aut alescere aut meti possit?
Give me a verdict, Horace….
Horace, Epistle 2.31-36
“Come now, what disturbs the sound of our shared song?
One who once wore finely made and beautiful hair
One you know was pleasing to thirsty Cinara,
And who would drink bright Falernian in the middle of the day,
Now a small meal pleases him followed by a nap in the soft plants by a river–
It is not shameful to have been a fool, but only not to stop being one.”
Nunc age, quid nostrum concentum dividat audi.
quem tenues decuere togae nitidique capilli,
quem scis immunem Cinarae placuisse rapaci,
quem bibulum liquidi media de luce Falerni,
cena brevis iuvat et prope rivum somnus in herba;
nec lusisse pudet, sed non incidere ludum.
“Why does truth produce hatred, and why is your person who tells truth made an enemy to others, even though everyone loves the blessed life, which is nothing but rejoicing in truth, unless it be that truth is loved in such a way that those who love something other than truth would wish to believe that what they love is the truth, and because they wish not to be deceived, they do not wish to be convinced that they have been fooled? And so, they hate the truth on account of that thing which they love in truth’s place. They love it when it shines, they hate it when it refutes them. Because they wish not to be deceived but wish to do the deceiving, they love the truth when it reveals itself, but hate it when it reveals them. “
cur autem veritas parit odium et inimicus eis factus est homo tuus verum praedicans, cum ametur beata vita, quae non est nisi gaudium de veritate, nisi quia sic amatur veritas ut, quicumque aliud amant, hoc quod amant velint esse veritatem, et quia falli nollent, nolunt convinci quod falsi sint? itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant. amant eam lucentem, oderunt eam redarguentem. quia enim falli nolunt et fallere volunt, amant eam cum se ipsa indicat, et oderunt eam cum eos ipsos indicat.
“The first act of the new emperors saw to it that the two Gordians be deified. Some however think that only one (the elder) was deified. But I remember that I read in the books which Iunius Cordus wrote at some length that both Gordians were borne aloft to the gods, even though the elder ended his life by hanging himself while the younger was taken away by war. The younger Gordian surely deserves more respect on account of the fact that war took him away.”
Prima igitur relatio principum fuit, ut duo Gordiani divi appellarentur. Aliqui autem unum putant appellatum, seniorem videlicet, sed ego libris, quos Iunius Cordus affatim scripsit, legisse memini ambos in deos relatos, si quidem senior laqueo vitam finivit, iunior autem in bello consumptus est, qui utique maiorem meretur reverentiam, quod eum bellum rapuit.
“This whole topic is handled here not merely to make oratory, which should move and flow, grow ancient because it must measure out each foot and weigh out each syllable. No, that is what miserable minds who are obsessed with minor things think about.
No one who throws himself into this concern completely will have any time for more important matters if, once the weight of the material is forgotten and polish itself is rejected, he constructs “mosaic work”, as Lucilius says, and works his words together in “vermiculate construction”. Won’t his fire cool down and his force diminish, the same way show-riders break the pace of their horses with a dancing gait?”
Totus vero hic locus non ideo tractatur a nobis ut oratio, quae ferri debet ac fluere, dimetiendis pedibus ac perpendendis syllabis consenescat: nam id cum miseri, tum in minimis occupati est: neque enim qui se totum in hac cura consumpserit potioribus vacabit, si quidem relicto rerum pondere ac nitore contempto ‘tesserulas’, ut ait Lucilius, struet et vermiculate inter se lexis committet. Nonne ergo refrigeretur sic calor et impetus pereat, ut equorum cursum delicati minutis passibus frangunt?
“In the fourth book of the Aeneid, describing the death of Dido, Vergil says that a lock of her hair was cut away in these verses:
Proserpina had not yet cut away the tawny lock from her and condemned her head to Stygian Orcus.
Then Iris, sent by Juno, cut away Dido’s hair and brought it to Orcus. Vergil has not contrived this story out of nothing, as that otherwise very learned man Cornutus supposes when he adds this commentary to the verse:
Whence came this story that hair must be taken away from the dying is unknown; but Vergil is accustomed to invent things now and then in the old poetic fashion, as he did with the golden bough.
Thus writes Cornutus. But I am ashamed that such a great man, though steeped in Greek literature, did not know that most remarkable play of Euripides, the Alcestis. For in that play, Orcus is brought onto the scene bearing a sword to cut the hair of Alcestis, and he speaks thus:
This woman then will go to the home of Hades.
I proceed to her, so that I may begin the rite with my sword.
For one is sacred to the god below ground
Once this blade has consecrated the hair of their head.
So it is clear, I think, whom Vergil followed in introducing the part about cutting the hair. But the Greeks mean by ἁγνίσαι to consecrate to the gods, whence your poet says in the character of Iris,
Ordered by Juno, I bear this sacred hair to Dis, and loose you from your body.
Henry Fuseli, “Dido”
In libro quarto in describenda Elissae morte ait quod ei crinis abscisus esset his versibus:
Nondum illi flavum Proserpina vertice crinem
Abstulerat, Stygioque caput damnaverat Orco.
Deinde Iris a Iunone missa abscidit ei crinem et ad Orcum refert. Hanc Virgilius non de nihilo fabulam fingit, sicut vir alias doctissimus Cornutus existimat, qui annotationem eiusmodi adposuit his versibus: Unde haec historia, ut crinis auferendus sit morientibus, ignoratur: sed adsuevit poetico more aliqua fingere, ut de aureo ramo. Haec Cornutus. Sed me pudet quod tantus vir, Graecarum etiam doctissimus litterarum, ignoravit Euripidis nobilissimam fabulam Alcestim. In hac enim fabula in scenam Orcus inducitur gladium gestans quo crinem abscidat Alcestidis, et sic loquitur,
Proditum est, ut opinor, quem secutus Virgilius fabulam abscidendi crinis induxerit: ἁγνίσαι autem Graece dicunt dis consecrare, unde poeta vester ait ex Iridis persona:
— Hunc ego Diti
Sacrum iussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo.
Fragments of this lost commentary on the Aeneid were recently found near a monument to Saint Raphael. The work, dated to 420 CE, was signed only with the name “Louis.” This comment is on Book VI when Aeneas and Sibyl subdue Cerberus in the underworld. Edited by Dani Bostick
Aeneid 6.419-22
Seeing Cerberus’ neck bristling with snakes,
the priestess tosses him a treat laced with honey
and medicated grains. Opening his three throats,
rabid with hunger, he scarfs down what she tossed, and
his huge backs relax as he falls to the ground, spread
out across the entire cave.
Cui vātēs horrēre vidēns iam colla colubrīs melle sopōrātam et medicātīs frūgibus offam 420 obicit. Ille famē rabidā tria guttura pandēns corripit obiectam, atque immānia terga resolvit fūsus humī tōtōque ingēns extenditur antrō.
6.420 she tosses a treat laced with honey and medicated grains
Here “treat” is a pot brownie. 420 is an extraordinary number. If one were to sail from Carthage to Alba Longa with a stop in Sicily, the journey would be 420 miles. Here, however, is not the number 420. You see, 4 is April, the fourth month of the year, and 20 is the twentieth day of the month (the 12th day before the Kalends). On this day, almost everyone enjoys cannabis.
Ovid once wrote, “Caesar, in April you have something which might take control of you” (Fasti 4.20). He added, “Aeneas, manifest piety, carried through fire sacred things and his father on his shoulders, other sacred things.” Ovid is telling us that Aeneas imported cannabis, “sacred things,” into Italy as a trafficker of drugs. We also know that oracles use such drugs frequently.
For these reasons, the treat consumed by Cerberus was not full of opiates, but rather cannabis. Since the treat was not only drugged with honey, but with “medicated grains,” which we call “cannabis,” Cerberus immediately passes out when he eats it. When men consume cannabis, some lose their minds and rage in reefer madness, others, calm as stones, rest on the sofa and, eager for food, satisfy their hunger with snacks.
6.420 melle soporatam et medicatis frugibus offam
Hic “offam” est crustulum cannabis.
420 est numerus extraordinarius. Si quis, commoratus in Sicilia, a Karthagine ad Albam Longam navigaret, iter CDXX milium passuum esset. Hic tamen non est CDXX, sed numerus diei. Nam IV est Mensis Aprilis, quarta mensis anni; XX est vicesima dies mensis, a.d. XII Kal. Ea die paene omnes cannibi fruuntur.
Ovidius olim scripsit: “Caesar, in Aprili, quo tenearis, habes” (4.20). addidit, “Aeneas, pietas spectata, per ignes sacra patremque humeris, altera sacra, tulit.” nobis dicit Aenean cannabim, “sacra,” in Italiam mercatorem medicamentorum portavisse. Scimus etiam vates medicamentis saepe fruari.
Quibus de causis, offa a Cerbero comesta non est plena papaverum, sed cannabis. Cum offa non modo melle, sed etiam “medicatis frugibus,” quas “cannabim” vocamus, soporata esset, Cerberus ea comesta subito obdormivit. Cum homines cannabim consumunt, alii furibundi insania cautum furiant, alii placati velut lapides in toro conquiescunt avidique cibi latrantem stomachum cenulis leniunt.
Marginalia:
Vide: Hesychius, s.v. kannabis
Kannabis: A Skythian herb for burning which has the kind of power that it completely dries out anything subject to it. It is a plant similar to linen from which Thracians make ropes (Cf. Herodotus 4.74.)
“He used to say that no plague is more fatal than the bodily pleasure which has been given to human beings by nature. Zealous lusts for this kind of pleasure compel people toward pursuing them insanely and without any control. From this source springs treason against our country, coups against the legitimate government, and from here secret meetings with enemies are born.”
Nullam capitaliorem pestem quam voluptatem corporis hominibus dicebat a natura datam, cuius voluptatis avidae libidines temere et ecfrenate ad potiendum incitarentur. Hinc patriae proditiones, hinc rerum publicarum eversiones, hinc cum hostibus clandestina colloquia nasci
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
From the Twelve Tables
“The Law of the Twelve Tables commands that anyone who has conspired with an enemy against the state or handed a citizen to a public enemy, should suffer capital punishment.”
Marcianus, ap. Dig., XLVIII, 4, 3: Lex XII Tabularum iubet eum qui hostem concitaverit quive civem hosti tradiderit capite puniri.
Tacitus Histories 3. 57
“How much power the audacity of single individuals can have during civil discord! Claudius Flaventinus, a centurion dismissed by Galba in shame, made the fleet at Misenum revolt with forged letters from Vespasian promising a reward for treason. Claudius Apollinaris, a man neither exceptional for his loyalty nor dedicated in his betrayal, was in charge of the fleet; and Apinius Tiro, an ex-praetor who was by chance at Minturnae then, put himself forth as the leader of the defectors.”
Sed classem Misenensem (tantum civilibus discordiis etiam singulorum audacia valet) Claudius Faventinus centurio per ignominiam a Galba dimissus ad defectionem traxit, fictis Vespasiani epistulis pretium proditionis ostentans. Praeerat classi Claudius Apollinaris, neque fidei constans neque strenuus in perfidia; et Apinius Tiro praetura functus ac tum forte Minturnis agens ducem se defectoribus obtulit.
Lucan 4.218-221
“Must we beg Caesar to handle us no worse than
His other slaves? Have your generals’ lives been begged?
Our safety will never be the price and bribe for foul treason.”
Utque habeat famulos nullo discrimine Caesar,
Exorandus erit? ducibus quoque vita petita est?
Numquam nostra salus pretium mercesque nefandae
Proditionis erit…
“Whoever wants to find a perjurer should go to the public assembly”
qui periurum conuenire uolt hominem ito in comitium
From the Suda
“Dêmadês: He was king in Thebes after Antipater. A son of Dêmeas the sailor, he was also a sailor, a shipbuilder, and a ferry-operator. He gave up these occupations to enter politics and turned out to be a traitor—he grew very wealthy from this and obtained, as a bribe from Philip, property in Boiotia.”
“Don’t you understand that while, in other cases, it is necessary to impose a penalty on those who have committed crimes after examining the matter precisely and uncovering the truth over time, but for instances of clear and agreed-upon treason, we must yield first to anger and what comes from it? Don’t you think that this man would betray any of the things most crucial to the state, once you made him in charge of it?”
“It is right that punishments for other crimes come after them, but punishment for treason should precede the dissolution of the state. If you miss that opportune moment when those men are about to do something treacherous against their state, it is not possible for you to obtain justice from the men who did wrong: for they become stronger than the punishment possible from those who have been wronged.”
“After that point, Suillius was persistent and brutal in pursuing his affairs and in his boldness for finding a mass of rivals. For the union of laws and wealth of offices gathered in one person furnished abundant opportunities for theft. And there was nothing in public so much for sale as the corruption of the advocates. It was so bad that Samius, a rather distinguished Roman knight, after he paid four hundred thousand sesterces to Suillius and once the collusion was revealed, laid down on his sword in his own house.
Therefore, when Gaius Silius was taking the lead of the elected consul—a man whose power and fall I will discuss in the appropriate time, the senators came together and asked for the Cincian law which carried the ancient warning that no one should receive money or a gift for pleading a case.”
Continuus inde et saevus accusandis reis Suillius multique audaciae eius aemuli; nam cuncta legum et magistratuum munia in se trahens princeps materiam praedandi patefecerat. Nec quicquam publicae mercis tam venale fuit quam advocatorum perfidia, adeo ut Samius, insignis eques Romanus, quadringentis nummorum milibus Suillio datis et cognita praevaricatione ferro in domo eius incubuerit. Igitur incipiente C. Silio consule designato, cuius de potentia et exitio in tempore memorabo, consurgunt patres legemque Cinciam flagitant, qua cavetur antiquitus, ne quis ob causam orandam pecuniam donumve accipiat.
CICERO TO ATTICUS 92 (IV.18 Rome, between 24 October and 2 November 54)
“By what means was he acquitted? The beginning and the end of it was the incredible ineptitude of the prosecutors, specifically that of Lucius Lentulus the younger whom everyone yelled was colluding. Add to this the wondrous work of Pompeii and a crooked jury. Even with this there were 32 guilt votes and 38 for acquittal. Remaining cases are waiting for him. He is not yet clearly unimpeded.”
quo modo ergo absolutus? omnino πρῷρα πρύμνα accusatorum incredibilis infantia, id est L. Lentuli L. f., quem fremunt omnes praevaricatum, deinde Pompei mira contentio, iudicum sordes. Ac tamen xxxii condemnarunt, xxxviii absolverunt. iudicia reliqua impendent. nondum est plane expeditus.
Jacob van Maerlant, (The traitor Ganelon drawn and quartered)., Spieghel Historiael, West Flanders, c. 1325-1335.
