For not even the son of Dryas, mighty Lykourgos,
Lasted long once he began to strive with the heavenly gods.
He;’ the one who chased the nurses of maddening Dionysus
Down the Nysian hill–all of them were dropping
Their wands to the ground because they were beaten
By man-slaying Lykourgos with a cattle-goad.
And Dionysus was frightened, so he immersed himself
In the salty waves where Thetis rescued the frightened child.
A powerful tremor had overcome him from the man’s shouting.
After that, the gods who live easily hated him
And Kronos’ son left him blind. And he didn’t last very long
After that, once he became hateful to all the immortal gods.”
“Dionysus, the child of Zeus and Semele, happened to be receiving purification under the guidance of Rheat among the Kybeloi of Phrydia. Once he completed the rites and received his acoutrement from the goddess, he traveled all over the world. He obtained his choruses and honors, while people were leading him everywhere. When he was present in Tharce, Lykourgos, son of Dryas, caused him pain, Hera was despising him, and drove him from the land with a gadfly. She attacked him and his caregivers. They happened to be engaging in sacred rites along with him. Driven by a god-made whip, he was rushing to punish the god. But [Dionysus] leapt into the sea beccause of fear where Thetis and Eurynome accepted him. Lykourgos did not commit irreverance without punishment. He paid a penalty mortals do.–for Zeus took his eyes from him. Many record this story, but Eumelos told the story first in his Europia.”
In the following speech check out the extreme distance between the μὲν clause and the δὲ clause. Also note Aeschines’ assertions about the rules for speaking in court (descending from oldest to youngest) traced back to Solon.
Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon 1-5
“Athenian men: you see the preparations and plans, how many there are, and the public pleading which certain men have used against what is measured and customary in the state. But I have come here because I have faith first in the gods and then in the laws and you—since I believe that no type of preparation is stronger among you than the laws and justice.
I [μὲν οὖν] would therefore wish, Athenian men, that the Council of Five Hundred and the Assembly would be governed rightly by those who led them and that the laws which Solon established about the proper order for public speakers would prevail: that it would be possible for the oldest citizen—as the laws prescribe—to speak prudently what he thinks is best for the city based on his experience on the platform without racket and trouble and then the rest of the citizens, as each desired, would provide their opinion about each matter in turn separated by age. In this way, the city would seem to me to be governed best, and the fewest cases would develop.
But [Ἐπειδὴ δὲ] since now all the standards which were previously agreed as acceptable have been rejected and certain men make illegal proclamations easily while others vote for them—and these are not men who were chosen by lot in the most just fashion to preside, but they sit in judgment by collusion and if any other councilor should actually obtain the right to be seated by lot and proclaims your votes correctly, then men who no longer believe that citizenship is a public good but think it is a private right threaten to accuse him; men who would take them as private slaves and make governments for themselves; these men who cast down the judgments of precedent and mete out their decisions based on the votes of anger—now the wisest and finest command of those in the city is silent: “Who of those men who are already fifty years old wishes to address the people?” and then in turn the rest of the Athenians. Now neither the laws nor the prytanes nor the selected officials nor even the selected tribe which is one tenth of the city is able to manage the disorder of the politicians.
The Athenian democracy had a fraught history that included sometimes attractive ideas like ostracism and frighteningly volatile features that led them to vote for the destruction of Mytilene one day only to rescind the order the next. One of their founding narratives also included the near-beatification of the killers of the tyrant Hipparchus, Harmodios and Aristogeitôn.
The following poems are taken from traditions of drinking songs in their honor.
PMG 893-897
“I will wrap my sword in a crown of myrtle
As Harmodius and Aristogeiton did
When they killed the tyrant
And made the Athenians equal under the law.”
“Dearest Harmodius, you have never died,
But they say you live in the isles of the blest
Where swift-footed Achilles
And Tydeus’ fine son Diomedes are”
“I will wrap my sword with a branch of myrtle,
Just as Harmodius and Aristogeiton did
When at the Athenian sacrifices
They killed the tyrant, a man named Hipparchus”
“Fame will always be yours in this land,
Dearest Harmodios and Aristogeiton,
Because you killed the tyrant
And made the Athenians equal under the law.”
“When Harmodios defeated his lawsuit, as he intended, [Hipparkhos] insulted him. After they invited his sister to come out to carry a basket in a certain procession, they rejected her, claiming they had not invited her at all because she was not good enough. Even as Harmodios took this badly, Aristogeitôn was a great deal angrier. Then all of the arrangements were made for the deed with those who were sympathetic to them but they were waiting for the great Panathenaia festival, because on that day there would be no suspicion at all if the citizens who were going to be part of the procession would be armed.
They had to begin the act, but the others were supposed to take care of the bodyguard immediately. The conspirators were few for safety’s sake, since they hoped that even those who did not know beforehand would be willing to share the struggle for their own freedom necessarily if they had arms in their hands and saw so few acting boldly.”
“But his death is said to have occurred by the more polished people not in the way most believe, because his sister was not allowed to be a basket-bearer in the procession. That’s pretty simplistic. Instead, they say Harmodius was Aristogeitôn’s brother and had been educated by him. For this reason, Aristogeitôn also took pride in educating people and considered Hipparkhos his rival. At the same time, it seems, Harmodios was in love with one of the fine and well-born young men of the day. People use his name but I don’t remember it. This young man was enamored with both Harmodios and Aristogeitôn for a while because they were wise. But when he started hanging out with Hipparkhos, he despised them and they were so pissed off by this slight that they killed Hipparkhos.”
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
One of the most well-known passages of Iliad 5 is when Athena spurs Diomedes to wound Aphrodite. The goddess of sex flees the battlefield and goes to be comforted by her mother.
Hom. Iliad 5.370-4
Then divine Aphrodite fell to the knees of Diône Her own mother. She took her own daughter into her arms. She touched her with her hand, named her, and spoke: “Dear child, who of the Olympians has done these kinds of things to you, Pointlessly, as if you were doing something wicked in the open?”
Once Aphrodite tells her the story, her mother then goes on to provide her a catalogue of gods who had to endure wounding by mortals. While the passage is amusing, it produces a little dissonance based largely on the significant detail of Aphrodite having a mother.
Schol. D ad. Hom. Il. 5.374
“Note that according to Hesiod, Aphrodite is the product of Ouranos’ genitals and the sea, but according to Homer, she is from Diône and Zeus.
Terracotta figurine of Aphrodite, Antikensammlung Berlin, c. 2nd Century BCE
An instructive detail here is that the scholion here doesn’t take a stance about whether either or not Homer or Hesiod are “correct” or one is prior to another, and I think this is pretty important. From a narrative perspective each genealogy makes sense for the story in question: Aphrodite is a powerful elemental force in Hesiod’s Theogony and there is both poetic and political logic behind her birth from Ouranos’ testicles. In the Homeric tradition, this is more complicated. Zeus needs to humiliate Aphrodite in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where he ‘gets back’ at her for infecting the gods with lust by inducing her to have sex with the mortal Anchises. In the Iliad, Aphrodite is rendered subordinate to Zeus as one of his children. Aphrodite is often mentioned as a daughter of Zeus (as G. S. Kirk notes in his Cambridge commentary on the Iliad), but this is the only place we hear about her mother. To make it a little more bewildering, Diône seems top merely be a feminine form of Zeus (cf. the genitive Dios).
Frederick Combellack writes in his 1976 article “Homer the Innovator” that “any person who spends very much time in the study of the Homeric poems will almost certainly find himself involved, perhaps with regret, in the study of Homeric scholarship” (44). He drops this “diss track” by way of introducing an argument against the very idea that Homeric poetry could “innovate” or “invent” new detail, an assertion supported by many scholars in the twentieth century, dismissed by Combellack as being possible, but implausible based on our evidence.
So-called “Ludovisi Throne”: main panel, Aphrodite attended by two handmaidens as she rises ouf the surf. Thasos marble, Greek artwork, ca. 460 BC (authenticity disputed).caption…
While I don’t necessarily share Combellack’s aversion to reading Homeric scholarship, despite a weighty tradition mocking its pedantry going all the way back to Seneca (and likely earlier, given the evidence of Palladas the Alexandrian poet), I do think the asperity of his comments point to an important problem in thinking about Homeric poetry: making any sense of the relationship between our ‘Homer’ and what may have come before.
The relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and antecedent ‘traditions’ is not just about mythological narratives: it pervades our view of Homeric language (the formula), devices (e.g. similes), as well as content. Indeed, a great deal of Homeric scholarship of the 20th century was engaged with this question in one way or another. (Sidenote, this is a topic that will always inspire debate: The first 45 minutes of my dissertation defense in 2007 was occupied by my readers debating among themselves the meaning of the word ‘tradition’ in relation to the Iliad.)
I have discussed neoanalytical approaches before, and I don’t really want to recap that. Here I am interested in two problems presented by the nature of Homeric poetry itself: First, Homeric poetry is generically meant to seem old and authoritative, without having to actually be so. Second, Greek poetry and myth in general have a very different approach to veracity or fidelity than a culture immersed in fixed textual traditions like ours might expect.
For the first problem, I always find it useful to flip our belief about Homeric poetry on its head: what if, instead of assuming that Homeric poetry stands as the authoritative origins of Trojan war narratives (and other myths) it stands at the end of a certain kind of flexible tradition, imposing an authoritative order only over time thanks to a privileged cultural position. I find starting from this approach useful especially with other archaic and classical age poets because we can’t actually know what ‘Homer’ they were exposed to and it is strange to think that epic performance was not shaped by other genres as well.
Birth of Aphrodite. Attic red-figure pyxis. MET, c. 460 BCE
For the second challenge, I often think back to what Hesiod announces before the cosmogonic narrative of the Theogony even begins. The Muses approach ‘Hesiod’ while he is tending his flocks:
Theogony 26-28
“Rustic shepherds, wretched reproaches, nothing but bellies, We know how to say many lies similar to the truth And we know how to speak the truth when we want to.”
When I teach myth I emphasize that while this passage can be taken as a disclaimer (i.e., you may know different stories than mine!) for communities of divergent, even conflicting narrative traditions, I think it is also a conditioning framework for setting aside concerns about veracity. Hesiod the narrator here attributes poetic authority to the Muses along with the ability to discern what is true from what is false. The result is that mortals simply cannot know and, therefore, probably shouldn’t worry about it.
But I have also taken recourse to ideas from scholars of memory to rethink moments like this. In studying memory systems, Martin Conway suggests that there are two forces in human memory: correspondence, which is about equivalence between details of ‘reality’ (or experience) and details of a story and coherence, which means that details make sense together in a narrative. When it comes to the way these systems operate in the human mind, not only does he argue that the memory systems have different neuro-anatomy, but he suggests that the episodic memory system (which prizes correspondence) developed earlier and is more basic to day-to-day survival than the autobiographical memory system which focuses more on coherence and is essential for the development of a goal or ‘identity’ driven self. The two systems are not exclusive—autobiographical memory selects from episodic memory in the creation of a coherent self.
In expanding these ideas to communities of audiences and narrative traditions, what I think we can say is that ancient audiences were accustomed to making sense of each story on its own terms, nonplussed by details that might conflict with other story traditions, because they belong to those other stories. The force of narrative coherence supersedes correspondence to ‘facts’ in other tales because what matters in each telling is the story in process. To an extent, these forces and the aesthetics they imply are operative throughout early Greek poetry (consider Pindar) and at play as well in the ‘innovations’ we see in Athenian Tragedy.
To return to book 5 of the Iliad: Aphrodite has a mother because it makes sense for the global context of the epic (where Zeus is the “father of gods and men”) and because it makes sense for this scene. Whether or not this is Homeric “invention” is almost beside the point. Certainly the simplicity of the name Diône and the lack of her presence in other narratives implies that this detail is important, even idiopathic to this (kind of) scene, but it tells us nothing about whether or not earlier versions of this theme including this detail or whether similar moments occurred in antecedent or parallel traditions. The challenge, as always, is to make sense of how this passage supports the Iliad we possess.
Cribbing from the Muses here: we cannot know if ‘Homer’ made something up, so should we bother worrying about it?
Alden, Maureen Joan. “The rôle of Calypso in the Odyssey.” Antike und Abendland, vol. XXXI, 1985, pp. 97-107.
Barker, Elton T. E.. “The « Iliad »’s big swoon: a case of innovation within the epic tradition ?.” Trends in Classics, vol. 3, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-17.
Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies
Berg, Nils and Haug, Dag Trygve Truslew. “Dividing Homer. 2,: Innovation vs. tradition in Homer : an overlooked piece of evidence.” Symbolae Osloenses, vol. 75, 2000, pp. 5-23. Doi: 10.1080/003976700300005811
Bruce K. Braswell. “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 21 (1971) 16-26.
Christensen, Joel P.. “Innovation and tradition revisited: the near-synonymy of ἀμύνω and ἀλέξω as a case study in Homeric composition.” The Classical Journal, vol. 108, no. 3, 2012-2013, pp. 257-296.
Combellack, Frederick M.. “Homer the innovator.” Classical Philology, vol. LXXI, 1976, pp. 44-55.
Martin A. Conway. “Memory and the Self,” Journal of Memory and Language 53 (2005) 594-628.
Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. “« Kyklos », the Epic Cycle and Cyclic poetry.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 1-40.
Bernard Fenik. Homer: Tradition and Invention. Leiden, 1978.
Ingalls, Wayne B.. “Linguistic and formular innovation in the mythological digressions in the Iliad.” Phoenix, vol. XXXVI, 1982, pp. 201-202.
Jones, Peter. “Poetic invention: the fighting around Troy in the first nine years of the Trojan War.” Homer’s world: fiction, tradition, reality. Eds. Andersen, Øivind and Dickie, Matthew W.. Papers from the Norwegian Institute at Athens; 3. Athens ; Bergen: Norwegian Institute at Athens, 1995. 101-111.
Mueller-Goldingen, Christian. “Tradition und Innovation: zu Stesichoros’ Umgang mit dem Mythos.” L’Antiquité Classique, vol. 69, 2000, pp. 1-19. Doi: 10.3406/antiq.2000.2419
Nussbaum, Alan J.. “The Homeric formulary template and a linguistic innovation in the epics.” Language and meter. Eds. Gunkel, Dieter and Hackstein, Olav. Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics; 18. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2018. 267-318.
Ready, Jonathan L.. The Homeric simile in comparative perspectives : oral traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Pr., 2018.
David C. Rubin. “The Basic-systems Model of Episodic Memory,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2006) 277-311.
M. M. Willcock. “Mythological Paradeigmata in the Iliad.” Classical Quarterly 14 (1964) 141-151.
—,—. “Ad Hoc Invention in the Iliad.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1977) 41-53.
Then divine Aphrodite fell to the knees of Diône
Her own mother. She took her own daughter into her arms.
She touched her with her hand, named her, and spoke:
“Dear child, who of the Olympians has done these kinds of things to you,
Pointlessly, as if you were doing something wicked in the open?”
The Iliad ends with the burial of Hektor, but the mythographical tradition would not let him lie in peace. There is a tradition for the exhumation and the reburial of his remains.
Aristodemos BNJ383 F7 [“Brill’s New Jacoby”=Schol. AB ad Il. 13.1]
“the Trojans and Hektor”: He has separated Hektor in particular from the rest of the Trojans. Following the sack of Troy, Hektor the son of Priam obtained honor from the gods after death. For the Thebans in Boiotia were beset by evils and solicited a prophecy about their deliverance. The oracle told them that they would stop the troubles if they would transfer the bones of Hektor from Ophrunion in the Troad to a place in their land called the “birthplace of Zeus”. They, once they did this and were freed from the evils, maintained the honors for Hektor and during hard times they used to call for his manifestation. This is the account in Aristodemos.
“At Thebes there is also the grave of Hektor, Priam’s son. It is next to a spring called the Oedipus Spring. The Thebans say that they brought the bones from Troy to this place because of the following oracle:
Thebans living in the in the city of Kadmos,
If you want to live in a country with blameless wealth
Bring the bones of Hektor, Priam’s son, home
From Asia to be honored as a hero in accordance with Zeus
The spring was named after Oedipus because it was the same place where Oedipus washed off the blood from his father’s murder
Lykophron in his Alexandraalludes to a strange tale of the transfer of Hektor’s remains from Troy to Thebes. Since Lykophron is virtually unreadable, here is the account from scholia (Schol. In Lykrophon 1194):
“They say that when there was a famine in Greece Apollo decreed that they should transfer the bones of Hektor, which were at the place called Ophrunos, from Troy to some city in Greece which did not take part in the expedition against Troy.* When the Greeks realized that Thebes in Boiotia had not fought against Troy, they retrieved the remains of the hero and installed them there.”
* In the Iliad, though the Boiotians (2.494-510) are named prominently in the catalogue of ships alongside the prominent city of Orchomenos (511-516), only Hypothebes is mentioned alongside recognizable topographical features of Thebes (οἵ θ’ ῾Υποθήβας εἶχον ἐϋκτίμενον πτολίεθρον, 505). One explanation for this is that “The place below Thebes” is the settlement surviving after the Epigonoi sacked the city. Diomedes, prominent in the Iliad, was instrumental in that expedition. In mythical time, then, Thebes was a ruined city for the advent of the expedition against Thebes.
The transfer of heroic remains is reported frequently in ancient texts. For Theseus’ bones see: Plut. Vit. Cim. 8.57; Vit. Thes. 36.1–4; Paus. 1.17.6, 3.3.7. Cf. Hdt. 167-68; Paus 3.3.6 for Orestes’ bones. McCauley (1999) identifies 13 different instances of the transfer of remains in ancient Greece, with 9 of them being clearly political in motivation.
Simon Hornblower accepts that the cult of Hektor at Thebes was historical. One suggestion for this (Schachter 1981-94: 1.233-4) is that when Kassandros re-founded Thebes in 316 BCE he consciously affiliated with Hektor in response to Alexander’s earlier association with Achilles (Kassandros had a great enmity for Alexander). Hornblower (427) also posits the bone tale as an instance of rivalry between Thebes and Athens as part of Thebes establishing a connection in the Hellespont to challenge Athenian commercial interests in the region. The first suggestion places the bone transfer tale after 316 BCE; the second dates it back to 365. Hornblower suggests that there were two stages involved with an oracle being reported c. 465 BCE (428) and the bones being retrieved near the end of the century.
A. Schachter, Cults of Boeotia1–4 (London, 1981-1994).
Hornblower, Simon 203. Lykophron: Alexandra. Oxford.
McCauley, B. 1999. “Heroes and Power: The Politics of Bone Transferal.” In R. Hägg (ed.) Ancient Greek Hero Cult. Stockholm, 1999:85-98
Phillips, D. D. 2003. “The Bones of Orestes and Spartan Foreign Policy.” In Gestures: Essays in Ancient History, Literature, and Philosophy Presented to Alan L. Boegehold, edited by G. W. Bakewell and J. P. Sickinger, 301–16. Oxford.
Seneca the Elder, Historical Fragments, 1 [=Lactant. Inst. Div. 7.15.14]
“Seneca outlined the periods of Roman history in “life-stages”. The first was her infancy under the king Romulus, who parented Rome and educated her. Then there followed a childhood under various kings thanks to whom the city grew and was shaped by many practices and institutions. Then, while Tarquin was king and Rome began to become more adult, it could not endure servitude and, once the yoke of arrogant rule was thrown off, preferred to heed laws instead of kings.
Once the Roman adolescence ended with the close of the Punic war, it began to show the full strength of adulthood. For, when Carthage was subdued, that city which was an ancient rival for power, Rome extended her hands over the whole earth, both land and sea until every king and nation had bent to her power.
But, since there was no reason left for wars, Rome began to use her strengths poorly and wore herself out. This was the first step of old age: when Rome was wounded by civil wars and suffering from internal evil, she returned again to the practice of individual rule, as if she had devolved into a second infancy. Thus she lost the freedom which she defended when Brutus was its agent and champion and grew weak in old age, as if she had not the strength to support herself unless she could use the ‘cane’ of kings.”
Seneca Romanae urbis tempora distribuit in aetates; primam enim dixit infantiam sub rege Romulo fuisse, a quo et genita et quasi educata sit Roma, deinde pueritiam sub ceteris regibus, a quibus et aucta sit et disciplinis pluribus institutisque formata. At vero Tarquinio regnante, cum iam quasi adulta esse coepisset, servitium non tulisse, et reiecto superbae dominationis iugo maluisse legibus obtemperare quam regibus, cumque esset adulescentia eius fine Punici belli terminata, tum denique confirmatis viribus coepisse iuvenescere. Sublata enim Carthagine, quae diu aemula imperii fuit, manus suas in totum orbem terra marique porrexit, donec regibus cunctis et nationibus imperio subiugatis, cum iam bellorum materia deficeret, viribus suis male uteretur, quibus se ipsa confecit. Haec fuit prima eius senectus, cum bellis lacerata civilibus atque intestino malo pressa rursus ad regimen singularis imperii recidit quasi ad alteram infantiam revoluta. Amissa enim libertate, quam Bruto duce et auctore defenderat, ita consenuit tamquam sustentare se ipsa non valeret nisi adminiculo regentium uteretur.
Roman copy: 1st century BC-AD 1st century; Greek original: 3rd century BC
“Let us consider now how many ways a man may be called unjust. It is indeed clear that a man who breaks laws is unjust but so is someone who is greedy and inegalitarian—thus it is clear that the just man will be law-abiding and fair. Justice, then, is lawful and fair; injustice is unlawful and unfair.
Since the unjust man someone who is greedy, he will be selfish regarding good things, not everything, but those things upon which good fortune and bad fortune rely—those things which are universally always good but not always for the same person. People pray for these things and pursue them; it is not right, however, that they pray for things which are universally good and good for them, but that they choose things that are just good for them.
The unjust man does not always choose the larger portion;for he will choose the smaller portion of bad things. But even here he is more selfish of the good because he appears to take on less evil, which is a type of good, and for that reason he seems greedy. He should be called unfair. This also embraces the common sense.”
“There are some people who get puffed up if they manage to talk about something tolerably after they have themselves selected a strange and impossible subject. Men have also grown old claiming that it is impossible to say or disprove a lie or to speak two ways about the same matters. Others claim that courage, wisdom, and justice are the same thing, that we have none of these by nature, and that there is a single knowledge about them all. Others waste their time in conflicts which bring no benefit, which can only create more trouble for those who approach them.
I, if I saw that this superfluity had only just emerged in speeches and that these men were eager for honor in the novelty of what they discover, I would not be a surprised at them. But, now, who is such a late-learner that he does not know Protagoras and the sophists who were active at his time and that they left to us these types of things and speeches even more excessively composed than these? How could anyone overcome Gorgias who dared to say that nothing exists at all or Zeno who tried to demonstrate that the same things are possible and impossible or even Melissos who—although some things are countless in number—tried to provide a proof that everything is one!”
“I would have a hard time enduring your attacks with a level mind, Marcus Tullius, if I believed that this petulance of yours came from good judgment rather than a sick mind. But, since I discover in you neither balance nor modesty, I will answer you just so you may lose the pleasure you get from slandering someone when you are slandered yourself.
Where shall I complain, whom shall I address, Senators, to tell that the Republic is being divided up as booty for any kind of daring pirate? Can I call to the Roman people, the people who are so corrupted by expenditures that they offer themselves and their fortunes for sale? Can I call to you, Senators, whose authority is a joke to any of the foulest and most criminal—especially when Marcus Tullius defends the laws, the courts, and the Republic and lords over this order as if he were the last scion of a famous family of Scipio Africanus and not some orphan citizen, just recently rooted in this city?
Come on, Marcus—aren’t your words and deeds perfectly clear? Haven’t you lived in such a way from boyhood that you believed that there was nothing sinful which anyone could do to your body? Or, I guess you did not develop this excessive elegance of yours with Marcus Piso by offering up your shame? It is thus hardly a wonder that you sell it so criminally since you won it so disgustingly.”
[The text goes on to insult Cicero’s wife, daughter, his relationship with Crassus and more…Many apologies to anyone who cares for Cicero, I have a weakness for excessive Latin invective…and Cicero did too…]
Graviter et iniquo animo maledicta tua paterer,M. Tulli, si te scirem iudicio magis quam morbo animi petulantia ista uti. Sed cum in te neque modum neque modestiam ullam animadverto, respondebo tibi ut si quam male dicendo voluptatem cepisti, eam male audiendo amittas.
Ubi querar, quos implorem, patres conscripti, diripi rem publicam atque audacissimo cuique esse praedae? apud populum Romanum? qui ita largitionibus corruptus est, ut se ipse ac fortunas suas venales habeat. an apud vos, patres conscripti? quorum auctoritas turpissimo cuique et sceleratissimo ludibrio est; ubi M. Tullius leges, iudicia, rem publicam defendit atque in hoc ordine ita moderatur quasi unus reliquus e familia viri clarissimi, Scipionis Africani, ac non reperticius, accitus, ac paulo ante insitus huic urbi civis.
An vero, M. Tulli, facta tua ac dicta obscura sunt? an non ita a pueritia vixisti ut nihil flagitiosum corpori tuo putares quod alicui collibuisset? aut scilicet istam immoderatam eloquentiam apud M. Pisonem non pudicitiae iactura perdidicisti! itaque minime mirandum est quod eam flagitiose venditas quam turpissime parasti.
(c) Manchester City Galleries; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
