More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Remember Demosthenes: “Only three things count in oratory. Delivery, delivery, and again: delivery.”’
then I shall face the politician’s worst nightmare: the requirement to give a straight answer.’
But do not worry – there will be time enough to sleep when we are dead.’
The work gave Cicero his first real taste of what it is like to have power – which is usually, when it comes down to it, a matter of choosing between equally unpalatable options – and fairly bitter he found it.
‘Eloquence which does not startle I don’t consider eloquence.’ Cicero, letter to Brutus, 48 BC
‘What convinces is conviction,’ he used to say. ‘You simply must believe the argument you are advancing, otherwise you are lost.
I do not propose to die leaving one ounce of talent unspent, or one mile of energy left in my legs.
that there is nothing quite like death to make one feel alive.
Let us hope that a solution presents itself. One usually does.’
‘The law is so expensive,’ said Clodius with a smile.
‘On the contrary, the ability to listen to bores requires stamina, and such stamina is the essence of politics. It is from the bores that you really find things out.’
her. ‘By heavens, Terentia,’ he said quietly, ‘what a clever shrew you are.’
Even the steward looked like an aristocrat, and when I said I had a personal message for his master from Senator Cicero, you might have thought I had farted, such an exquisite expression of distaste spread across his bony face at the mention of the name.
By this time tomorrow, I remember thinking, the voting on the Field of Mars would be well underway, and we would probably know whether Cicero was to be consul or not, and in either event the sun would shine and in the autumn it would rain.
‘Mucius is just one solitary whore in a whole hired troupe of common prostitutes.
doubt if there was one supporter whose hand he did not shake, and with whom he did not establish one brief moment of rapport, sufficient to leave the other man feeling he had been specially singled out.
YOU CAN ALWAYS spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.
‘The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destroy one’s spirit by worrying about them too far in advance.
