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February 17 - March 21, 2021
“I soon perceived a growing Curiosity, a Love of Books and a fondness for Study, which dissipated all my Inclination for Sports, and even for the Society of the Ladies.
Incel
He was a plebian, the son of a rustic “nobody,” as Trollope puts it.12 Cicero
Cicero famously began his first speech against Catiline with striking urgency: “How far wilt thou, O Catiline! abuse our patience?”
“How long shall thy Madness outbrave our justice?”17
Fire!
“You cannot possibly remain in our society any longer,” he admonished.
“Let the disloyal then withdraw, let them separate themselves from the loyal. . . . get you gone to your unholy and abominable campaign.”20
Catiline stood in the Senate and attempted to respond to this blast. An aristocrat himself, he attacked Cicero’s relatively low birth, calling him “an immigrant citizen” (that is, born outside Rome).
He also warned that those conspirators who had remained behind in the city would not receive the indulgence he had shown Catiline. “There is not any longer room for lenity; the business itself demands severity.”
“If anything does happen to me, I shall fall with a contented and prepared mind; and, indeed, death cannot be disgraceful to a brave man, nor premature to one of consular rank, nor miserable to a wise man.”
showing leniency to the conspirators would be cruel to their intended victims—you and your families.
while he breathes, will, in his own Person, charge himself, with the Execution and Defense of whatever you shall decree.”27
makes a Patriot as it makes a Knave.29
In some private performances, Voltaire played the role of Cicero.30 A few decades later Mozart’s rival Antonio Salieri wrote an opera about the Catiline war.
“Bob Paine is conceited and pretends to more Knowledge and Genius than he has.”
Numbskull and a Blunder Buss before all the Superiour Judges.”
This passage, while long and wordy, should be read with the patience that people in the eighteenth century were accustomed to give to the printed word. If read slowly, considered clause by clause, it can convey great power:
As the People are the Fountain of Power and Authority, the original Seat of Majesty, the Authors of Laws, and the Creators of Officers to execute them; if they shall find the Power they have conferred abused by their Trustees, their Majesty violated by Tyranny or by Usurpation, their Authority prostituted to support Violence or screen Corruption, the Laws grown pernicious through Accidents unforeseen or unavoidable, or rendered ineffectual through the Infidelity and Corruption of the Executors of them; then it is their Right, and what is their Right is their Duty, to resume that delegated
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what was distinctive about the Enlightenment was not a system of political thought or a set of new philosophical notions.
Rather, the Enlightenment was more a process than a result.
the foundations of the Industrial Revolution were put in place by Enlightenment thinkers exploring new technologies such as steam power.
Mayhew
“No taxation without representation.”
An eighteenth-century Scottish poet summarized the thought, Of pow’r THE PEOPLE are the source, The fountain-head of human force; Spurn’d by their Subjects, WHAT ARE KINGS, But useless, helpless, haughty things?
If Washington is the most remote of the founders, Olympian in stature, Adams is his opposite, the most modern—quirky, striving, self-obsessed,
“Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his weakness. . . . He was very great while he spoke of his country, which he did so often; but he was almost as little when he spoke of himself—which he did as often.”
For Adams, education was always a means to an end. For a smart, driven young man from a modest background, books about government, politics, and law were the road to reputation, honor, and power.
he proudly told John Adams that “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
This preference for the Greeks may have inoculated Jefferson against the stiff, Roman-like Federalism of Adams and Washington.
There are few better ways to study a literary passage than to write it out in one’s own hand, feeling each word and following the flow of thought.
the school’s president was hauled before the college’s governing body, the Board of Visitors, on the charge of being habitually drunk. He did not deny it and solved the problem by dying that December.
This Scottish influence would remain with him throughout his life, most notably in its emphasis on testing ideas against observation through one’s own senses.
By 1750, according to some estimates, 75 percent of Scots could read, compared to 53 percent in England.
Adam Smith, who won a scholarship to Oxford for graduate work after taking a degree at Glasgow, complained in The Wealth of Nations that “in the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.”23
The Scottish institutions led the English-speaking world in having their faculty members specialize in one or two subjects, instead of making them responsible for teaching the university’s entire curriculum.
1708;
“many Scottish lawyers in the seventeenth century still went to France to complete their law training rather than to England.” That’s significant in the context of classicism because much more than English law, French jurisprudence had its roots in ancient Rome.
Charles Darwin in turn may have arrived at his theory of natural selection in part by combining Hutton’s conception of vast time with his friend Adam Smith’s theories of the free market, applying both to the natural world.
Darwin himself had attended the University of Edinburgh but dropped out after deciding he did not want to be a doctor. About five years later, at the end of 1831, he began his years-long voyage aboard the HMS Beagle by reading a copy of a geology textbook based on Hutton’s theories.
Pyrrhonisms [the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho’s doctrine of complete uncertainty]
Euripides, the fifth-century Athenian tragedian, that in translation reads: “The words of truth are simple, and justice needs no subtle interpretations, for it has a fitness in itself; but the words of injustice, being rotten in themselves, require clever treatment.”
His Ideas of the English Constitution are correct and his Political Writings are worth something:
Jefferson manages to separate the politicLly and philosophically informed sources despite their rank impiety
His Religion is a pompous Folly: and his Abuse of the Christian Religion is as superficial as it is impious.
Pope famously instructed the reader to Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.
“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” he asserted. “For Plato makes him one of his Collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his name.”
Collucutor
Plato’s Socrates, writes the classical scholar Jeffrey Henderson, is “unworldly, aloof, and hyper-intellectual,”
Xenophon’s is “down-to-earth, handy, and practical as well as philosophical and comfortable in any society.”
“farming is the fairest, noblest, and most pleasant way to earn a living,” a sentiment Jefferson held throughout his life.82
The Sicilian city of Syracuse began as a colony of Corinth, notes Stanyan, but it grew “large and beautiful,” and as it “increased in power,” it came to renounce its “obedience” to Corinth.
Sibilssance
freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from confusion.”
Utility the test of virtue . . . Virtue consists in Prudence Temperance Fortitude Justice
