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power—what we know in Latin as imperium—the
nothing,” said Molon, “dries more quickly than a tear.”
“But the National Archive is run by Catulus’s people.
the politician’s nightmare: the requirement to give a straight answer.”
If you want power, there is a time when you have to seize it.
did nothing all day except read and think—a most dangerous occupation for a man,
Cato was always the perfect Stoic, as long as nothing went wrong.
NO ONE CAN REALLY CLAIM to know politics properly until he has stayed up all night writing a speech for delivery the following day.
few subjects make more tedious reading than happiness.”
there are few blessings in life more onerous than the friendship of a great man.
like watching an elephant trying to make itself at home in an anthill.
a supreme commander of consular rank with imperium lasting for three years over all territory up to fifty miles from the sea,
sometimes you have to start a fight to discover how to win it.
shared supreme command is an oxymoron.”
There can seldom have been a more urban creature than Cicero.
“Dangerous men always attract a following,
“I would defend the blackest devil in hell if he was in need of an advocate.
Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?
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.”
Amisus, on the eastern edge of the Black Sea—which
in theory even a woman could become a stenographer.
THUS DID MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO, at forty-two, the youngest age allowable, achieve the supreme imperium of the Roman consulship—and
