Sublime

And there was no end to his rash promises of debt relief (one of the most despicable forms of radicalism in the eyes of the Roman landed classes) or to his bold threats to take out the leading politicians and to put the whole city to flames.

Solon had maintained the republican forms; now the people still entertained a blind hatred against these forms of government under which they had seen, for four centuries, nothing but the reign of the aristocracy. After the example of many Greek cities, they wished for a tyrant.

The essay focuses on the anger of those in positions of power over others.

Seneca, who defined anger as the desire for vengeance at an injury (iniuria) and argued that it must be eliminated, was himself motivated by rage against Claudius when he fell in with Agrippina’s plans. There is another veiled gibe implied by the use of the word “benefit” or “favor,” beneficium, since as we shall see, Seneca was to write a treatise

Rome at this period had no police of any kind and hardly any resources for controlling violence beyond what individual powerful men could scratch together. The instruction ‘to make sure that the state should come to no harm’ could in theory have been intended to draw a line between the unauthorised actions of a Scipio Nasica and those sanctioned by

The quarrel between the kings and the aristocracy assumed the character of a social struggle. The kings sided with the people, and depended for support upon the clients and the plebs. To the patrician order, so powerfully organized, they opposed the lower classes, so numerous at Rome. The aristocracy then found itself threatened by a double peril,

More concretely disturbing was the concurrent deterioration of the political and ethical situation in Athens to the point of crisis—the democracy turning fickle and corrupt, the consequent takeover by a ruthless oligarchy, the Athenian leadership of Greece becoming tyrannical, wars begun in arrogance ending in disaster.