Sublime

The idea that the political process had been fixed behind the scenes seemed in some ways worse than the open violence of the previous decades. Cicero captured the point nicely when he observed that in Pompey’s notebook there was a list not only of past consuls but of future ones too.

This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.

I know this is lunacy, but it is just a thought experiment (I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect, courage, vision, and perseverance; this is the point of the thought experiment).

For his First Catilinarian speech, and especially its famous first line (‘How long, Catiline, will you go on abusing our patience?’), still lurks in twenty-first-century political rhetoric, is plastered on modern political banners and is fitted conveniently into the 140 characters of a tweet.