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Welcome to another episode of The Doctor’s In. Today, we are looking back in order to look ahead, which is the right way to view history. Mankind has a weird way of repeating itself, getting into similar cycles that have similar outcomes. I want to talk about one of these cycles.
In Comeford College, we are going through some of the works of Cicero. We just finished up our discussion on The Second Philippic against Antony. In this speech, Cicero styles it after Demosthenes’ speech against Philip II of Macedon. Demosthenes could see that the miliary power of Philip was going to be a problem for Athens, so he was warning against it around 350 BC. Shortly thereafter, we have the rise of Philip’s son to power, Alexander the Great. We should know how that story goes. Demosthenes was not nice about Philip just as Cicero is not nice here about Antony.
Now, if you’re a little fuzzy on your Roman Caesar timeline, as most people are, here is some background for you. We recently finished up going through the Twelve Caesars, which is probably my favorite history of the Caesars. Suetonius, I don’t think, is not overly crass in his description of the Caesars while not making them look better than they were. There are some definite rated – R description in the book because that is what the Caesars were doing. Don’t go into that book blind. There are terrible things of history in it. Julius Caesar took power as a dictator from the senate and never really gave it back. This led to his assassination. In his absence, there was a power vacuum, and Marc Antony seemed to be stepping up to fill the shoes of Caesar. As a lover of the senate, Cicero hoped to save the republic and at the minimum, not allow Antony to come to power. He wrote 12 different Philippics against Antony; this is his most famous one. This would have been around 44-43 BC during the civil war time of Rome. This was building the peace in the world for Christ to come.
These Philippics eventually lead to Cicero’s death, for Marc Antony, as a condition for him to cede his claim to the throne, ask Augustus for the life of Cicero in exchange. Cicero was found traveling across the country when they stopped him to take off his head and hands. While a great orator, he learned an all to important lesson of being careful with who you crucify with your words. If they come to power, they may be coming for you.
So, what about Antony got Cicero so worked up? What kind of a man would not be suitable to lead a country according to the great Stoic teacher?
While Antony is most famous for his affair with Cleopatra, there was sadly more terrible things about him. Antony had a real problem with money. It started off at a young age when he wasted his father’s fortune and blamed it on his father. Cicero then said of him as Antony tried to get money and power back, “At first you were just a public prostitute with a fixed price: quite a high one, too. But very soon Curio intervened and took you off the streets, promoting you, one might say, to wifely status, and making a sound, steady, married woman of you” (pg. 122). Now, I don’t think Antony was actually sleeping with Curio, though those kinds of things did tend to happen in Roman courts. Rather I think that Curio bought him into power along with his vote. He was a man that money could buy his allegiance. Which to a man of the republic, this was a terrible tragedy. He goes on later in life,
Antony, were you too totally witless—or is not insanity the appropriate word? To realize this: that in your station of life to become a purchaser of confiscated property, and of Pompey’s property at that, would earn you the curses and loathing of Roman people… and the unbelievable – almost miraculous – fact is that he squandered Pompey’s substantial fortune, not in a few months, but in a few days! (130)
No matter how much money he seemed to come in contact with, he found a way to fritter it away in no time at all. This was not a man that you wanted in charge of your country’s treasury. Many Caesars were bad with money. Antony seemed to have a real skill in using and losing it.
Antony was also a public drunk. Drunkenness was not a think that was done in public in Roman times, though everyone seemed to do it in private. It was a common practice for Caesars to have feasts all day long at times, taking emetics to allow one to keep eating and drinking all day. Antony took it a step further:
You drank so much wine at Hippias’ wedding, Antony, that on the next day you had to be sick in full view of the people of Rome. It was a disgusting sight; even to hear what happened is disgusting. If you had behaved like that at a private dinner party, among those outsize drinking cups of yours, everyone would have regarded it as disgraceful enough…flooding his own lap and the whole platform with the gobbets of wine-reeking food he had vomited up. He admits that this was one of his filthier actions: let us now return to his grandeur misdeeds. (129)
He was an example of what not to do at a wedding because of his public drunkenness. This was just one of the examples that Cicero gave in this speech.
All these things speak to his private character, Cicero also had a problem with his public character. “Now in the national sphere nothing has greater weight that a law; while in private affairs the most valid of all things is a will. Antony abolished both – laws, with and without notice; wills, although even the humblest citizens have always respected them” (149). Antony took everything that he could get away with, whether or not it was legal. He had enough influence and backing to that the people harmed couldn’t do anything about it. If the laws had no sway over a person before he ruled a country, what would happen to that person if he came into full power? Nothing would be able to stop him.
So, Cicero had a real problem with Antony. This is not a man that he wanted leading his beloved country. He wanted the republic back but knew that wasn’t going to happen. So, he did the best he could, not allowing a dirt bag to ruin the country he loved.
Thinking through history, there is another people that could understand where Cicero was coming from. In this edition of the book, there is a note at the beginning of this section from Camille Desmoulins in 1793, “These Republicans (of the French Revolution) were mostly young people who, brought up on readings of Cicero at school, were fired by them with the passion for freedom” (101). Now, I didn’t know who Desmoulins was until I googled him. Apparently, he was a French journalist during the French Revolution until he was executed for “conspiring” against the French Republic. Now, we haven’t heard that before. But, as a young French man, reading Cicero and coming to his description of Antony, I could see a lot of similarity between Antony and the French royalty. France was having a lot of problems at the time, and the people didn’t know where to turn. They turned radical and it didn’t work out to well for them. The mob is never a good ruler.
How does this like Trump though? I see many friends who are comparing Trump to the rulers of the French. Now, I am not a Trump worshipper. I think he is personally a pretty terrible guy. His private life, not good. His business morals are within the bounds of law and that is about the best I can say, which is a terribly low bar. He doesn’t look to do the most good with his businesses. He is looking for the most money. He looks out for himself first. He is prideful and selfish. Now, I couldn’t vote for Biden, Clinton, or Harris because they are for the government protecting the right to kill babies. This is deplorable. This is the government enforcing and encouraging immorality, which I can’t stand. The Democratic Party is anti-government, anti-life and anti-America.
Trump, while not a good man, is running the government in a responsible way. He is seeking to have the budget be balanced, which means we can’t be spending all the money that we currently are. There has to be cuts in order to not be in debt. People can only be blessed by government out of surplus, not in deficit. This seems to be something that the Left doesn’t understand. It will be interesting to see what Trump does with Hegseth and Waltz in the next few days about the security breech. Signal is actually a pretty secure server, so it will be interesting to see how it holds up to the scrutiny it is about to face. As a Signal user, I want to see how they handle this. Signal is probably more secure than iMessage or anything else that most people use. I want to see what Hegseth and Waltz says about it in this scenario. Nothing happened to Clinton with her emails, so I don’t expect much to happen to either of these two men as they did less with less than she ever did. The Left is sure not to realize that though. This isn’t good though and it will be interesting to see how the leaders handle these things.
All this to say, is Trump like the royals that brought about the French Revolution? Not even close. Are the American people less educated than the French people who tried the Revolution? Absolutely. If the American people try to revolt like that, it was end up much worse than the French Revolution, and that was horrific to say or think about.
I bring this all up to encourage you to study your history. Learn how the men of old acted and watch how things turned out. Learn from it. Watch the world unfold in front of you and act according to the wisdom of the ages. Chances are, they experienced things similar to what we have today.
With all this said, The Doctor is Out.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, and Michael Grant. Selected Works. Penguin, 2004.