Skip to main content

Cicero

Started a biography of Cicero by Anthony Everitt. “His big idea, which he tirelessly publicized, was that of a mixed or balanced constitution.” (p.7)

Cicerone denuncia Catilina (1888) by Cesare Maccari

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BC in Arpinum and died in 43BC, time running backwards from our perspective, at 63, spoiler, beheaded by Marc Anthony, which was OK because routinely killed. He wrote more than three-quarters of extant Latin literature that is known to have existed in his lifetime. He was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic. “Very few other men have both stood at the centre of world events and written so well and fully about the part they played. ” (Michael Grant Cicero: Selected Works) 

According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "the Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." He impact on leaded Enlightenment thinkers and political theorists such as John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu and Edmund Burke. His name means chickpea. "Plutarch explains that the name was originally given to one of Cicero's ancestors who had a cleft in the tip of his nose resembling a chickpea. However, it is more likely that Cicero's ancestors prospered through the cultivation and sale of chickpeas." (Wikipedia)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Manet and Degas

  Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special.  In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review

Silo

This is a dark show that I'm reluctant to watch. Slow burn with reveals along the way. Lots of padding and important small details you have to pay attention to, which sometimes I don't because I'm looking at my phone. The TV competes with the phone. Either I'm playing chess, or another game, or surfing for news about my favorite soccer team NYCFC. They're supposed to sign some new players and can register them tomorrow, but the team usually doesn't do things in a timely way, they're messy.  The first few episodes of the 10 episode first season are about the sherif and his wife, played by Rashid Jones .  Then there's like a buffer action episode where the generator almost goes kaput. Then it becomes Longmire, a woman sheriff who doesn't know the protocols and rules, and doesn't care, she just wants truth and answers.  Everyone lives in the Silo, it's huge and mysterious and you can't have relics, things from the past, that might clue you i...

movie versus book

I'm watching the movie a second time, and I'm halfway through the book. Among the movie's differences from the book. Sortilege starts off narrating. The movie doesn't have the school bell for the phone either, just a regular ring. It's really weird the way Doc shouts when he sees the photo of Amethyst as a baby. I guess it's to dramatize the negative impact of being pregnant and using, but the child we see looks pretty healthy. The child doesn't huff out because they're boring like she did in the book.  Superficially The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice are similar but it's a completely different style of narrative. The Coen brothers are amazing, they have a very witty movie that I have loved for a long time. Pynchon is a whole other realm of fiction, and this conversion is fairly faithful, taking out the best lines and making it more compact. The audio book is 15 hours, the movie is 2 hours. Anyway, I like the different movies for different reasons. T...