a masterful case study in the hypocrisy, self-pity, idealism and obliviousness of the elite. 

Cicero's status as a New Man in a world of aristocrats exemplifies the self concious precarity of nouveau rich.

his devotion to the State, his romanticization of "liberty, ancestors, hearths and altars"and utter disregard for how hollow that rings to landless conscripts and starving children, and his corresponding patronizing angst over the corruption of the morals of the poor and their dependency on the grain dole so perfectly exemplifies our own post-Great Society misanthropic liberalism.

my heart aches for Tyro, whose perspective makes Cicero's career feel desperate and fascinating and important even as the principle himself remains nauseating.

Cicero would have been happy and at home in the America of George Washington or John Quincy Adams, trading witticisms with Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.

he was an enslaver whose primary accomplishment as Consul was to subvert a conspiracy against the government which had mooted emancipation and land redistribution. 

his conception of freedom began and ended with the ability of the very rich getting to run in elections and criticize each other. for him, the dictatorship of the emperor was mainly an evil in that it displaced the dictatorship of the senatorial-equestrian alliance. 

all of which is to say we would do well to model ourselves in opposition to him. and yet I can't help feeling sad when I read the scene of his death.