Politics 2050 Years Ago: Dateline--Rome

CICERO(106-43 BC)

A poet must be clinical, dispassionate about life. The poet feels much less strongly about these things than do other men...one finds realized (in Auden’s work) a verbal and intellectual pleasure so pure that one feels as if the lowly human faculty of mere enjoyment had been somehow ennobled. -Frederick Buell, W.H. Auden As a Social Poet, Cornell UP, London, 1973, p.41.


Cicero came long ago,
at a critical juncture,
he urged his combative peers
to end their recriminative posture,
political moralist who saw
the value of philosphy in politics,
an idealist in an age of extremes,
complex personality who saw
kindness as a means to justice,
the goal of society.
The main branches of society
must work together, love each other
for this is the foundation of law
which holds society together.

Popular Assemblies, like today,
no longer expressed the will of the people,
no longer aspired to higher culture,
to honesty or propriety: was was
the real politics for our a way of life.

Ron Price
10 June 1995

Source S.E. Smethurst, “Politics and Morality in Cicero”, The Phoenix, Vol. 10/11, 1955-57, pp.111-121.