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Lie, and Be Elected
February 2, 2012, 5:00 pm
By Peter Monaghan
Just in time for the 2012 electoral silly season comes an old text, newly translated, with timeless advice for those who would rule.
Among its pearls of swinedom, offered with not even a pause over self-contradiction: Flatter voters grandly, but beware, “politics is full of deceit, treachery, and betrayal.”
Quintus Tullius Cicero set down that and other advice for his big brother, Marcus Tullius Cicero, in 64 BC. Quintus was trying to help Marcus, perhaps Rome’s greatest orator, win election to one of two annual consulships of Rome, the state’s supremely powerful top post.
Quintus’ counsel took the form of a punchy, you’re-just-going-to-have-to-man-up letter. And it suggests that little is new in political thrust and parry: Nothing the younger Cicero told his brother has lost any currency—at all. Statesmen considered shameless flattery to be effectively deceitful then, as now.
https://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/lie-and-be-elected/29971
