Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

This past weekend was to have been the annual vigil in the park in Hong Kong where thousands come out every year on June 4 in remembrance of what really happened in Tiananmen Square. This year, the park was empty. Not just a few, but empty. Those in power made statements in the Mainland "media", whose job is to persuade people to support those in power, about how misinformation needed to be eliminated and the terrorists and criminal elements behind it stopped for the sake of all the good people of China.

Of course in the end Cicero was silenced by those who were taking power. You may have humor and charm, you may be well-behaved and your claims may be correct, but if you are an impediment to the agendas of those in power, they will silence you in whatever ways they can unless others in society restrain them.

It is the lesson of history that Noam Chomsky shouted from the rooftops: when you use your power to silence speech you don't like, you are corrupt, regardless of how you try to disguise it, and the more power you have to do it, the more corrupt, until absolute power corrupts absolutely or society refuses to allow it and restrains you.

> Of course in the end Cicero was silenced by those who were taking power.

The conflict between Cicero and Mark Antony is a splendid case study of influence versus power and how that conflict ends when power chooses to play its hand.

Mark Anthony may not have ultimately been successful (he was though), in which case Cicero may have lasted a bit longer. He was already 63 when he was executed, so it's not like he lived a short life for the age he lived in.

"in remembrance of what really happened in Tiananmen Square."

That event is still remembered across the world. Recently the Register noted that "Tank man" vanished for a while from certain search engines but has made some re-appearances again. It may also surprise you to learn that "Cicero sic in omnibus, et Brutus aderat" (Big C puked in the bus and Brutus had a rat)

I understand where you are coming from and I think the notion of:

"power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely"

is a very, very old notion.

> "Cicero sic in omnibus, et Brutus aderat"

This would appear to mean "Cicero [was] this way in everything, and Brutus was there", which comes across as two clauses with absolutely no connection between them. On the other hand, it is comprehensible Latin, unlike "semper ubi sub ubi". Is it a quote from a real source, or was it composed purely for the sake of sounding like English when read in the British standard Latin pronunciation?

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciat... )

See the section about "Down with skool" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Latin

Hm. That original poem is much better English and, of course, completely impossible Latin.

I find it interesting that what gerdesj remembered were two lines (in the wrong order) that didn't go together in the English, but which were also the only two lines that made sense as Latin.

That's what happens after 40 years, I'm afraid: You get your doggerel out of order and accidentally correct it.

I recall those lines that my Latin teacher prefaced with something like "I can't remember the whole thing but ...". I was 10 in 1980 and he was quoting probably from his youth at school or a further 20-30 odd years before then, so I'm recalling something second hand from around 1950-1960! There were some errors. Who knows if he got the "correct" poem to start with. You should hear my rendition of the Jabberwocky.

I feel quite sorry for historians.

I'm not trying to find fault! I think it says something about possible memory strategies.

> I feel quite sorry for historians.

Yep, this happens everywhere. Context is gradually lost to time and eventually questions just can't be resolved.

Something I read that really stuck with me was a comment on some correspondence between a Mesopotamian king and a high-ranking water engineer:

> His letters contain many poorly understood technical terms for weirs, sluices, dykes and the activities associated with them, so that accurate translation is impossible

We know, broadly, what he was talking about, we have a huge corpus showing the vocabulary in use, and we understand the technology he was using pretty well. But we don't know exactly what he was saying, and it's vanishingly unlikely we ever will.

(quote from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16179911-the-mystery-of-... )

  Caesar adsum jam forte
  Brutus aderat
  Caesar sic in omnibus
  Brutus sic in at

> the end Cicero was silenced by those who were taking power.

This is a spin on the fact that he was a participant in the murder of Caesar. Cicero was trying to take back power that had been lost to a very popular Leader by participating in the murder of said leader.[0] The killers and conspirators involved were all hunted down and killed.

[0] - for those not up on Roman institutions, Dictator had a different role than we would ascribe today, albeit with many similarities.

The historical consensus seems to be that Cicero, while probably amenable to the plot, was a witness only, and not involved with the conspirators until after the deed was done.

Cicero wasn't murdered for any connection with the assassination of Caesar. He was murdered because Marc Anthony personally hated him for having denounced Anthony in a series of speeches known as the Philippics. When Octavian and Anthony were setting up the Second Triumvirate, Cicero's life was one of Anthony's demands.

He openly praised at least the main conspirator, Cassius, in his letters: http://attalus.org/translate/cassius.html#12.1

He loved the Roman Republic and it's senatorial grandeur, and hated Caesar for his illegal arrogation of power.

Before we laud him as a saint, wasn't Cicero the guy who felt the plebian/patrician divide was just and right? My (poor) memory is that he was across the aisle from Caesar under the auspices of "no commoners" as well as "no dictators".

No one is lauding him as a saint. It's an objection to likening the murder of Cicero to censorship by the state.

Cicero was killed because Antony had a personal vendetta against Cicero. Antony's political partner, Octavian, had a good relationship with Cicero and even looked on him as a father figure. Giving him up to Antony was a compromise he was very unhappy to make (but Antony was not flexible on this demand).

Cicero, if anything, is an example of how one can be loud and open with their thoughts and actually get along well with political leaders (and he got on well with Caesar as well, supposedly). His murder is primarily indicative of Antony's pride.

Cicero was a conservative in some ways. But I don't think he was particularly prejudiced or classist, for the time. Remember that he was technically a plebeian himself, although obviously a privileged and successful one.

Cicero's father was of the equestrian order, not patrician but definitely not plebeian. Think upper middle class from the midwest who goes to the right schools and ends up in DC.

Calling equestrians the upper middle class is not accurate. They were firmly upper class, just the lower portion of the upper class. If the senatorial class was roughly the billionaires, then the equites were the ten and hundred millionaires. Perhaps not as rich as the very top of the upper class, but still a league above the upper middle class.

Technically it was illegal for senators to engage in any commercial activity besides agriculture so they still had to really on the equites who directly exploited the natives in the provinces to give them their cut (tax collection was privatised in the republican period). So it's not unlikely that there were individual equites who were more wealthy than many Senators.

That's fair, since senatores was a political class, not an economic class, and equites was technically the top economic class. I tried to simplify things to make the analogy possible, and I think the spirit of it is instructive even if the details could be more complicated.

The important point is that no one should mistake the equestrians for anything close to even the top end of the middle class.

Yes, calling Equestrians the upper middle class is not accurate. Our classes don't accurately map on to Roman classes; it was just a flip remark. Nouveau riche doesn't work either.

However, the Senatorial class was not an economic distinction either but rather an aristocracy. Even in the Late Republic these were old families who had had Senators and Consuls in their heredity. There were fewer of these clans, 14 at the time of Caesar (of the Julii clan). Cicero by comparison was of Equestrian rank and a New Man, novus homo, in the Roman political world.

Equestrians weren't knights anymore, expected to field a horse, .... The Roman legions had been professionalized by then. There were property and suitability requirements enforced by the Censors.

Pompey, Crassus, Cicero, Gaius Marius, Mark Anthony even Octavian (before being adopted by Ceasar) were technically all Plebeian. By mid/late Republic the Plebeian/Patrician distinction had lost almost all meaning, as most Patrician families had died out or were surpassed in wealth and political influence by more successful Plebeian families.

The Equites were purely a social/wealth based class, any Roman citizen could become one if he we satisfied the wealth requirements.

I like how just correcting a falsehood is in your eyes "lauding him as a saint". There are no saints in real life.

Cicero wasn't involved in the murder of Caesar. He was more republican than aristocrat and thus not trusted by the Liberatores. Also he was very anti-Anthony: The Philippics, 14 speeches in 44 and 43 given after the death of Caesar.

Another triumvirate was formed after the death of Caesar with Anthony, Octavian and Lepidus. The proscriptions were from that triumvirate and not just Anthony. Cicero favored Octavian but as future emperor, Octavian favored Octavian. Antony certainly hated Cicero and Octavian didn't find Cicero all that useful and well, that was that.

But if June 4 for you is only about Victoria Park, then you're starting to enter religion.

What matters is we've discussed it all week in every newspaper, certainly a lot more than we would have done before. The crowds were around the park too, the police had to understand why this was necessary, etc. There s not one hong kong resident last Friday who didn't know what had happened on June 4, so maybe let the covid restrictions play out, and make sure we dont start talking more abt HK problems than tiananmen ?

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