Sublime

C'est ensuite l'empereur Antonin (1,16) que Marc Aurèle évoque en faisant en quelque sorte le portrait du prince idéal qu'il voudrait être lui-même. La philosophie n'est pas absente de cette description, puisque Antonin y est comparé à Socrate qui était capable de s'abstenir comme de jouir des choses selon les circonstances.

Gaius Julius Zoilos

An omniscient observer could certainly have predicted how the deliberation would end, but Cicero himself could not; he didn’t have the kind of thorough self-knowledge that would have led him to predict his own behaviour

The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not shaven’.

am led to believe that they will soon be left with no other alternative than democratic liberty, or the tyranny of the Caesars. *n

Equally intriguing a survival, and perhaps even more surprising, is part of a long poem that Cicero wrote to celebrate the achievements of his consulship; it is no longer complete, but it was famous, or infamous, enough that more than seventy lines of it are quoted by other ancient writers and by Cicero himself in later works. It includes one of th

As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”