Lend me your ears... and the head attached

Cicero Denounces Catiline, fresco by Cesare Maccari, 1882–88 (Wikipedia)

Who is Cicero? The short answer is he’s like this famous orator who um well he was a Roman and he talked real good. A slightly longer answer is a man on the wrong end of whose tongue or pen you would not want to be, because his oratory was famously polemical. Hence on September 2nd we should remember, and to some extent celebrate, the first of the “Philippics” that made him famous and dead.

Huh? Dead. Yup. I’ll get to that. But first the Philippics.

It’s a term for a singularly harsh political denunciation. Or at least it used to be. And as you may notice, I’m sidling up to a commentary of the O Tempora O Mores kind about declining cultural standards in which we no longer remember such things and as a result our politics is at least as abusive but far less eloquent. Where’s any sort of Cicero today? Or Demosthenes?

I bring him in because the term “Philippic” originated with his denunciations of Philip of Macedon. Which didn’t work. Thanks in part to Demosthenes, Athens and Thebes did revolt against the dominance of Macedon but got walloped at Chaeronea in 338 BC and for all practical purposes lost its independence permanently.

Somebody assassinated Philip two years later for reasons that are unclear but apparently weren’t related to Athens. Demosthenes again persuaded the Athenians to revolt and again it failed, and with Macedonian agents hot on his heels Demosthenes committed suicide. History remembers him more favourably and rightly so. But his tongue was a double-edged weapon.

Still, I’m meant to be killing Cicero, right? So here we go.

He unleashed his tongue on Mark Antony, the guy who came to bury Caesar not praise him in Shakespeare. Cicero actually objected to the fact that Mark Antony hadn’t helped murder Caesar. And he gave him what for in classic style, even classical, including deliberately adopting Demosthenes’ own Philippics as a model.

He went on and on, 14 of these things in less than two years. And it rather backfired, I have to admit. For one thing, Mark Antony had him killed and his head and hands displayed in the forum to frighten opponents of Antony and his new buddies Octavian and Lepidus. For another, Cicero got so carried away over Mark Antony that he overlooked the danger of Octavian, even endorsing his raising of a private army.

In the end Mark Antony also overlooked the danger of Octavian, who defeated Antony and drove him to suicide, and shuffled Lepidus off into obscurity in which he at least lived out his days in humiliating peace.

As for Cicero, well, he sure gave a great speech. The sort we should imitate. Starting by being aware of it, and even studying it in schools. While also giving a little attention to the need to be a little more prudent about practical matters.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - September 2, 2016

“Unhurt people are not much good in the world.”

Irish literary critic Enid Starkie, quoted in “Social Studies” in the Globe and Mail Dec. 11, 2007 (parenthetically, I would not have thought there were enough of them for it to matter)

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A short Sedan ride

Napoleon surrenders his sword (Wikipedia)

September 1 was a bad day for France back in 1870. They lost the crucial battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, forcing the surrender of their army and their Emperor Napoleon III the next day. Now for my money they were well rid of the latter. But their defeat, despite the efforts of the promptly proclaimed Third Republic to fight on, had to hurt. And in the end, it turned out to be a very bad day for the rest of the world too.

It’s not that they had much of a dog in this fight. And the establishment, bloody course and violent suppression of the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the war was mostly bad for France while offering an object lesson about political radicalism to those willing to learn it. But the Franco-Prussian War had several pernicious consequences.

First, it allowed Bismarck and company to complete the unification of Germany and establishment of the German Empire whose subsequent aggressive course was the main cause of the disastrous First World War, which in turn set in motion the events leading to Hitler’s aggression and the Second World War.

Second, and related, the fact that the Franco-Prussian War was such a quick affair led politicians and the public alike, in Germany, France, Britain and throughout Europe, to overlook the possibility that the next major war would be protracted. It’s easy in retrospect to say that developments in weaponry and logistics in the 19th century, the implications of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions for wars between advanced countries, would almost certainly lead to the long, hideous stalemate of World War I, with its muddy, bloody trenches and millions killed.

In fact it could have turned out otherwise (for more on this see my documentary The Great War Remembered and stay tuned for my book of the same name). But it was a possibility given too little weight in the run-up to 1914; far too few people pondered the risk that the long, sanguinary American Civil War was a harbinger of worse to come. If Sedan had gone the other way, if the Franco-Prussian War had lasted several years, even if the French had ultimately succumbed, it might have opened men’s eyes a little wider to the really nightmarish possibilities of allowing an assassination to escalate into a general war in the summer of 1914.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - September 1, 2016

“The first edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy published in 1694, defined history as the ‘narration of actions and of matters worth remembering.’ The eighth edition, in 1935, said much the same: ‘the account of acts, of events, of matters worth remembering.’”

John Lukacs At the End of an Age p. 51n [oddly, in this otherwise excellent book, Lukacs indignantly rejects this definition – but for once I’m with the French Academy on this one].

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What changed the course of history?

If assassination really never has changed the history of the world, as Disraeli claimed, it’s not for want of trying. And with World War I much on my mind as I finish up a book on it, I’m thinking the assassination of Franz Ferdinand certainly triggered events that even if they were more or less waiting to happen do seem to have been unleashed by his assassination even though he wasn’t likely to do anything worthwhile had he lived. But I also think it’s something of a historical finger in the eye of various assassins to reflect on the ways in which disease has done what they could not.

Take Henry V. Please. I mean, he is dead. Take him and bury him. He died on August 31, 1422 while campaigning in France, of… dysentery. And really, why not? Lots of people did. Kings don’t have some special dispensation to die only of elevated-sounding or elegant maladies. So yes, the hero of Shakespeare’s play (or plays if you count the two where he’s a wild child as well as the one where he grows up) with that Agincourt speech ended up not victorious and reigning happily ever after nor even dying heroically in battle but instead… how shall I put this tactfully?... kind of pooped his guts out.

Ugh. But that’s more or less what it amounts to.

OK. So he’s dead. And dead young, just 36, after just 9 years on the throne, before he could fulfil his promise as a king if any.

Much as I love Shakespeare, his judgement in such matters or at least his publications are not to be relied on. He was a propagandist for the Tudors who had taken the throne by killing off the last reigning Yorkist king Richard III and helping dispose of any other potential claimants not wiped out in the Wars of the Roses between Yorks and Lancasters. And thus he, or his patrons who might have caused him to perish if he’d gotten out of line, had a vested interest in making the Lancasters look good to make the Yorks look bad. (His negative portrayal of Richard II, predecessor to the Lancasters, is by contrast entirely justified, even insufficiently harsh.) But were they?

I don’t mean were the Yorks bad. I’ve addressed that elsewhere and the answer seems pretty clearly to be no, not even Richard III whose reputation was blackened by Shakespeare on his way to the parking lot under which he was recently found buried. I mean were the Lancasters good?

There were only three of them so it should be easy to answer. And crucially, Henry VI was not. I’ve heard his character praised. But he was a weak king and mentally unstable and his inability to rule contributed to the Yorkist rise to power, or lunge for it by some accounts. And he was also handicapped by coming to the throne very young because his father died early. That being, of course, Henry V. All the Lancasters were Henrys.

I can’t really tell if Henry IV was a good king. Shakespeare portrays him as such, with Henry V growing into a worthy heir throughout the cycle of plays. But his reign was marked by endless troubles, revolts and plots. And if he showed skill and even judgement in surviving them, he didn’t have much chance to establish a domestic record before dying of some unidentified disease or diseases that caused disfigurement, seizures and his early demise at age 45 after just 13 years on the throne.

As I’ve said before, if he’d just admitted he wasn’t king of France and gone home, he would have done his kingdom considerable good. And himself, as it turns out, because war is always a risky business and poor sanitation in those days sure didn’t make it safer.

Thus Henry VI took over, in name at least, at age nine. Months not years. So he was a pawn, puppet and object of a tug of war for the first 15 years of his reign, and never developed a strong character.

Had his own father lived even to the same age that his father had, Henry VI would at least have been nine years old when he took over, and presumably had a more stable childhood with at least some guidance and certainty from his father. Had Henry V lived to be, say, 60, then Henry VI would have come to the throne in 1446 in his mid-30s.

Of course he might still have been an awful king, harsh and greedy, weak and treacherous or just lazy. He might have been an OK king. He might even have been a good one. And if he had been good, or really bad, the Wars of the Roses would probably have been avoided altogether or, alternatively, been less destructive because the Yorkist cause would have been more obviously just and commanded greater support.

Either way, the end result, with the Tudor usurpation and subsequent brutally cynical break with Rome, would have been highly unlikely. We cannot know what would have happened, naturally. Possibly something even weirder or more outrageous. Maybe something worse for the future rise of England and the Anglosphere with its unique liberty under law.

My crystal ball tends to cloud over in such cases. But before doing so, it says to me that Henry V’s ignominious death did help destabilize England with far-reaching consequences in ways that your average assassin can only envy. And envying a bacterium, virus, worm or amoeba (dysentery is a syndrome not a disease and can have various causes) is exceptionally ignominious too.

It happened todayJohn Robson