Rise and Fall

O homines ad servitutem paratos!

Whilst technology
improves, our political
quality decays

as far too many
politicians are fawning,
incompetent knaves.

Those bootlickers are
wasting the chance to create
wise, just, golden days;

they’re worse than those whom
Tiberius described as
“prepared to be slaves”.*

UPDATE (6 May):

Nat lupus inter oves†

Of course, the voters
are not without blame for each
ill-considered choice

of one more lupine 
demagogue who bleats with a
feigned liberal voice;

slavish, ovine folk
who want to be led are the
easiest to fool.

I want no leader;
our representatives should
represent, not rule.

*  Tacitus, Annales, III, 65.
†  Ovid, Metamophoses, I. 304.

Enigmatic Invective

At Letters of Note, we can read a famous missive of invective from Algernon Swinburne, the English poet, to The New York Tribune, wherein he alludes to another notoriously rude reply:

If I am to believe that that name has been made the mark for such vile language as is now publicly attributed to men of note in the world of letters, I, who am not sufficiently an expert in the dialect of the cesspool and the dung-cart to retort in their own kind on these venerable gentlemen—I, whose ears and lips alike are unused to the amenities of a conversation embroidered with such fragments of flowery rhetoric as may be fished up by congenial fingers or lapped up by congenial tongues out of the sewerage of Sodom—can return no better or more apt reply than was addressed by the servant of Octavia to the satellites of Nero, and applied by Lord Denman, when counsel for Queen Caroline, to the sycophants of George IV.

Swinburne refers to the account of Nero’s bringing allegedly false charges of adultery (with a slave!) against Octavia, his sister* and wife, in the Annals of Tacitus:

Actae ob id de ancillis quaestiones, et vi tormentorum victis quibusdam, ut falsa adnuerent, plures perstitere sanctitatem dominae tueri; ex quibus una instanti Tigellino castiora esse muliebria Octaviae respondit quam os ejus.   (Ann. XIV. 60. 4)

[“On account of this, her slave-girls were examined under torture, and though some were forced by the intensity of agony into admitting falsehoods, most persisted in upholding the virtue of their mistress; to the menaces of Tigellinus one of them responded that Octavia’s female parts were purer than his mouth.”]

This reference to female naughty bits was quite rude for Romans—and, since Tacitus uses indirect speech, his readers would likely have assumed that the servant’s actual words were far ruder—; Romans (or, at least, surviving Roman writers) were so horrified that saying cum me—“with me”—might sound like cunne—the vocative of cunnus†, “vulva”—that they not only made cum follow the personal pronoun in the first person singular but also insisted that other personal pronouns postposited cum likewise (thus, for instance, tecum and vobiscum, for “with thee” and “with you”).  We may safely assume, I submit, that Swinburne wasn’t thinking that “female parts” would be an adequate English translation for muliebria.

*  Tacitus presents Octavia, though older than Nero, as younger and (though unlikely for a Julio-Claudian woman) as adorably sweet and politically naïve.
†  originally, A Latin Dictionary by Lewis and Short (Oxford, 1879) chastely and succinctly defined cunnus—not in English but, less usefully for those who might be using a Latin dictionary because they have a less than expert knowledge of Latin, in Latin—as pudenda muliebrum, which means “the shameful things of women”; later (in my 1933 impression, for example), the definition is a slightly less prudish “the female pudenda”.

Rara Temporum

Dicere licet*

Quite rare are the times

when you may think what you like
and speak as you think—

so Tacitus† said,

and I, for one, will attempt
to maintain that link

between thought, speech and
the right of free expression
lest all freedoms shrink.

*  written in response to a post at Watts Up With That—and posted thereto—on Lord Monckton’s being too extreme when he associated the vile, deceitful, meretricious, authoritarian, intolerant, anti-democratic, totalitarian Prof. Ross Garnaut with the Nazis.  I also posted an earlier comment:

If the loons who try to order every aspect of my life would have their way, I shan’t even be allowed to call Mussolini a Fascist or Hitler a Nazi.  When newspaper columnists intimate that I should be tattooed, or imprisoned or gassed because I heretically oppose their fraudulent, pseudo-scientific conjecture, then calling them merely wrong-headed is not quite strong enough.  Sometimes, totalitarians, authoritarians, and all sorts of would-be-aryans have to be called by the right name—and Godwin’s Law, surely, does not apply when discussing real, murderous, send-opponents-to-concentration-camps Fascists or Nazis.
I’d liefer that Lord Monckton not display the svastika [when quoting Prof. Garnaut] but I shall defend to a small degree of inconvenience his right to do so.

I posted similarly at Australian Climate Madness:

Godwin’s Law refers to the almost certain probability that any internet discussion will, at some point, feature an inappropriate comparison to Hitler, Nazis or fascism.  Godwin’s Law does not refer to a public speech wherein a person of undoubted authoritarian bent (such as the arrogant Ross Garnaut) is legitimately compared with other totalitarians.  Godwin’s Law does not refer to a comment (such as this) which mentions fascists in proper context.
I defend Lord Monckton’s right to make comparisons, even odious ones, and I defend his right to refer to the contemptible Garnaut with appropriate invective, even if it upset people.

†  P. Cornelius Tacitus, Historiae, I. 1:  Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet.  [Rare the felicity of the times when to think what you wish and to say what you think is permitted.]

UPDATE I (26 June):  see also “Die Grüne Bierhalle”, by Prof. Bunyip, whereto I commented:

People must give up
their normal expectations
of modern science;

the directing State,
as contract guarantor, shall
insure compliance.

UPDATE II (16 July):  see Merv Bendle’s “Eco-fascism & the Greens” at Quadrant Online.  See also the comments on my post, “Gore Redefines Reality”, at Impact of Climate Change.

UPDATE II (27 June, 2014):  see Sen. Dean Smith speaking in the Senate on freedom of speech: