Hey, I Just Happened to Be There! It Was Crassus!
Here's the stupid statement of the decade:
This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists. My Name is Rocco Landesman and I'm an Asshole. (Style borrowed from a friend.)
A disgusting display of depravity, vacuity, and excess.
And not very flattering, as Scott Johnson points out. In fact, history does not regard Caesar as a writer's writer. He wrote like a general -- a bureaucrat, even.
What many do not realize is that Caesar was the major proponent of a Purist style of writing Latin, which was called the Attic or "clean style", as against the flowery and convoluted oratorical style which Cicero loved. Cicero's remark on Caesar's writing in the Commentarii is telling: Nudi sunt, recti et venusti "Spare, direct and engaging". After Caesar nobody wrote clean Latin again, although Fronto tried a hand at it centuries later in vain. But the feeling for simplicity was gone, just as the feeling for the ways of the old Republic was gone.
For anyone who can read Latin with some fluency, Caesar is fine reading, quick and to the point, with an eye into not only the Roman military, but into the genuine Roman way of thinking. Every other author in Latin wrote for a specific audience in the upper classes, nothing for the common reader. Caesar wrote for the wide range of a Roman reading public, which is why later Roman critics praised and valued him so greatly.
If you wanted to base or tone your own writing style on any ancient models, whom would you choose in this new Millennium? It wouldn't be the Cicero who furbished out our Congressional debatery of the mid l9th century, with the last traces extant in Southern filibustering. It might be Tacitus if you wanted to write hard and bitter, but that would chafe soon enough I guess. We have had our Petronius followers to the point of surfeit, maybe enough of that by now. Whom would it be? A NOTE ON CAESAR AS STYLIST
Here we have a president, and an NEA chairman, both pampered, pretentious twits, showing off like school boys to an adoring crowd. Caesar? Why should Obama write like Caesar? It makes one laugh, of course, but the point is plain: Obama is a Conqueror! Not a great thinker, moralist, or even an interesting person, but a conqueror!
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions . . . . Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.' Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man. Marcus "Tully" Cicero, Our Patron Saint
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