05-17-2007, 10:57 PM
Thank you Kate; yes, now with the Web making so many things so much more efficient than just ten years ago, there's no excuse for getting expensive airfares, or not learning well.
That latest bit of ps-Sallust, by the way, after the usual banalities of such ancient admonitions and flatteries, in midstream suddenly becomes an astonishing little piece. The advice the writer gives for the salvation of the res publica is: get rid of bankers and the means for the middle class to live on credit, which can only damage everybody; and get rid of welfare -- after all those people are freeloaders, and again, it does no good to the fabric of society -- using some of the money instead to treat veterans better because they deserve it. And though it's almost surely not Sallust, conversely, it was clearly written centuries before the fall of Rome: and explains clearly how it will pass. IÂ can't remember reading in so brief a compass of a single ancient Roman work so many original ideas, including an awareness of the transience of their own world and its eventual fall (at least not from a rational standpoint, nothing like the 12Â centuries of Etruscan superstition).
Bill
That latest bit of ps-Sallust, by the way, after the usual banalities of such ancient admonitions and flatteries, in midstream suddenly becomes an astonishing little piece. The advice the writer gives for the salvation of the res publica is: get rid of bankers and the means for the middle class to live on credit, which can only damage everybody; and get rid of welfare -- after all those people are freeloaders, and again, it does no good to the fabric of society -- using some of the money instead to treat veterans better because they deserve it. And though it's almost surely not Sallust, conversely, it was clearly written centuries before the fall of Rome: and explains clearly how it will pass. IÂ can't remember reading in so brief a compass of a single ancient Roman work so many original ideas, including an awareness of the transience of their own world and its eventual fall (at least not from a rational standpoint, nothing like the 12Â centuries of Etruscan superstition).
Bill
