Over the recent Christmas holidays, I have had the distinct pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with the novels of English writer Robert Harris** (1957-present). Some time ago I read Pompeii (2003) and Imperium*** (2006), both historical novels set in the tumultuous times of the Roman Republic. It was a bare knuckles harshly practical world, with slaves and freedmen, plebeians, aristocrats, plutocrats, and tyrants to be. A time of Bread and Circuses. I enjoyed then both for their intricate plot lines and the accuracy of historical detail they provided.
Now I have a added a longer timeline to his written corpus in my experience, in reverse chronological order. I started with his newest work, Conclave (2016) (about the election of a Pope), then An Officer and a Spy (2013) (a recreation of the Dreyfus military spy scandal conspiracy from late 19th century France), followed by The Fear Index (2012) (a story of artificial intelligence and autonomous stock manipulation in Switzerland orchestrated by the programming of a mad American genius married to supercomputers), and most recently the third of Harris’ Roman historical novels, and the second volume in his Cicero Trilogy, Conspirata (2009) (originally titled Lustrum when published in England).
This novel recounts the saga of Cicero, a lawyer by training, and a New Man, the first non-patrician to be elected Consul (senior among the two chosen by virtue of a higher vote total) of the Roman Republic in 63 A.D., arguably the most powerful political man in the world at that time, and the four years that followed his one-year term of office.
All the usual historical Roman suspects are also present: Pompey, Caesar, Servius, Catulus, Catilina, Cato, Crassus, Atticus, Hortensius, Hybrida, Aurelia, Clodia, Servilia and Terentia, familiar from ancient school history and Latin lessons, or after careful study of the series Rome on HBO.
Conspirata was written well before Trump’s political aspirations were anything but wispy pipe dreams to anyone but himself. In 2009 his swollen dreams could only have been poorly organized, even to Trump’s inner self.
Harris was not writing prophetically, but as an investigator looking for durable lessons from the ashes of our historical past. Yet, his words and description strike home in this novel in a penetrating manner for our current American political turmoil.
I can heartily commend all of Harris’ fiction to readers. His books are easily found at the usual outlets, including Amazon on the web. The interested explorer may want to read them in historical order rather than publication date sequence.
His novels are, in order: Fatherland (1992), Enigma (1995), Archangel (1998), Pompeii (2003), Imperium (2006) (Cicero Trilogy I), The Ghost (2007), Lustrum (2009) (Cicero Trilogy II, titled Conspirata in US), The Fear Index (2011), An Officer and a Spy (2013), Dictator (2015) (Cicero Trilogy III), and Conclave (2016).
As we prepare for the Triumph of Trump at Friday’s Presidential Inauguration Day, I offer here a score of pointed examples from Harris’ 2009 novel, Conspirata to elevate and inform your thinking, and perhaps to succor your misgivings.
This too shall pass.
Selected Brief Quotes from Robert Harris’ Conspirata (2009)
The book takes place in ancient Rome starting in the year 63 B.C., the year of Cicero’s rule as Consul of the Republic, one of two men elected to the most post powerful civilian public office that year by those with the franchise to vote.
A multi-volume biography of Cicero was written by his slave and personal secretary Tiro, which survived until the collapse of the Roman Empire. Tiro was the first to record a verbatim shorthand record of debates in the Roman Senate, at Cicero’s direction. So, Tiro also served as a sort of ancient 2000-year old C-SPAN precursor.
Tiro invented a system of shorthand note taking, known as notae Tironianae,**** to accurately set down contemporaneous speech. His system was widely known and used for more than 1,000 years throughout Europe. Remnants are still with us today in the form of familiar linguistic items such as the ampersand (&), and the common abbreviations: etc.,. e.g., and i.e..
And now to the recorded words of Conspirata (or Lustrum, if you prefer):
#1. (from page 14): Like many rich old man they tended to regard the slightest personal inconvenience as proof of the end of the world.
#2. (from page 19): If A had been a man she would certainly have achieved the rank yourself for she was shrewder and braver than any of the brothers.
#3. (from page 20): “I don’t reproach my son for his liaisons—men will be men—but some of these modern women are shameless beyond belief.”
#4. (from page 23): “It depends on what your bill contains. All we have so far election slogans, ‘Land for the landless’, ‘Food for the hungry’. I’ll need a few more details than that.“
#5. (from page 30): The Gods alone know what he wants—entire planet probably
#6. (from page 37): It drew gasps and a round of applause all to itself, as well it might, for it was carved from Numidian ivory, and had cost over 100,000 (“Macedonia will pay!”).
#7. (from page 45): “You have called yourself the people’s consul,” he sneered at C, when at long last his turn came to speak. “Well, we shall see what the people have to say about that!”
#8. (from page 46): “Besides nothing’s signed and sealed—I can always change my mind. And meanwhile by this noble gesture I show the people I’m a man of principle who puts the welfare of the public ahead of his own personal gain.”
#9. (from page 58): He affected to copy the great general in all things—his girth, his swaggering gate, even his hair, which he wore swept back in a Pompeian wave.
#10. (from page 61): He used to say that the bigger a crowd the more stupid it is, and that a useful trick with an immense multitude is always to call on the supernatural.
#11. (from page 66): He had tried to calm the crowd and assure them it was a trick, but people in a mess aren’t stupid and easily frightened as a school of fish or herd of beasts.
#12. (from page 67): “Unfortunately, politics is neither as clean as a wrestling match, nor played according to fixed rules.”
#13. (from page 67): The really successful politician detaches his private self from the insults and reverses of public life, so that it is almost as if they happen to someone else.
#14. (from page 69): “I don’t believe for an instant he would be so foolish as to stand, and if he did he would be crushed. The people are not entirely mad. This is a contest to be head of the state religion. It demands the utmost moral rectitude. Can you imagine him responsible for the vestal virgins. He has to live among them. It would be like entrusting your hencoop to a fox!”
#15. (from page 70): All the sensible citizens were appalled at the notion, or made ribald jokes and laughed out loud. Still, there was something about it—something breathtaking about the sheer cheek of it.
#16. (from page 70): “Each time he loses, he simply doubles his stake and rolls the dice again.”
#17. (from page 71): It could scarcely have been closer. The Victor flung back his head and raised his arms to the heavens. He looked almost demented with delight—as well he might. That crazy outlay of 20 million was actually the greatest bargain in history: it would buy him the world.
#18. (from page 77): “But if you want to run this Republic, you will need more books in your library then a single volume.”
#19. (from page 81): [He] had no interest in philosophy or literature, no knowledge of history: not much learning of any sort, in fact. However, unburdened by education or natural delicacy, [he] did possess a rare gift for seeing straight through the heart of a thing, be it a problem or a person, and saying exactly what [he] thought.
#20. (from page 89): They are made for one another. “She wants to be a [rich man’s] wife and he likes to fuck [rich men’s] wives, so what union could be more perfect?
#21. (from page 93): Many men would have accepted this. but not him. He had everything in the world he wanted except the one thing he most desired. So he flatly refused to [stop].
#22. (from page 94): “He will have to except that others are allowed to triumph in this Republic as well as he.”
#23. (from page 97): It sickened me. Never before had the pointlessness of piling up treasure for its own sake been more apparent to me.
I’m quite certain that Robert Harris, though he is a fine contemporary English novelist, does not consider himself an augur, with the divine power to read entrails and foretell the future, as the ancients did before every major political decision.
Yet reading his roman novels from 2,800 years ago, it is as if you are in a fluid time machine and can travel in an instant from a dusty street in the middle of a stinking Roman summer wearing a toga and sandals and then find yourself in America at breakfast reading the New York Times or Washington Post in print, if you are an old fogey, or more likely in 2917 on your branded smartphone (Apple for the stylish and cognoscenti) or iPad tablet device. The ideas expressed are immediately relevant and comprehensible.
Nothing strange is really new. Politics is a repeating spiral arc with a low angle of tilt.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
(In honor of Rome’s provinces of Nearer and Further Gaul. In 63 B.C. Germanium dies not play a central role in these novels).
Incipient tyranny is ever so. Only the technology and social media components are swapped out in modern times.
*Definition of Diverticulum from Wikipedia:
A diverticulum (plural: diverticula) is the medical or biological term for an outpouching of a hollow (or a fluid-filled) structure in the body. Depending upon which layers of the structure are involved, they are described as being either true or false.
In medicine, the term usually implies the structure is not normally present. However, in the embryonic stage, some normal structures begin development as a diverticulum arising from another structure.
A small play on words, since a diverticulum can refer to a blind pouch leading nowhere, in biological tissue or in written stories about political movements.
**English novelist, Robert Harris, from the Wikipedia entry:
Robert Dennis Harris (born 7 March 1957) is an English novelist. He is a former journalist and BBC television reporter. Although he began his career in non-fiction, his fame rests upon his works of historical fiction. Beginning with the best-seller Fatherland, Harris focused on events surrounding the Second World War, followed by works set in ancient Rome. His most recent works centre on contemporary history.
Born in Nottingham, Harris spent his childhood in a small rented house on a Nottingham council estate. His ambition to become a writer arose at an early age, from visits to the local printing plant where his father worked. Harris went to Belvoir High School in Bottesford, and then King Edward VII School, Melton Mowbray, where a hall was named after him. There he wrote plays and edited the school magazine. Harris read English literature at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Union and editor of the student newspaper Varsity.
After leaving Cambridge, Harris joined the BBC and worked on news and current affairs programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. In 1987, at the age of thirty, he became political editor of The Observer. He later wrote regular columns for the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph.
Harris’s first book appeared in 1982. A Higher Form of Killing, a study of chemical and biological warfare, was written with fellow BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman. Other non-fiction works followed: Gotcha, the Media, the Government and the Falklands Crisis (1983), The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984), Selling Hitler (1986), an investigation of the Hitler Diaries scandal, and Good and Faithful Servant (1990), a study of Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary.
Fatherland 1992
Harris’s million-selling alternative-history first novel Fatherland has as its setting a world where Germany has won the Second World War. Publication enabled Harris to become a full-time novelist. HBO made a film based on the novel in 1994. Harris stated that the proceeds from the book enabled him to buy a house in the country, where he still lives.
Enigma 1995
His second novel Enigma portrayed the breaking of the German Enigma code during the Second World War at Bletchley Park. It too became a film, with Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet starring and with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.
Archangel 1998
Archangel was another international best seller. It follows a British historian in contemporary Russia as he hunts for a secret notebook, believed to be Stalin’s diary. In 2005 the BBC made it into a mini-series starring Daniel Craig.
Pompeii 2003
In 2003 Harris turned his attention to ancient Rome with his acclaimed Pompeii. The novel is about a Roman aqueduct engineer, working near the city of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. As the aqueducts begin to malfunction, he investigates and realises the volcano is shifting the ground and damaging the system and is near eruption. Meanwhile, he falls in love with the young daughter of a powerful local businessman who was illicitly dealing with his predecessor to divert municipal water for his own uses, and will do anything to keep that deal going.
Imperium 2006
He followed this in 2006 with Imperium, the first novel in a trilogy centered on the life of the great Roman orator Cicero.
The Ghost 2007
Harris was an early and enthusiastic backer of British Prime Minister Tony Blair (a personal acquaintance) and a donor to New Labour, but the war in Iraq blunted his enthusiasm. “We had our ups and downs, but we didn’t really fall out until the invasion of Iraq, which made no sense to me,” Harris has said.
In 2007, after Blair resigned, Harris dropped his other work to write The Ghost. The title refers both to a professional ghostwriter, whose lengthy memorandum forms the novel, and to his immediate predecessor who, as the action opens, has just drowned in gruesome and mysterious circumstances.
The dead man has been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister called Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair. The fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband. Harris told The Guardian before publication: “The day this appears a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him.”
Harris said in a US National Public Radio interview that politicians like Lang and Blair, particularly when they have been in office for a long time, become divorced from everyday reality, read little and end up with a pretty limited overall outlook. When it comes to writing their memoirs, they therefore tend to have all the more need of a ghostwriter.
Harris hinted at a third, far less obvious, allusion hidden in the novel’s title, and, more significantly, at a possible motive for having written the book in the first place. Blair, he said, had himself been ghostwriter, in effect, to President Bush when giving public reasons for invading Iraq: he had argued the case better than had the President himself.
The New York Observer, headlining its otherwise hostile review The Blair Snitch Project, commented that the book’s “shock-horror revelation” was “so shocking it simply can’t be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain.”
Lustrum 2009
The second novel in the Cicero trilogy, Lustrum, was published in October 2009. It was released in February 2010 in the US under the alternative title of Conspirata.
The Fear Index 2011
His novel The Fear Index, focusing on the 2010 Flash Crash, was published by Hutchinson in September 2011. It follows an American expat hedge fund operator living in Geneva who activates a new system of computer algorithms that he names VIXAL-4, which is designed to operate faster than human beings, but which begins to become uncontrollable by its human operators.
An Officer and a Spy 2013
An Officer and a Spy is the story of French officer Georges Picquart, a historical character, who is promoted in 1895 to run France’s Statistical Section, its secret intelligence division. He gradually realises that Alfred Dreyfus has been unjustly imprisoned for acts of espionage committed by another man who is still free and still spying for the Germans. He risks his career and his life to expose the truth.
Dictator 2015
Dictator is the long-promised conclusion to Harris’s Cicero trilogy. It was published by Hutchinson on 8 October 2015.
Conclave 2016
His next novel, Conclave, was published on September 22, 2016. Harris announced on Twitter that the novel is “set over 72 hours in the Vatican” and follows “the election of a fictional Pope.”
Non-fiction
A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (with Jeremy Paxman). London: Chatto & Windus, March 1982 ISBN 978-0-7011-2585-1
Gotcha! The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis. London: Faber and Faber, January 1983 ISBN 978-0-571-13052-8
The Making of Neil Kinnock. London: Faber and Faber, 17 September 1984 ISBN 978-0-571-13267-6
Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries. London: Faber and Faber, 17 February 1986 ISBN 978-0-571-13557-8
Good and Faithful Servant: The Unauthorized Biography of Bernard Ingham. London: Faber and Faber, December 1990 ISBN 978-0-571-16108-9
Robert Harris’ novel Imperium (2006) on Amazon.com
***From America’s dictionary, the Merriam-Webster, not the first definition, but the second is intended here:
- : supreme power or absolute dominion
- : the right to command or to employ the force of the state
A little about Merriam-Webster, America’s dictionary reference work.
Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, is an American company that publishes reference books, especially dictionaries.
In 1831, George and Charles Merriam founded the company as G & C Merriam Co. in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1843, after Noah Webster died, the company bought the rights to An American Dictionary of the English Language from Webster’s estate. All Merriam-Webster dictionaries trace their lineage to this source.
In 1964, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., acquired Merriam-Webster, Inc., as a subsidiary. The company adopted its current name in 1982.
In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. In 1807 Webster started two decades of intensive work to expand his publication into a fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language. To help him trace the etymology of words, Webster learned 26 languages. Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country used somewhat different vocabularies and spelled, pronounced, and used words differently.
Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, and at the University of Cambridge. His 1820s book contained 70,000 words, of which about 12,000 had never appeared in a dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing colour with color, waggon with wagon, and centre with center. He also added American words, including skunk and squash, that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of 70 in 1828, Webster published his dictionary; it sold poorly, with only 2,500 copies putting him in debt. However, in 1840, he published the second edition in two volumes with much greater success.
From the Wikipedia entry on Noah Webster (no relation to 19th century prominent American politician and statesman Daniel Webster):
Noah Webster, Jr. (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author. He has been called the “Father of American Scholarship and Education”. His blue-backed speller books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read, secularizing their education. According to Ellis (1979), he gave Americans “a secular catechism to the nation-state.”
Webster’s name has become synonymous with “dictionary” in the United States, especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.
Webster was born in the Western Division of Hartford (which became West Hartford, Connecticut) to an established family. His father Noah Sr. (1722–1813) was a descendant of Connecticut Governor John Webster; his mother Mercy (Steele) Webster (1727–1794) was a descendant of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. His father was primarily a farmer, though he was also deacon of the local Congregational church, captain of the town’s militia, and a founder of a local book society (a precursor to the public library). After American independence, he was appointed a justice of the peace.
Webster’s father never attended college, but he was intellectually curious and prized education. Webster’s mother spent long hours teaching her children spelling, mathematics, and music. At age six, Webster began attending a dilapidated one-room primary school built by West Hartford’s Ecclesiastical Society. Years later, he described the teachers as the “dregs of humanity” and complained that the instruction was mainly in religion. Webster’s experiences there motivated him to improve the educational experience of future generations.
At age fourteen, his church pastor began tutoring him in Latin and Greek to prepare him for entering Yale College. Webster enrolled at Yale just before his 16th birthday, studying during his senior year with Ezra Stiles, Yale’s president. His four years at Yale overlapped the American Revolutionary War and, because of food shortages and threatened British invasions, many of his classes had to be held in other towns. Webster served in the Connecticut Militia. His father had mortgaged the farm to send Webster to Yale, but he was now on his own and had nothing more to do with his family.
Webster lacked career plans after graduating from Yale in 1778, later writing that a liberal arts education “disqualifies a man for business”. He taught school briefly in Glastonbury, but the working conditions were harsh and the pay low. He quit to study law. While studying law under future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, Webster also taught full-time in Hartford—which was grueling, and ultimately impossible to continue. He quit his legal studies for a year and lapsed into a depression; he then found another practicing attorney to tutor him, and completed his studies and passed the bar examination in 1781. As the Revolutionary War was still going on, he could not find work as a lawyer. He received a master’s degree from Yale by giving an oral dissertation to the Yale graduating class. Later that year, he opened a small private school in western Connecticut that was a success. Nevertheless, he soon closed it and left town, probably because of a failed romance. Turning to literary work as a way to overcome his losses and channel his ambitions, he began writing a series of well-received articles for a prominent New England newspaper justifying and praising the American Revolution and arguing that the separation from Britain was permanent. He then founded a private school catering to wealthy parents in Goshen, New York and, by 1785, he had written his speller, a grammar book and a reader for elementary schools. Proceeds from continuing sales of the popular blue-backed speller enabled Webster to spend many years working on his famous dictionary.
Webster was by nature a revolutionary, seeking American independence from the cultural thralldom to Britain. To replace it, he sought to create a utopian America, cleansed of luxury and ostentation and the champion of freedom. By 1781, Webster had an expansive view of the new nation. American nationalism was superior to Europe because American values were superior, he claimed.
A plea from Webster, on behalf of America:
America sees the absurdities She laughs at their folly and shuns their errors: She founds her empire upon the idea of universal toleration: She admits all religions into her bosom; She secures the sacred rights of every individual; and (astonishing absurdity to Europeans!) she sees a thousand discordant opinions live in the strictest harmony … it will finally raise her to a pitch of greatness and lustre, before which the glory of ancient Greece and Rome shall dwindle to a point, and the splendor of modern Empires fade into obscurity.
When language mattered, and words had definite meanings, accepted by educated men (and women), and civility and decent behavior were honored and expected of out foremost citizens.
Tironian Notes, a system of shorthand from ancient Rome:
Tironian notes (Latin: notae Tironianae; or Tironian shorthand) is a system of shorthand invented by Tiro (94 BC – 4 AD), Marcus Tullius Cicero’s slave and personal secretary, and later his freedman. Tiro’s system consisted of about 4,000 abstract symbols[citation needed] that were extended in classical times to 5,000 signs. During the medieval period, Tiro’s notation system was taught in European monasteries and was extended to about 13,000 signs. The use of Tironian notes declined after 1100 but some use can still be seen in the 17th century.
Nicknamed “the father of stenography” by historians, Tiro (94 BC – 4 AD) was a slave and later a freedman who served as Marcus Tullius Cicero’s (106 – 43 BC) personal secretary. Like others in his position, Tiro was required to quickly and accurately transcribe dictations from Cicero, such as speeches, professional and personal correspondence, and business transactions, sometimes while walking through the Forum or during fast-paced and contentious government and legal proceedings.
The only systematized form of abbreviation in Latin at the time was used for legal notations (notae juris), but it was deliberately abstruse and only accessible to people with specialized knowledge. Otherwise shorthand was improvised for note-taking or writing personal communications and these notations would not have been understood outside of closed circles. Some abbreviations of Latin words and phrases were commonly recognized, such as those inscribed on monuments, but according to literature professor Anthony Di Renzo, “Up to this point, no true Latin shorthand existed”.
Scholars believe that after learning about the intricacies of the Greek shorthand system, Cicero recognized the need for a comprehensive, standard Latin notation system and delegated the task of creating one to his slave, Tiro, whose highly refined and accurate method became the first standardized and widely adopted system of Latin shorthand. Tironian notes (notae Tironianae), also known as Tironian shorthand, consisted of abbreviations with Latin letters, abstract symbols contrived by Tiro, and symbols borrowed from Greek shorthand. Tiro’s notes represented prepositions, truncated words, contractions, syllables, and inflections. According to Di Renzo, “Tiro then combined these mixed signs like notes in a score to record not just phrases, but, as Cicero marvels in a letter to Atticus, ‘whole sentences'”.
From the Wikipedia entry for scribe and author Marcus Tullius Tiro:
Marcus Tullius Tiro (died c. 4 BC) was first a slave, then a freedman of Cicero. He is frequently mentioned in Cicero’s letters. After Cicero’s death he published his former master’s collected works. He also wrote a considerable number of books himself, and possibly invented an early form of shorthand.
The date of Tiro’s birth is uncertain. Jerome dates it to 103 BC, which would make him only a little younger than Cicero. However, he was probably born considerably later than that: Cicero refers to him as an “excellent young man” (adulescentem probum) in 50 BC.
It is possible that Tiro was born a slave in Cicero’s household in Arpinum and came with his family to Rome. However we do not know for sure that he was a verna (homegrown slave). Cicero refers to Tiro frequently in his letters. His duties included taking dictation, deciphering Cicero’s handwriting and managing his table, as well as his garden and financial affairs. Cicero remarks on how useful he is to him in his work and studies.
He was freed in 53 BC and accompanied Cicero to Cilicia during Cicero’s governorship there, although he was frequently separated from his patron due to poor health, and many of Cicero’s letters refer with concern to his illnesses.
After Cicero’s death Tiro bought an estate near Puteoli, where Jerome says he died in 4 BC at the age of ninety-nine.
He is believed to have collected and published Cicero’s work after his death, and, it seems, was a prolific writer himself: several ancient writers refer to works of Tiro, now lost. Aulus Gellius says, ” [he] wrote several books on the usage and theory of the Latin language and on miscellaneous questions of various kinds,” and quotes him on the difference between Greek and Latin names for certain stars. Asconius Pedianus, in his commentaries on Cicero’s speeches, refers to a biography of Cicero by Tiro in at least four books, and Plutarch refers to him as a source for two incidents in Cicero’s life.
He is credited with inventing the shorthand system of Tironian notes, later used by Medieval monks, among others. There is no clear evidence that he did, although Plutarch credits Cicero’s clerks as the first Romans to record speeches in shorthand.
Tiro appears as a recurring character in Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa crime fiction series, where he occupies the role of sometime sidekick to Saylor’s investigator hero, Gordianus the Finder.
He is the first-person narrator in the three books of Robert Harris’s biographical-fiction trilogy of Cicero: Imperium (2006), Lustrum (2009, published in the US as Conspirata), and Dictator (2015).
Tiro appears in several books in the SPQR series by John Maddox Roberts.
Tiro (spelled Tyro) appears in the television programme Rome, played by Clive Riche in the episodes “Son of Hades”, “These Being the Words of Marcus Tullius Cicero”, “Heroes of the Republic”, and “Philippi”. This version of Tiro appears to be older than Cicero, and is only freed in Cicero’s will.
In the bizarre web of worldwide coincidences and parallels (or are they?), it turns out that scribe Tiro had his own branded red & white baseball cap (2011) before Trump got the idea for his MAGA version (2012). As with so much of Trump’s purloined agenda, Trump’s hat slogan was a straight rip-off from Reagan’s well known slogan from 1980, and further snitched from Tiro (63 B.C. channeled through the good folks of Tiro, Ohio via Rex Parker and then the New York Times Crossword Puzzle in August, 2011).
It’s just flat out mind boggling.
From Rex Parker’s August 5, 2011 blog, including Tiro’s baseball cap.
I don’t know exactly how the tiny village of Tiro, Ohio got mixed up in all this, but it is a real place. As of June 2016, the population is 266, considerably smaller than its assigned zip code of 44887.
Tiro, Ohio may be small in population numbers, but it has a big heart and plenty of balls. There is a 30-year old tradition at the Tiro Tavern of the annual Tiro Testicle Festival, drawing visitors from well beyond the local precincts to celebrate the occasion.
Tiro is a proud part of Crawford County, Ohio. It will not be a terrible surprise to learn that Tiro, Ohio voters joined hands with their Crawford County, Ohio friends and neighbors, and a majority of Ohioans altogether, to deliver Trump a resounding victory in November past (73.4%).
2016 Election: National Races
(Crawford County voters only)
President/Vice President
- Donald Trump/Michael Pence – 13265
- Hilary Clinton/Tim Kaine – 4518
- Gary Johnson/William Weld – 687
- Richard Duncan/Ricky Johnson – 118
- Jill Stein/Ajamu Baraka – 114
We can only conclude that their Tiro preferences, hat-wise, have shifted from the New York Times/Tiro the Scribe pride of display in 2011, to the new Tiro, Ohio normal slogan, Trump’s MAGA without the town identifier. A selfless sacrifice for the proud locals.
Whether Tiro’s citizens will be long-term Trump boosters remains to play out starting on Friday.
Origin and definition of the French epigram: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”:
An epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”). Literally “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”
I still remember hearng this phrase, I think in my second year of school French, during the 8th grade. We were taught how to say it properly, and then we had to learn it, spell it, and write it out correctly in French. All in the hands of the elegant and sophisticated teacher, Miss Sima Szaluta. It seemed very grownup to offer this worldly phrase in a conversation, tripping off an American tongue, in the full arrogance of youth, without really understanding then what it actually meant. Most children are excellent copyists. Some never learn to advance beyond those verbal skills.