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A Traitor By Any Other Name….

Jason Pappas on the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero.. [1] (106-43 B.C.).

With the possible exception of Jesus of Nazareth, the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is the central figure of Western civilization. Cicero’s republican political theory influenced both the American and French revolutionaries — and through them, contemporary democracies everywhere — far more than Greek democratic thought or practice. As a moral thinker, Cicero bequeathed the idea of natural law to both Christian theologians and secular philosophers. His influence on the ideal of liberal education is equally profound; he popularized, if he did not coin, the Latin words rendered by our terms “the humanities” and “liberal arts.” The list of the cardinal virtues — wisdom, justice, fortitude and temperance — comes from his De Officiis (On Duties), probably the most-read secular essay on ethics in Western history. …

Such a man will doubtless have somewhat to bring to the table today, in this global war on terror we now find ourselves engaged in… and so he does.

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

And to whom would this apply to, today? I would think [2] that much [3] to be [4] rather obvious [5].