The result of the leadership ballot is due on 17 December.
Since that date was announced I have had a feeling that it coincided with something else but couldn’t remember what. For a while I thought it might be someone’s birthday I had forgetten.
Then it came to me yesterday. 17 December is the ancient Roman festival of the Saturnalia.
Among the traditions of this festival are that masters and slaves exchange places for the day. Citizens would let their slaves borrow their clothes and would prepare dinner for them.
A perfect day to appoint our new master perhaps? But in the Liberal Democrats, who really is the master and the slave- the Leader or Conference? On the basis that the Leader is the master, what would Huhnius or Cleggius cook for their 50,000 grassroots servants?
But it’s not all good. Around 65 BC, the result of consular election was set aside because of corruption and the losing candidates plotted with others to kill leading senators and assume power by force, on the Saturnalia. Foiling this plot was one of Cicero’s major steps to greatness.
Antony Hook won his school’s Classics Prize in 1998 by bluffing that he properly knew this stuff.
UPDATE: It now appears that the result will by 18 December but throughout October Lib Dem News said it was the 17th.
December 3, 2007 at 11:18 am |
Hehe, so it is! 63BC I believe, Catiline and all that business. And in Cicero’s own mind it was the height of his greatness, the poor silly…
December 3, 2007 at 11:26 am |
Do not dis’ Cicero. He is an example to every novus homo, like myself.
December 3, 2007 at 11:51 am |
Bah. Wince at his classic object lesson in fishing:
“Cicero to Gn. Pompeius Magnus in Asia – Rome, c June 62
If you and the army are in good health, it is well; I too am in good health. Your official dispatch gave me, in common with everybody else, more pleasure than you could believe. For you indicate in it as confident a hope of peace as I have consistently held out to all others, because I relied exclusively upon you; though I must tell that your enemies of longstanding (your friends of recent date) are profoundly dismayed at your dispatch; they have been hurled down from the height of their expectations, and lie prostrate.
As regards your private letter to me, however, in spite of its containing but a slight expression of your regard for me, I assure you I was charmed with it; for generally speaking nothing cheers me up so much as the consciousness of my good services to others; and if, as sometimes happens, they elicit no adequate response, I am quite content that the balance of services rendered should rest with me. Of this I have no doubt at all, that, if the proofs of my deep devotion to you have not quite succeeded in attaching me to you, that attachment will be brought about and cemented between us by the interests of the state.
Still, not to leave you in any doubt as to what it was I missed in your letter, I shall be as frank with you in mine as my own nature and our mutual friendship alike demand. My achievements [in foiling the Catiline conspiracy] have been such that I did expect some congratulatory reference to them in your letter, in consideration, not only of our intimacy, but of their importance to the state; and I can only suppose that you omitted any such reference because you were afraid of wounding anybody’s feelings. Anyhow, you must allow me to say that what I accomplished for the salvation of our country is now approved by the deliberate pronouncement of the whole world; and when you return home, you will recognise that the wisdom as well as the courage I showed in my achievements was such that you, though a much greater man than Scipio Africanus ever was, will find no difficulty in admitting me, who am not much less a man than Laelius, into close association with yourself both in public policy and in private friendship.”
I am, of course, not procrastinating at all in transcribing a two thousand year old letter on a Monday morning. What a suggestion.
December 4, 2007 at 12:25 am |
He just saved the Republic from dictatorship, he was entitled to pat himself on the back.
Seriously, thank you from raising the culture level of my humble blog with your ancient texts. Keep it coming.
December 12, 2007 at 12:05 am |
[...] before, but this one’s worth it: a good, robust liberal response on a controversial issue. 12. Clegg-Huhne: the ancient Rome connection on Antony Hook’s blog. What Saturnalian revelry have the candidates got planned for us, do you [...]