Some will look back with amusement from our age of boundless terrestrial spaces and teeming populations at these operations of Lilliput, these miniature battles, like those of Virgil's bees. But if we focus our microscopes more sharply or, better, if we do not blur our mental vision by always seeing big, we shall find in the story of this tiny Achaean League principles that govern, or ought to govern, our own democracies. These principles are stated by Polybius.3 Freedom of speech is one; equality and humanity, the love of one's fellow beings, are the others. And what are these — παρρησία, ἰσότης, φιλανθρωπία — but the only temporarily abandoned motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité?
3 The Histories, with an English translation by W.R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library, 1922), II 38. 6-9.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, August 20, 2026
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
Edward Kennard Rand (1871-1945), The Building of Eternal Rome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943),p. 6: