Sulla Musk

 

 

+ Speaking of Musk, this week that apostle of unfettered speech mused that it might be time for the US to welcome a military dictator, like the Roman tyrant Sulla, Julius Caesar’s murderous role model, who after putting down a revolt in Athens, demolished both Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum (those early purveyors of Cultural Marxism) and destroyed one of the greatest libraries of the Classical World…

+ Here’s historian Tom Holland’s description of Sulla’s destruction of the centers of Athenian learning…

[Sulla] ordered the groves where Plato and Aristotle had taught to be chopped down and used to build siege engines. When an Athenian peace delegation did what Athenian peace delegations had always done and began to discourse windily on the glories of its city’s past, Sulla silenced the talk with a gesture of his hand. “Rome did not send me here to be lectured on ancient history.” With this dismissal, he sent the delegates back to their city to eat boiled shoe leather and starve. Athens’s cultural capital had reached the limits of its overdraft. (Rubicon: the Last Days of the Roman Republic)

 JEFFREY S. CLAIR