American politics needs all the help it can get, including help from ancient Roman political thinker. They are now more accessible through Jed Atkins’ new book Roman Political Thought, just out from Cambridge Press:
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/roman-political-thought?format=PB&isbn=9781107514553#tZ1bQyDgBzLDIhQh.97
 

Once upon a time genuine scholars  ran genuine philanthropies. It’s happened again: Congratulations both to Andy Delbanco and to the Teagle Foundation for choosing so well . The story: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-teagle-foundation-announces-andrew-delbanco-as-its-new-president-300615440.html
 

​ 
 
Bobby Kennedy’s spech in indianapolis afer the assassination of martin Luther King’
The following is Robert F. Kennedy's statement on the assassination of Marthin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
 

Does hyperbole win elections? If so, how?
​Here’s a starting point:
A Google search “Hillary Clinton hyperbole” showed approximately 237,000 results.
and
“Donald Trump hyperbole” yielded about 382,000 results.
Can anyone think of a really powerful hyperbole by Hillary Clinton?
If not, for the time being at least, the loser is
                                               Hillary R. Clinton.
​

                                                                           THE NEW WINNER IS  
                                                                       Marcus Fabius Quintilianus,
 who in his Institutes of Oratory  8.6. 68.
cites a stomach-turning hyperbole by Cicero
“In hyperbole we may say more than the actual facts, as when Cicero attacks an enemy by saying, "He vomited and filled his lap and the whole tribunal with fragments of food.”
        Can you top that! Post your entries as comments on this blog. 

​     Sorry, all you contestants who submitted quotations from Donald Trump in the first day of the Hyperbole of the Day contest. Trump hyperboles, which once were worth a dime a dozen, have fallen in value to a dime  a gross - and many of them are indeed gross.
   And so, THE WINNER IS –
    Peter H. Burian
The award is for this passage from W.H. Auden “As I walked out one Evening”:
 
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,”
There’s more to the poem, of course, and irony, too.  “Tons more,” as any good hyperbolist would say.
   Keep trying, aspiring hyperbolists! The contest continues.

​The Hyperbole of the Day Contest
Is Donald Trump a demagogue or a populist?  That questions brought me back to studying demagogy.  But as I was finishi8ng the article which has now appeared  as the cover story in the Spring American Scholar,  I saw more and more clearly  that demagogy, ancient and modern, was best understood as a form of political discourse, not  as a set of policies.  Maybe I didn’t make that as clear as I should have in my book on the demagogues, The New Politicians of Fifth Century Athens. So I am now turning my attention to hyperbole, a key ingredient in the discourse of demagogy.
Will you help by posting here your favorite hyperbole. It doesn’t have to be from Trump but he sure is a wonderful source of them
PS   Click here  the link to my American Scholar. article, “Populist or Demagogue?”. 

​When I was its president the Teagle Foundation, the Foundation made a grant to Project Pericles, a consortium of several dozen liberal arts colleges committed to encouraging civic engagement among their students. I was delighted we could make the grant, in part because Project Pericles had been inspired by Eugene Lang, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who never forgot reading the Periclean Funeral Oration in the second book of Thucydides. And I had a certain weakness for Thucydides, too.  
But, there was dissonance between the idealism of those who were inspired by the Periclean Funeral Oration and a view widespread in recent scholarship, which often treats the speech as a way by which Thucydides projected his own anti-democratic views onto Pericles. In the view of these scholars far from being praise of democracy, the Funeral Oration deplored it. Pericles, they thought, was made to say that Athens was only “in name a democracy.”
        So, when I retired from the Teagle Foundation, I undertook a close reading of the Greek of the passage on which these views are based. I found that several ostensibly minor stylistic details when brought into focus showed clearly that the speech was indeed a strong, if somewhat quirky, affirmation of democracy as practiced in ancient Athens.  And more than that: it affirmed the link between participation in civic life and resilience.
I wrote a short article on what I found, hoping to persuade my classical colleagues, but also to reach friends, former students, the leaders of Project Pericles, and others inside and outside academia who realized the urgency of  thinking freshly about democracy at a time when it is often under fire, sometimes literally so. I was not just affirming an older, idealistic readimng  of the Funeral Oration, but was exploring  some new territory where participation (we’d say “civic engagement”) produces astonishing endurance e and vitality, both at the individual and the civic level.  I’m not sure the Greeks had a word for it, but we could call it “resilience.”
         We need it, now, more than ever. 

I

Congratulations to Dan Mendelsohn  for  being awarded Prinnceton's Madison medal.  And take a look at his website ,  http://www.danielmendelsohn.com/  , for a  sense of his  ac complishment.