Msgr. Richard C. Antall: P.S.: They Don’t Want Us to Vote at All

Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist, was an amateur classicist of some competency and a man whose sympathies were capable of crossing centuries. He wrote a two-volume Life of Cicero that was really a defense of the Roman author. Too many of his contemporaries were critical of Cicero, holding him to a standard of perfect consistency they never applied to his enemies Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian.

He saw Cicero as a politician pursuing goals and accepting compromises, even sometimes despite his devoutly held convictions. He admitted that Cicero was not consistent when he seemed to curry favor with Pompey or Caesar. The impossible standard applied to the writer was unreasonable, thought Trollope. Cicero was not always completely honest, but that was to be expected of a man playing the game he did: ….

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