December 18, 13.57pm
I was struck last week, when reading Robert Harris's Imperium, by the way in which much of the Roman justice system has been handed down to the modern legal arena, but what is true of law is equally true of politics.
As I slid quietly towards sleep just as Cicero, Harris's protagonist was climbing the greasy pole from aedile to praetor, I suddenly found myself reading a convincing description of the behind-the-scenes debates, jutsificatons and discussions that led US into a near-unilateral "war on terror".
But this was 68BC, not 9/11, and a cast list including Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar rather than George W Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
But while the names and places may have been changed to protect the guilty, the events were remarkably similar. Instead the destruction of the Twin Towers, we have an attack on the Roman fleet at Ostia by pirates who destroyed a dozen or more triremes and kidnapped a handful of officials.
The effect on the Roman Republic - then an extraordinarily sophisticated democracy - was extraordinary. Politicians hell bent on furthering their own positions whipped the local populace into a hysterical fear, and while they were worrying who or what was creeping up the Tiber to sack their homes, they happily handed parts of their precious democracy to one man Pompey, thus opening the door to a process that would ultimately result in Caesarean Empire.
The manner in which the fear of the poeple and the power of the mob was manipulated for political ends is chillingly told and echoes down the generations to the Patriot Act, phone-tapping and the hideous war in Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, this has been a theme developed elsewhere, not least by Robert Harris himself, in an excellent opinion piece in the New York Times, in which the writer explains how fear and patriotism can be a politician's most potent weapons:
"By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned."