of the judges, the number of patrons, and the size of the crowd of backers — the number of the witnesses was really only paraded in order to bring the financial and political power of the plaintiff into the limelight. The intention in all Cicero's oratory against Verres was to convince the judges, under the veil of fine ethical passion, that the condemnation of the accused was in the interests of their order. Given the general outlook of the Classical, the courts self-evidently existed to serve private and party interests. Democratic complainants in Athens were accustomed at the end of their speeches to remind the jurymen from the people that they would forfeit their fees by acquitting the wealthy defendant.[1] The tremendous power of the Roman Senate consisted mainly in their occupancy of every seat of the judicial (jurors') bench, which placed the destinies of every citizen at their mercy; hence the far-reachingness of the Gracchan law of 122 which handed over the judicature to the Equites and delivered over the nobility — that is, the official class — to the financial world.[2] In 83 Sulla, simultaneously with his proscription of the financial magnates, restored the judicature to the Senate, as political weapon, of course, and the final duel of the potentates finds one more expression in the ceaseless changing of the judges selected.
Now, whereas the Classical, and supremely the Forum of Rome, drew the mass of the people together as a visible body in order to compel it to make that use of its rights which was desired of it, the "contemporary" English-American politics have created through the press a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted to him, so that he must think, will, and act as a ruling personality somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit. This is dynamics against statics, Faustian against Apollinian world-feeling, the passion of the third dimension against the pure sensible present. Man does not speak to man;[3] the press and its associate, the electrical news-service, keep the waking-consciousness of whole peoples and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass, politically, from one hand to the other. It does not turn itself into cards and wine. It is turned into force, and its quantity determines the intensity of its working influence.
Gunpowder and printing belong together — both discovered at the culmination of the Gothic, both arising out of Germanic technical thought — as the two grand means of Faustian distance-tactics. The Reformation in the beginning of
- ↑ See Pöhlmann, Griech. Gesch. (1914), pp. 236, et seq. [Cf. Aristophanes, Wasps. — Tr.]
- ↑ Thus it was possible for Rutilius Rufus to be condemned in the notorious case of 93, because as proconsul he had in accordance with his duty proceeded against the extortions of the concessionnaire associations.
- ↑ Radio broadcasting has now emerged to enable the leader to make personal conquests of the million, and no one can foretell the changes in political tactic that may ensue therefrom. — Tr.
