The alchemy of power. Marcus Aurelius 1.11

Lord Acton remarked famously that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Marcus Aurelius puts it differently: power pretends, and must manage its pretense carefully. You can hear me read this passage <here>.

Παρὰ Φρόντωνος τὸ ἐπιστῆσαι οἵα ἡ τυραννικὴ βασκανία καὶ ποικιλία καὶ ὑπόκρισις, καὶ ὅτι ὡς ἐπίπαν οἱ καλούμενοι οὗτοι παῤ ἡμῖν εὐπατρίδαι ἀστοργότεροί πως εἰσί.

From Fronto (†) I learned to recognize that the alchemy of power (‡) demands both subtlety and hypocrisy, and that those we call well-born are generally quite ruthless.

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(†) Marcus Cornelius Fronto was born in the city Cirta, in north Africa, into a family with Roman citizenship. He studied rhetoric as a child with great success, eventually moving to Rome to complete his education and enter public life, where his success as an advocate earned him a large fortune and a consulship. He was generally taken to have no equal in Latin oratory besides Cicero, so it was no surprise when Antoninus Pius chose him to tutor his heirs. In the period between 1750 and 1956, some personal letters between Fronto and his pupils were recovered from palimpsests (manuscripts scraped clean and reused) in the Vatican, making him more interesting to scholars, who were not much impressed by the two grammatical treatises claiming him as author (falsely, as it would appear).

(‡) ἡ τυραννικὴ βασκανία. Another way to render βασκανία is witchcraft. Greek uses the word τύραννος and its relatives to refer to an absolute ruler, a despot whose power is expressed without any explicit institutional limitation, such as a constitution. What I have made the alchemy of power here could thus also be rendered the magic of the tyrant. An interesting aside: the word τύραννος appears to originate outside Greek, in some Anatolian language where it designates an overlord either divine (like the Phrygian moon-god Men, known as Μὴν Τύραννος in Attic inscriptions) or human (like the Lydian kings described by Herodotus, Histories 1.14). Dim echoes of this word have been sought and found all over the ancient Mediterranean. A few worth noticing: (1) Hittite offers the verb tarḫ- or tarḫu-, meaning to conquer, with the derivative Tarhunna as a title for the storm-god. In Luwian, the storm-god's title becomes Tarḫuuant, Tarhunt, or Tarhunza; an adjective tarhunti- identifies things belonging to him (Kloekhorst, Hittite Lexicon s.v.). (2) Etruscan, with known Asian provenance, preserves Turan as the name of a goddess identified by Romans with Venus (Bloch, The Etruscans 4.1); (3) Hebrew uses the word סרן (tseren, seren) to refer to the lords of the Philistines (Strong, § H5633; Brown-Driver-Briggs, §§ 5716-17).