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.
---
(†)
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).