You must log in or # to comment.
Explanation: Cicero’s Philippics are a series of speeches made by Cicero criticizing Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s former officers and a member of the coalition which avenged Caesar’s death. Mark Antony had a reputation as a bit of a lowbrow fellow, apparently not wholly slander, while Cicero was the very symbol of the ultrarefined senatorial elite.
Regardless of your opinions on Cicero, he absolutely torched Mark Antony rhetorically, with the second book of Philippics being particularly damning in calling Mark Antony a brute, a savage, and worst of all, repulsively unmannered!
Cicero’s speeches were so infuriating that Mark Antony had Cicero killed shortly thereafter.
Classic pen vs. sword argument.
Is the pen actually mightier than the sword? Try to answer that with a sword through your scapula.
Like, normally, I hate Cicero. Optimate fuck. But in his dealings with Mark Antony, Cicero is my spirit animal. “What, you SPARED me when you could’ve killed me? What, you want a fucking COOKIE for that, murderer? You want me to lick your boots after you butchered everyone in your social circle who dared have a thimble-full of decency and fucked half the goat pens in Italy? Ooh, so scary, you’re drawing your sword and motioning for your goons to cut my throa-”
to vulgar childlike poetry so he can actually interpret it
This reminds me of a BlueSky thread I saw linked on Mastodon, of people riffing on the ludicrous and flawed idea that great literary works need to be distilled using LLMs into plain language, to “avoid difficult language”: https://bsky.app/profile/adamcsharp.bsky.social/post/3lb5og7vrv22j
It’s like watching education happening in reverse. Even Orwell would be baffled at these happenings vis-a-vis AI/LLMs.
Why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick?
