The new Cicero
von Charlotte Higgins (Link: Guardian)
Um die nächsten vier Jahre US-amerikanischer Politik zu verstehen, muss man auch etwas über Politik im antiken Rom verstanden haben, argumentiert Charlotte Higgins in ihrem Guardian-Artikel über die Parallelen zwischen den Senatoren Cicero und Barack Obama. Nachdem Elvin Lim in seinem Buch The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W Bush eine kontinuierliche Verwahrlosung der Kunst der Rhetorik bei amerikanischen Präsidenten diagnostiziert hat, bricht mit Obama ein neues goldenes Zeitalter politischer Rhetorik an.
Zitat
It is not just in the intricacies of speechifying that Obama recalls Cicero. Like Cicero, Obama is a lawyer. Like Cicero, Obama is a writer of enormous accomplishment – Dreams From My Father, Obama’s first book, will surely enter the American literary canon. Like Cicero, Obama is a „novus homo“ – the Latin phrase means „new man“ in the sense of self-made. Like Cicero, Obama entered politics without family backing (compare Clinton) or a military record (compare John McCain). Roman tradition dictated you had both. The compensatory talent Obama shares with Cicero, says Catherine Steel, professor of classics at the University of Glasgow, is a skill at „setting up a genealogy of forebears – not biological forebears but intellectual forebears. For Cicero it was Licinius Crassus, Scipio Aemilianus and Cato the Elder. For Obama it is Lincoln, Roosevelt and King.“
