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I am reading a book about politics in the Roman Republic during the first century BC. Here is a passage concerning the run-up to elections. Does it sound familiar to you?
The man putting himself up as a candidate ... mustered his last ounce of patience and prepared himself to listen to anyone and everyone who wanted to talk to him, no matter how long-winded or prolix. If he happened to find a mother and babe, he smiled at the mother and kissed the babe - no votes there, of course, but she might well persuade her husband to vote for him. He laughed loudly when it was called for, he wept copiously at tales of woe, he looked grave and serious when grave and serious subjects were broached; but he never looked bored or uninterested, and he made sure he didn't say the wrong thing to the wrong person. He shook so many hands that he had to soak his own right hand in cold water every evening. He persuaded his friends famous for their oratory to mount the rostra ... and address the forum frequenters about what a superb fellow he was, what a pillar of the establishment he was ... and what a dismal, reprehensible, dishonest, corrupt, unpatriotic, vile, sodomizing faeces-eating, child-molesting, incestuous, bestial, depraved, fish-fancying, idle, gluttonous, alcoholic lot his opponents were. He promised everything to everybody, no matter how impossible it would prove to deliver those promises.
J F R
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. (Richard Dawkins, 2006)
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