YOU RULE

If democracy is ailing, how best to heal it?

- ADAM GOPNIK

Cicero, the Roman orator and politician of the first century B.C.E., spoke up over and over again—while stamping his feet for effect in between sentences, if his own testimony is to be believed—for the republic: that is, for a form of democratic government, perhaps limited, but unambiguously opposed to tyranny or boss-man rule. Supplying the rhetorical fuel, at least, for Julius Caesar’s assassination, he took up with some of Caesar’s successors, imagining them to be less autocratically inclined than the man they had assassinated. Before long, he found himself on the run from his new friends and was caught and killed by soldiers of the new regime. His head and hands were cut off and displayed in the forum where he had spoken, as a warning to others to be more discreet. His head was where his mouth was, of course, and his hands were an instrument of oratory, too; he was of a generation that believed in violent gesticulation while arguing, a form of communication now limited to football coaches protesting calls from the sidelines.

And that was more or less that: reticence about the res publica ruled for a millennium and a half, with Cicero reduced to a master of the long and Latinate sentence. Then, just a couple of hundred years ago, a new set of republics was born, in Western Europe and America. Now, by general agreement, they are in crisis, too, having lasted only about half as long as the Roman original.