Mithridates is Dead.

http://cnx.com/?p=1469

In the First Century BC, the greatest enemy of the Roman Republic was Mithridates of Pontus, who used “notorious pirates” to attack and harass the Romans while conquering much territory of his own.

Desperate, the Romans invested a lot of unprecedented power in a single man, Pompey Maximus, to go out and finally defeat the Pirates. But Pompey didn’t stop there. He kept on pushing and laid seige to many territories in western Asia, most of which had nothing to do with Mithridates or the Pirates such as Syria and Judea. Mithridates eventually took his own life, although Pompey still claimed the victory for it.

Denied what he saw as the proper acknowledgment of his acts, Pompey aligned himself with Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus in the First Triumvirate. The three leaders then perverted the Roman political system, forced those who opposed them into exile or worse, and eventually forced the complete destruction of the Roman Republic.

Today, Osama bin Laden is dead. And those who let him escape in the first place 10 years ago are already starting to crow that they’re not getting enough credit for the death of the “Notorious Terrorist.”

Please let the historical parallels end there.

:shrug:

We nearly got there under Bush. And I was thinking a lot about the parallels between Mithridates and Osama bin Laden, and Bush and Pompey, while reading Robert Harris' Conspirata a couple of weeks ago. It's starting to get really scary to me.

Reading Harris over the past months (I started with "Imperium," the first book in this trilogy) it's fascinating how many parallels there are between Obama and Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Cicero was a provincial, a "new man" not born into the aristocracy, who made it to the highest office through his oratory and popular acclaim (not to mention cutting a lot of questionable deals). I hope Obama meets a better fate than Cicero, though.

His famous speech to the Senate in which he denounces a conspiracy by a certain Cataline to stage a coup ("O Tempus! O Mores!!!") is a classic of public speaking.

Potomac.

Only reason that guy even gets out of bed in the morning is that sweet, sweet bourbon isn't going to drink itself.

to today are frightening. The Tea Partiers/GOP are nothing more than "Boni" or "Good-Men" of Rome dedicated to keeping all power and all money with the aristocracy. Hell, Cato baasically invented the filibuster just to frustrate Julius Caesar. Its eerie.