Titled: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED IN 2,066 YEARS? "The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." - Cicero - 55 BC So my friends, History maybe studied but not learned.
In a letter to The Chicago Tribune (20 April 1971), John H. Collins, Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, reported that the following attribution to Cicero, actually originated in A Pillar of Iron (1965), Taylor Caldwell's fictionalized account of the life of the senator. (In fact, Collins noted that it was on page 483 of the edition he had in hand.) Collins held that the alleged quotation "is totally without documentation," and that "the great bulk of [Caldwell's] quotations are false." He further observed that "[a] historical novelist has a perfect right to put invented conversations and anecdotes into a novel, but should not represent these inventions as authentic history." snopes.com My understanding is the romans had only two penalties for crimes. One was a fine, the other was death. Do you have any idea how much money we waste on prisons? On a completely unrelated note, I knew there were a lot of asians living in my neighborhood, but it really sinks in when the literature the Jehovah's witnesses leave on your doorstep is written in Chinese.
And to think we could have said since 55 BC finally Bill Clinton balanced the budget and began paying down the deficit. Well at least the latter is not myth.
All wonderfully cheap solutions that required no prisons. What I guess I'm getting at is, I find it hard to imagine the government of Rome providing enough assistance to anyone to become dependent upon it. Perhaps the quote fits in that the Senate and the Emporer still pillage the state coffers. That seems to be a principal that has held true throughout history. Yet another argument for smaller government.