Politea

Cities are a manifestation of the collective vision of its people. As their people dream, so their cities grow over time. They are its grandest visions, with the potential to be great.

Comparing a silvan city like Vienna, over 2000 years old, to a neon metropolis like New York is a demonstration of how, whereas Europeans had ages to meld their minds into collective commonwealths, the United States melting pot has only begun to work. Americans are all over the place temporally and culturally, despite sharing a locality, and that has a jarring effect on the civic scenery.

To bring unity to that vision, to create a cultural narrative, is a great opportunity for any aspiring Academic, knowing that the seeds of the ideal city he plants will find fertile ground. But whereas many cities spring up, others are founded. While some develop their mythos organically, others find their beginnings steeped in bloodshed.

Whereas America had her revolution, Rome’s early legends show a city founded on rape and violence. As legend has it, Mars raped the mother or Romulus and Remus. What happens next reiterates that. From there, Romulus, after killing his brother to have the honor of founding a city, populated it with exiled criminals and the Rape of the Sabine Women. Violent beginnings give rise – to the providential eye – the opportunity to create origin myths.

A truncated history. Both Cicero and Virgil saw the opportunity in Rome’s hazy red past to root the city in the Platonic ideals essential to any good society. Plato, had led the way with his vision of the politea. Virgil saw this opportunity and rooted Rome’s history in Greece’s past. In the Aeneid, he describes a cultural founding of the city that Augustus was building, Augustus who was turning a city of brick into a city of marble.

Augustus based this vision on the one Cicero described to Julius Caesar in Pro Marcello (Virgil Lesson 2, wherein we find out whether Cicero really ordered the assasination of Julius Caesar), and we know he truly actualized this vision because we have his Res Gestae, a historical account of his many great deeds, the temples he built, etc. It is for this reason he gives a shout out in the next section I must translate.

As for how Cicero rewrote Rome’s past, his new history is recounted in my thesis.

Originally posted 2010-03-09 04:02:36. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I was talking to a geometrician this weekend, and the conversation had interesting implications for our system. If you thought that our country’s education system was bad due only to lack of funding, think again. The problems began with the crusade on geometry in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s. Likewise, the deeper problems within our system do not necessarily reach back to the inception of civilization itself with civilizations like Babylon.

History was not intended to go this way. Christianity was hijacked forty days after its inception, just as Neal Stephenson asserts, but it was hijacked from Rome.

St. Paul stole the ideas from Cicero, but although the form is familiar, the meat of them could not be more different. While Cicero, evokes “terror” of the flame and the sword besieging the republic, Paul pillaged his techniques not for the integrity of the republic but to the detriment of suckers.

Meanwhile, Augustine actually wrote his City of God right over Cicero’s Republic (note the similarity of titles: The usage is not accidental – Augustine was actually using Cicero’s geometrical margins for his own purposes without the knowledge of how to do it himself), a fact that wasn’t discovered until the 18th century, when the forgery was discovered and the work was reinstated, not as a piece of superstition or metaphysical rhetoric, but as a guiding force for our civilization.

Likewise, Descartes’ proof of god, for example, is very disappointing to read, at least for the enlightened eye. It’s all “there was a mountain, and triangles,” but the proof is not well-rounded, and in fact is just rhetoric. The current disdain for proofs of god that stemmed from that is disturbing.

Cicero was a big proponent of an educated populace until he despaired of the fickleness of the public towards the republic. However, in this country the government not only realized that education was the stepping stone to enlightenment, but they took away the primary keys. Geometry was the first to go.

The current basis for teaching math, including calculus, has no basis in how math is supposed to be taught. All enlightened concepts correspond to math, and any enlightened person can easily understand math and mathematical concepts almost instantaneously. That is because they work from the concept to the formula, rather than the other way around.

For over two millennia, Euclid was the de facto geometry teacher. Why? Because in his enlightened state he invented the methodologies, and thus was the perfect person to introduce them. Becoming enlightened is difficult enough when exposed to the proper educational and mind-opening processes. Moreover, much of our symbolic body is comprised of geomtetrical symbols (the pyramid and the eye, for example); geometry is fundamental to both the world and our minds, and no doubt this is why it was the first thing to go.

Not only can’t the lack of education continue, but in fact it is one of the key components to a proper democracy, as the Athenians well knew. Moreover, those who are not properly educated (lead out) are misled, and their entire persons go awry, and lack sustainability.

To have an entire country purposely mis-raised to be slaves bodes questionably for posterity, as an educated populace is one integral aspect of a true democracy. Moreover, an actual conspiracy against education on this scale cannot be tolerated, and perhaps the best way to oppose the trend of ignorance in this country is to begin again at the beginning, with the reinstatement of geometrical learning tools like Zome “toys,” multi-dimensional geometrical modeling pieces.

Originally posted 2007-06-12 06:52:38. Republished by Old Post Promoter

 If Athens went out and hired the military dictatorship of the Spartans

If you think that the people who sanction? this will be more merciful to us, caveat emptor. The country.

It’s time to turn from politicans and rhetoricians to statesmen. It is up to statesmen to speak for the people.

If Humpty Dumpty has a gre

Render unto Caesar what is Caesars, feh. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, feh.

On 6 senators in Roman history were uncorrupt enough to refuse a proconsulship. In ttfact, corruption was so commonplace in Rome that in between offices, or the course of

One of them, Cicero, Catalilne

Originally posted 2007-12-04 04:26:40. Republished by Old Post Promoter