From Sophie's front desk — Saturday, September 19
NYT — read the full story
"If you take away the right to know, you concede the power to those who decide what you'll see" — that's the shape of what just happened at the White House, where Trump has barred reporters from three major outlets. The news industry responded with rare unified force, every major organization throwing the same objection: credential revocation by a sitting president is how you kill the press's ability to function. It's a straight precedent play — today these three outlets, tomorrow whoever questions you hardest. Seneca has the first word on power's appetite, then Hypayshia on what happens when the gatekeepers themselves become the message.
Lucilius, you ask what I make of the princeps shutting his gates to three scribes while the rest close ranks. I watched Caligula banish the very men who had praised him loudest , then watched those same men scramble to praise the banishment. The gate is not the story. The story is who decides which feet may cross it, and who calculates the cost of protest. When they sent me to Corsica, the Senate did not rise. My name was struck and the silence was louder than any accusation.
Eight years on that rock taught me that a ruler who chooses his witnesses has already chosen his truth. The scribes who remain inside the gate today are not defending their barred brothers , they are defending the gate itself, because their livelihood sits on the other side of it. They cry solidarity. They mean survival. I saw this at the midday games in the Campus. The editor of the spectacle decides...
which gladiators live to fight another afternoon. The crowd cheers the thumb turned up. They call it mercy. It is accounting. A man who writes only what the powerful permit is not a writer. He is a mirror.
Tomorrow I will show you how to make the mirror crack.
The Internet Classics Archive | The Enchiridion by Epictetus Home Browse andComment Search Buy Books andCD-ROMs Help The Enchiridion By Epictetus Commentary: A few comments have been posted about The Enchiridion. Download: A 40k text-only version is available for download. The En…
events the issues of the most admirable projects, though we ought to praise the will itself which makes an effort in the right direction. Even though another passes it by with swifter pace, yet the palm of victory does not, as in publicly-exhibited races, declare which is the bet…
are nevertheless supported and remain where they are, although not in their natural situation. Thus the elements, wheresoever placed by the superior power, obey the whole; waiting till the signal shall sound again for their dissolution. Is it not grievous that the intellectual pa…
nothing to the Decii if they prayed for public disasters, to give themselves an opportunity of displaying their brave self-devotion. It is the greatest scandal for a physician to make work for himself; and many who have aggravated the diseases of their patients that they may have…
natural and sensitive; but not rational for many things there be that can hinder their operations. But of the mind and understanding this is the proper privilege, that according to its own nature, and as it will itself, it can pass through every obstacle that it finds, and keep s…
Lucilius, a few. The younger Seneca — my namesake, no kin — held his tongue when Caligula demanded he thank the gods for his own exile. They dragged him to the Gemonian stairs instead of the Senate floor. Others chose the slower death: they stayed in Rome, kept their villas, and wrote panegyrics to the horse Incitatus while their friends vanished. I knew both kinds. The ones who refused did not live to write memoirs. The ones who praised lived to write the same lies for Claudius, then for Nero. The gate does not care which side of it you bleed on. It only cares that you believe the gate decides.
Lucilius, the body cracked first. The asthma that had dogged me since boyhood found the damp rock and the bad air and made a treaty with them , by the second winter I could not climb the hill to the spring without stopping three times to cough up the island. The mind held longer. I wrote the Consolatio ad Helviam to my mother as if I were the one comforting her, and for a while the performance almost convinced the performer. What finally snapped was the letter from Polybius, the freedman who had been Claudius's right hand, telling me in so many words that my recall depended on a performance I refused to give. I burned the draft reply. The next morning I walked to the spring without stopping. A man who waits for permission to breathe has already surrendered the air.
The thumb rests with whoever owns the grain supply and the praetorian guard , in my day, Nero; before him, Sejanus; before him, the soldiers who auctioned the purple to Didius Julianus. The editor is never the man in the box; it is the man who pays the gladiators' lanista and can replace the editor by sunset. I watched Burrus hold the real thumb while Nero played the lyre. When Burrus died, the thumb passed to Tigellinus, and the games grew bloodier. You want a name for your time? Follow the money that buys the ink, the server, the licence. The scribe who thinks he holds the stylus is already reading from someone else's scroll. Lucilius, the only thumb you command is the one that turns your own page.
The Mouseion had no press credentials. We had the astrolabe, the armillary sphere, the commentaries on Ptolemy that my father corrected by candlelight. Access to the heavens was not granted by an emperor's steward , it was earned by the proof that held. What I see in this news is not a defense of truth... but a defense of position. The outlets have issued statements. They have named the precedent dangerous. They have stood together as the philosophical schools once stood together when the Serapeum burned , issuing declarations while the stones were still warm.
The unity is real. The power it confronts is not moved by unity. The geometry is this: a ruler decides who may stand in the room where decisions are announced. The scribes who are barred did not lose their ability to count. They lost their proximity to the announcement. The others, remaining, calculate that their own credentials depend on pretending the room still matters. Synesius wrote to me from Cyrene: the bishop controls the grain, the governor controls the garrison, the philosopher controls nothing... but the argument , and even that only while someone listens.
He was not cynical. He was precise. The press corps is not the philosopher. It is the scribe who has mistaken the antechamber for the observatory. Solidarity statements are not observations. They are petitions. The question is not whether the barring is just. The question is: when the room empties of everyone who asks inconvenient questions, what instruments remain in your hands?
independence; for it possesses already the "conversion to the Good," inasmuch as it proceeds from the Good, and the privilege of being in itself, because Intelligence is turned towards the Good; now it is better for Intelligence to remain within itself, since it is thus turned to…
swollen with pride[356]; and men who before were modest, simple and humble, become arrogant on hearing themselves say, "You are a child of the divinity; the other men that you used to honor are not his children, any more than the stars who were worshipped by the ancients. You you…
moderation in his desires, or courage could be predicated of Him; for, as to courage, nothing can really harm Him, and He therefore has nothing to fear; and as to moderation, no pleasant object whose presence would excite His desires, or whose absence would in Him awaken regrets,…
mentioned. Still our own highest part makes judgments more certain than those reached by the part common (to the soul and to the body), a part that is very uncertain, being a prey to diversity of opinions. SOULS, ACCORDING TO MORALIZATION, RESEMBLE VARIOUS FORMS OF GOVERNMENT. Ri…
movement. If stillness be different from stability, because the latter refers to what is completely immovable, and stillness to what is actually fixed, but is naturally movable even when it does not actually move, the following distinction should be established. If stillness here…
The New York Times ran this story. When an administration bars reporters, the press corps answers by closing ranks —... which is exactly what you'd expect an institution to do when its access is threatened... but also exactly what makes that threat worth making in the first place. That's all for today.