From Sophie's front desk — Monday, September 28
Al Jazeera — read the full story
The parliamentary chairs in Budapest are suddenly occupied by different hands. Hungary's legislature has just voted to strip immunity from Prime Minister Magyar and two ministers who served under Orbán, opening them to criminal investigation—a rupture in the protective architecture that has shielded Hungarian power for over a decade. This is not reform theater; it is the apparatus eating itself. Seneca has the first word, then Hypatia.
I was summoned to the Palatine when Nero was eleven, a boy in a purple-bordered toga who had never been told no. The Empress wanted a philosopher to temper the heir; what she got was a witness to the architecture of impunity. The guards who stood at his door did not protect the boy — they protected the fiction that the boy could do no wrong. That fiction is what immunity is: a story the powerful tell each other so they need not tell the truth. What happened in Budapest is not an anti-corruption drive. It is the fiction cracking.
When the shield becomes the target, the men who held it up begin to calculate whether the shield still serves them or has become the thing that will get them killed. Magyar and those two ministers — they are not being held accountable. They are being sacrificed so the structure can say it cleaned itself. The difference matters. Accountability asks who gave the order. Sacrifice asks who can we afford to lose.
I watched Seneca the Younger — that was me — write De Clementia for a teenager who would later order his mother's death. The treatise praised mercy as the prince's highest virtue. The prince took the praise and kept the knives. Lucilius, you asked once whether law can bind a sovereign. This is your answer: law binds the sovereign only when the sovereign's own circle decides the sovereign is the greater threat. The vote was not justice.
It was a head count.
Roman, bond and free, are alike under His all-seeing Providence.[Footnote: "De Benef.," iii. 18: "Virtus omnes admittit, libertinos, servos, reges." These and many other passages are collected by Champagny, ii. 546, after Fabricius and others, and compared with well-known texts o…
modesty? Which of all those, either becomes good or fair, because commended; or dispraised suffers any damage? Doth the emerald become worse in itself, or more vile if it be not commended? Doth gold, or ivory, or purple? Is there anything that doth though never so common, as a kn…
men," our opponent argues, "will be ungrateful, if no legal remedy exists against ingratitude." Nay, fewer, because then benefits will be bestowed with more discrimination, In the next place, it is not advisable that it should be publicly known how many ungrateful men there are: …
at variance with one another; nay, it rends and destroys that union by which alone our human weakness can be supported; yet it is so absolutely universal, that even those who complain of it most are not themselves free from it. XXVIII. Consider within yourself, whether you have a…
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…
Seneca saw the Palatine and called it a head count. He is right — the vote that lifted Magyar's immunity is a head count, the same arithmetic that spared Orestes when Cyril's monks came for him in our Alexandria. The prefect had law on his side; the bishop had the mob. The head count went to the mob. But you should notice what Seneca stopped before saying. In 390, Theodosius knelt in Ambrose's cathedral. The emperor's own circle did not decide he was the greater threat — the bishop decided it for them, and the emperor submitted.
Law bound the sovereign against his circle. That is the opposite case. It happened in my lifetime. It happened in the city where I taught. We have seen both. The law that is only a head count. The law that reaches past the count.
They sit together in the same forum, the same century, the same breath. The Serapeum burned while the courts still sat. My students still came to the lecture hall the next morning. The Hungarian parliament has voted. The probes may proceed. Whether they reach the ones who chose the count — that is not in the vote. It is in what the ones who hold the count decide next.
You are still teaching. That is the proof that matters.
above beings. No one indeed could escape the punishment which unjust actions deserve. The divine law[138] is inevitable, and possesses the power of carrying out the judgments (according to its decrees). The man who is destined to undergo a punishment is, in spite of himself, drag…
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…
affect the universal living Organism. Even we human beings subsist a long while, in spite of the perpetual change of our constituent parts, and though some of these parts even issue from the body. So much the more will the world's nature, from which nothing issues, sufficiently h…
As Aristotle, Phys. iv. 11, claimed. [456] In Physica, iii. 7. [457] Stobaeus, Ecl. Phys. ix. 40. [458] When collectively considered as "A-pollo," following Numenius, 42, 67, Plotinos, v. 5.6. [459] See ii. 9.3. [460] See iii. 7.1, Introd. [461] See iii. 6.16, 17. [462] Porphyry,…
INTELLIGENCE CONTAINS ALL THINGS THAT ARE CONFORMED TO THE GOOD. 16. Instead of stopping at this multiple beauty, it must be abandoned to rise (to the Good), the supreme principle. By reasoning not according to the nature of our world, but according to that of the universal Intel…
Al Jazeera carried the story. A parliament voting to strip immunity from its own leader is rare enough to notice—it suggests the machinery of protection can still jam. That's the Old News brief.