Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08626_Field_TCGG T391.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 1KB | 16 lines

     have been “singular to see these men—generally of low
     origin and devoid of culture—surrounded in their camps
     by ambassadors, poets and learned men, who read to
     them Livy and Cicero, and original verses, in which they
     were compared to Scipio and Hannibal, to Caesar and
     Alexander.” But they were all acting on a tiny scale the
     past that was being unearthed, just as English statesmen
     were modelling themselves at the time of England’s great
     expansion on the statesmen of Roman antiquity. With the
     more intelligent of them, like Cesare Borgia, this
     archaeological and analogic habit of mind assumed the
     proportion of a mania. His “Aut Caesar aut nihil” is the
     same type of literature as is concentrated in the small
     maniacal figure of Julien Sorel, Stendhal’s little domestic
     Napoleon. Borgia’s motto itself is reminiscent of the title
     of a book popular before the war in Germany: Wordly