What Happened to Manlius?
Nobody Flashes
So…let’s continue from yesterday with John Adams accounts of what happened to Manlius–
From A Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Adams:
Manlius was cited by the tribunes before the pole. In a mourning habit he appeared, without a single senator, relation, or friend, or even his own brothers, to express concern for his fate. And no wonder: a senator, and a person of consular dignity, was never known to have been so universally abandoned. It was not the love of liberty, but absolute fear which seized the people. The senate had already condemned him by their vote, and given their consuls dictatorial power against Manlius and his friends. The tribunes themselves were corrupted with bribes or fear: and no man dared expose himself to aristocratical vengeance, unprotected by the tribunes.
Manlius’ offence was, love of the people: and democratically misdemeanors are the most unpardonable of all that can be committed or conceived in a government where the demon of aristocracy domineers. Livy himself betrays a consciousness of the insufficiency of the evidence to prove Manlius’s guilt. He says he can discover no proof, nor any other charge of any crime of treason.
But then what happened?
Adams
“They took him out of the capital, where the people could not see them and threw him off the Tarpeian rock.
He died a sacrifice to the rancorous envy of his peers in the senate, the consulate and the patrician order who could not bear the sight of so splendid a distinction and elevation about themselves in any one of their order. He alarmed his fellow aristocrats by superior merit, services and rewards,
He was no sooner dead than the people repented and regretted him.
And in conclusion, Adams said this:
The history of Manlius is an unanswerable argument against a simple aristocracy: it is a proof that no man’s liberty or file is safe in such a government: the more virtue and merit he has, the more in danger, the more certain his destruction.
Let’s hope, in this year of 2019….that certainty for the 45th President, is no longer the case, for what we are witnessing today is no different than that which happened in Rome. We certainly are ruled by an aristocracy of…in the words of P.J. O’Rourke:
A Parliament of Whores.
Such as existed long ago in the time of Manlius. 
About
I am a nobody. If the different classes of America were color-coded, I would be in the yucky brown, one rung up from the bottom. I grew up in Naples, Florida and live near the Mississippi River now with my husband and two dogs. I am part of the slowly disappearing middle-class. I was a musician most of my life: drummer/singer/keyboards—but I retired before the plastic surgery flu hit. I have no degrees, which could be a good thing…depending on how you view our educational system. I do have three patents…but that really doesn’t make me a somebody. The one thing that is constant in my life is my OPINIONS, which i have more than perhaps even Carl Sagan could have imagined…mostly political. (yes…my ancestors were crabby buggers)
Hopefully other nobody’s will put their opinions on my site. But, if you happen to be a somebody, you’re more than welcomed to help out.
It’s my Nobody Opinion that Nobody’s Perfect, and Nobody Cares, that Nobody Knows why Nobody Wins, and when that happens, Nobody Wonders, why Nobody Flashes, why Nobody’s Fooled, but then Nobody remembers that Nobody ALWAYS Reports the truth.
You can email me at joyanna_adams@yahoo.com
Joyanna Adams 