Ancient & modern | 24 October 2009

Parliament is supposed to be open, to be democratic and to serve the people, but MPs first of all attempted to close down any investigation of their expenses, and now continue to kick and scream against demands that they pay any money back. All this leads one to conclude that they have given up caring about their own reputation and that of parliament, so deeply stuck in the mire have they become.

This is extremely dangerous. In his unpublished de Legibus (‘On Laws’), Cicero offers some especially instructive views on the matter in his reflections about senatorial corruption. He writes: ‘The senatorial order must be untainted by impropriety and serve as a model for the rest of the citizens. If we can secure this, we shall have secured everything.’

He goes on to argue: ‘For if you care to look back over our past, you will see that the character of our leaders has formed the character of our whole state. Any change in their moral stature was reflected in that of the population. For that reason, immoral leaders are especially dangerous for a state, because they not only indulge in immorality themselves, but they also instil it in the citizens. Corrupted themselves, they corrupt others, and do far more damage by their example than by their actual transgressions.’ Cicero would certainly have constructed a connection between MPs’ and bankers’ behaviour and wondered what effect it might have on the populus Britannicus.

MPs would do well to learn from the example of the Roman politician Livius Drusus. He was a proponent of much sound legislation to give the poor a fairer distribution of land and Italians full Roman citizenship. He was assassinated in 91 bc, and the historian Velleius quotes the following example to prove the moral stature of the young man: ‘When his house was being built on the Palatine, the architect promised that he would so design it that it would be out of sight, protected from all observation, and no one would be able to peer into it.