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O Fabricius! What would your great soul have thought, if to your own misfortune you had been called back to life and had seen the pompous face of this Rome saved by your efforts and which your honourable name had distinguished more than all its conquests? 'Gods,' you would have said, 'what has happened to those thatched roofs and those rustic dwelling places where, back then, moderation and virtue lived? What fatal splendour has succeeded Roman simplicity? What is this strange language? What are these effeminate customs? What do these statues signify, these paintings, these buildings? You mad people, what have you done? You, masters of nations, have you turned yourself into the slaves of the frivolous men you conquered? Are you now governed by rhetoricians? Was it to enrich architects, painters, sculptors, and comic actors that you soaked Greece and Asia with your blood? Are the spoils of Carthage trophies for a flute player? Romans, hurry up and tear down these amphitheatres, break up these marbles, burn these paintings, chase out these slaves who are subjugating you, whose fatal arts are corrupting you. Let other hands distinguish themselves with vain talents. The only talent worthy of Rome is that of conquering the world and making virtue reign there. When Cineas took our Senate for an assembly of kings, he was not dazzled by vain pomp or by affected elegance. He did not hear there this frivolous eloquence, the study and charm of futile men. What then did Cineas see that was so majestic? O citizens! He saw a spectacle which your riches or your arts could never produce, the most beautiful sight which has ever appeared under heaven, an assembly of two hundred virtuous men, worthy of commanding in Rome and governing the earth.


Jean-Jacques Rousseau


#fabricius #frivolous #rome #values #virtue



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Did you know about Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

Moreover Rousseau advocated the opinion that insofar as they lead people to virtue all religions are equally worthy and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. Following the French Revolution other commentators fingered a potential danger of Rousseau’s project of realizing an “antique” conception of virtue amongst the citizenry in a modern world (e. Although in this state he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature he gains in return others so great his faculties are so stimulated and developed his ideas so extended his feelings so ennobled and his whole soul so uplifted that did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever and instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal made him an intelligent being and a man.

Rousseau's novel Émile: or On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau's autobiographical writings—his Confessions which initiated the modern autobiography and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker—exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing.

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