It is the year LIX, BCE. The Roman LIX translates into 59 in Arabic, soon to proclaimed “American Numerals” by Trumpius Maximus, newly returned to the Consulship.
BCE stands for Big, Crazy Entertainment, and it is fitting that this edition of the games are being staged in Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans. During his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar besieged and then obliterated old Orleans, then called Cenabum. Later Roman overlords of the province would bestow the name Aurelanium on the city. The first 59 BCE (Before the Common Era) was the year that Caesar was first elected Consul.
I watched Sunday’s American gladiatorial spectacle with a Dane—soon-to-be an enemy combatant in the looming Bellum Americanum—and the famed Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero. We were in an unheated safe house in the midst of the Arctic temperatures of Upstate New York (actually colder than those now prevailing in the Arctic). As historical happenstance would have it, we were not far from two towns named in his honor: Tully and Cicero, both in Onondaga County.
Cicero hated Caesar, though he was not part of the conspiracy that assassinated the usurper in the Roman Senate in 44 BCE. Nonetheless, Cicero wrote that he “wished he had been invited to that superb banquet.”
In the aftermath of the bloodbath in the Curia, Cicero lambasted Ceasar’s henchman and would-be successor, Marc Antony, in a series of fourteen speeches known as the Philippics. Antony’s thugs then tracked down Cicero as he fled the Italian peninsula and cut off his head and hands.
When Antony’s wife Fulvia saw Cicero’s severed head displayed in the Roman forum, she grabbed hold of the legendary orator’s tongue and began jabbing it with a hairpin pulled from her lavish coif.
Luckly, Cicero’s allies included Rome’s leading physician, Asclepiades, who had not only developed an atomic theory of the human body, but was also the inventor of cryogenics. Just in time, the good doctor had this beautiful mind spirited to a subzero cave in the bowels of an Alpine glacier north of Milan (Mediolanum), where Cicero has been cooling his head—though not his heels (these were never found)—for the last two millennia-and-change.
That glacier has been melting quickly in recent decades, so, thanks to a Living Latin kick-starter campaign, Cicero has recently been moved secretly to a luxury frost-o-leum at an unspecified location in North American. As befits his exalted status, Cicero’s current berth is between the noggins of baseball immortal Ted Williams and Walt Disney, who, since his temporary demise in 1966, has been anything but animated.
Soon after it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would do this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, a secret meeting of the Ciceronian Cryonic Society (CCS) deemed it worthwhile, nay essential, that, for the first time since his beheading, the celebrated orator be warmed up a few degrees in a slow oven.
Cicero would want to know what’s going down in the American Republic during the current stampede towards Dictatorship. Cicero had seen it all before. He hadn’t fared too well in Ancient Rome under such circumstances, making any advice from him suspect at best. But at least he could offer rhetorically elegant commentary.
Cicero is on record—papyrus and occasionally parchment—as enjoying the theatrical preludes to the gladiatorial games staged in the Colosseum. But he found the human combat distasteful and felt particular compassion for the elephants forced to participate. In the Philippics, Cicero savaged Antony for his “gladiator’s body,” one that housed a mind of the same brute qualities.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Cicero scoffed as the dandified champions paraded through the tunnel to the arena, not in their armor, but in purple-suited finery, their hair slicked and styled, their necks draped with gold chains, their mangled fingers ornamented with bejeweled rings, their cauliflower ears coddled by music muffs. Later, when games had at last begun after all the pomp and circumstance, Cicero wondered why the American legionnaires’ curious flying chariots hadn’t descended from above and disgorged their own gladiator to battle with those already in formation on the green, gridded floor of Caesar’s Superdome? I drew the Roman’s attention to the fact that this amphitheater had a roof. “Have these machines not catapults that could launch incendiary missiles to blast a hole in the battlements?” I didn’t dislike the idea.
Just before kick-off, the CCS technicians had hooked up DeepSeek’s recently unveiled Large Latin Language Model and Nero-Neuro-translator to the cooling Kelvin-Pole on which they had mounted Cicero’s head.
Given the Ancient hack-job on his tongue, Cicero wasn’t in top elocutionary form, and during the half-time show he wondered if a kindred lingual fate had befallen the Pulitzer-prize-winning performer. Had some modern-day Fulvia recently mutilated the rapper’s silver tongue?
Even through this marvel of the latest AI technology, Cicero only caught a few words that passed Lamar’s lips as he babbled into what the Roman thought was some kind of magic scroll, not of parchment but of exotic metal gripped tightly and held close to his mouth. Cicero couldn’t make heads or tails of the patter, though he had dropped mega dinari (having gotten into digital currency a good ten years ago) on the coin toss, in spite of his long-ago fulminations against gambling on the games.
Luckily, Cicero had also taken the over on the national anthem, set by oddsmakers at 120.5 seconds. In his heyday Cicero had been a master of rhetorical emphasis and well-timed repetitio, and a warm grin broke through his icy lips grin when Jon Batiste circled back not once, but twice through “the land of the free,” vaulting the New Orleans native’s bluesy rendition of the British-white-man’s-drinking-society-song-equipped-with-an-American-racist’s-ridiculous-lyrics a few seconds past the over/under line. “Tasty tag, my man!” exclaimed Cicero, dollar signs flashing in his frozen eyes.
By contrast, the only words from Lamar’s half-time show that Cicero did understand were: “The revolution will not be televised.” Cicero’s response to that fleeting moment of clarity was immediately seen in English on the DeepSeek tablet and uttered simultaneously by a virtual voice that sounded a lot like James Earl Jones’s: “It could have been televised this very moment in this very place, toppling the would-be emperor from his throne high up in the amphitheater, if you only you, Kendrick Lamar, weren’t so obsessed with the sound of your own indecipherable voice, and the attendant fame and lucre in which you bathe. Entertaining Trumpius and his masses is a form of venal submission, not courageous dissent.”
Two hours earlier, as Batiste had hymned the American Republic (its own over-under expiration-date dropping rapidly in Vegas), Trumpius had risen from his imperial seat in salute. From the crowd came a giant surge of jubilation as the plebes and patricians saw his flame-topped image spread across the giant screen.
It was time for Cicero to quote himself, his prodigious memory undiminished by the intervening centuries since he first gave the speech in the Senate:
“Behold, here you have a man [Caesar] who was ambitious to be king of the Roman People and master of the whole world; and he achieved it! The man who maintains that such an ambition is morally right is a madman; for he justifies the destruction of law and liberty and thinks their hideous and detestable suppression glorious.”
After the rituals opening patriotic displays, Cicero soon became bored by the on-field maneuvers and on-screen decadence, all of it familiar to him from the last days of the Roman Republic. After halftime, Cicero seemed downright depressed. Hyped as a great orator, Kendrick had proved a grave disappointment. Even Trumpius made for a dismal display: “I knew Caesar and Trumpius is no Caesar.”
As the epic “entertainment” ground on, Cicero began to cool further, then lost interest altogether. In the third quarter he glanced over as we finished off the Buffalo Wings. “Finger LIXing good,” he quipped, the great orator reduced to infantile wordplay. Such was the state of the Republic of Rhetoric.
These games were a bust and so was he, he punned again, forlornly.
The CCS technicians came early in the fourth quarter and took him. The Dane made an ardent plea that he be hidden somewhere Greenland, but even she knew that he would not be safe there.
The next morning, we got word that the van had been intercepted by ICE, Cicero kidnapped by one of the Osprey plane-helicopters from the Super Bowl fly-over. His head had been flown immediately south and from a great height pitched into the Gulf of America just off of Nova Aurelianum.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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