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As we've noted many times in these pages, one common way in which people attempt to demonstrate the aptness of a particular social or political viewpoint is to put its expression into the mouth of a revered historical figure. Surely if one of great minds of our civilization, someone who lived hundreds (or even thousands) of years ago, said the very same thing we're thinking today, then surely that's proof we've hit upon some eternal truth that should be sagaciously heeded. In short, attributing apocryphal quotations to everyone from Confucius to Abraham Lincoln is an attempt to capitalize on the maxim that great minds think alike. One prime representative of this phenomenon is the passage reproduced above, which warns about the perils of governments' overspending their budgets and lavishing too much money on foreign aid and welfare programs. For the last half century it has been attributed to Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero and widely quoted by politicians and pundits seeking to bolster their arguments in favor of fiscal conservatism. For example, Louisiana representative Otto Passman, who for thirty years pursued a relentless battle against spending for foreign aid in the U.S. Congress, read these words into the Congressional Record on April 25, 1968: On March 29, 1971 the Chicago Tribune published a letter from a reader who invoked the same words to make a similar point: Those words were never uttered by Cicero, however; and the reason no one ever quoted them as such until about fifty years ago is because they weren't written until 1965. They sprang from the pen of Taylor Caldwell, a fiction writer best known for historical novels such as Captains and the Kings, her 1972 best-selling chronicle of the rise to wealth and power of an Irish immigrant named Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh (which was also made into a popular television mini-series in 1976). Caldwell penned several novels based on real-life religious and historical figures, including Genghis Khan (The Earth Is the Lord's), Cardinal Richelieu (The Arm and the Darkness), Saint Luke (Dear and Glorious Physician), Saint Paul (Great Lion of God), Aspasia (Glory and the Lightning), and Judas Iscariot (I, Judas). Her 1965 effort A Pillar of Iron was a historical novel about the life of Cicero, the great Roman statesman who is a pillar of iron as he publicly maintains his search for honor and justice under law in the face of plots against his life and his country. Although A Pillar of Iron often drew directly from the recorded speeches and letters of Cicero for its dialogue, it was nonetheless a work of fiction, and the now famous statement from Cicero about balancing the budget was an invention of Caldwell's and not a reproduction of Cicero's own words. In fact, the novel doesn't even present these words as something spoken by Cicero, but rather as a summation of Cicero's political philosophy presented as a preface to an imagined conversation between Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida: As Jess Stearn observed in In Search of Taylor Caldwell, this imagined historical conversation was reflective of Caldwell's own political outlook much more than Cicero's: She was a conservative politically, believing the spoils belonged to those who toiled for them. There were not free lunches. She abhorred the welfare philosophy that gave handouts to free-loaders, decrying rewards for indolence and incompetence. Or, as John Blundell aptly quipped in Ladies for Liberty, Taylor Caldwell gives us fiscal policy, civil service reform, cuts in aid to less developed countries, and welfare reform all in one sentence. The reproductions of Caldwell's words as a historical quote from Cicero have altered the original a fair bit over the years: the admonition that prudence and frugality should be put into practice as soon as possible was quickly dropped from the end of the sentence; people have replaced mobs as the ones who should be forced to work and not depend on the government for subsistence; the proclamation that the arrogance of the generals should be tempered and controlled now refers to generic officialdom rather than military figures; and the warning that this advice need be followed lest Rome become bankrupt has mutated into the more ominous-sounding lest Rome fall.
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