Stealing from humanity

Tyranny is hateful not merely because it abridges the inalienable rights of man, but also because it cheats humanity of what might have been, what should have been our common gift.

How many artists, inventors and authors must surely have perished in the Holocaust!

How many great minds live and die unknown today in lands ruled by criminals – in Byelorus, in North Korea – for only rarely in history does the genius of a Solzhenitsyn survive in spite of oppression and his work slip across the border into free lands!

Caesar Augustus, whose month this is, had a freedman in his employ, one Phaedrus, who apparently suffered no ill at his hands, and whose fables are extant today, though barely known.

From Phaedrus we get the brilliant observation:

“Homo doctus in se simper divitias habet.” (A man of learning always has riches within himself.)

But this same Augustus also banished Ovid, one of the greatest poets of the Roman Empire, to what was then the edge of nowhere (a settlement in today’s Romania) over some outrage that no one has ever quite diagnosed with certainty.

And so he who gave us the beautiful Metamorphoses and Love Poems, died in that place, bitter and unhappy – and humanity must always wonder, what might have been.

Obedience School for your inner Genius

Some Roman once wrote of the poet Ovid:

"He would have been a better poet if he had controlled his genius instead of letting his genius control him."

I have pondered and pondered that sentence but it still makes no sense to me.

Any thoughts?

Winner of the best response gets a certificate for ten days free obedience training for his/her inner genius.