‘Each of you above all wishes to be an orator himself’
Thucydides put the pessimism of Cleon of Athens on display in his narraÂtion of the two days’ debate over the short-lived Mytilenean rebellion. ‘Each of you above all wishes to be an orator himself’, as Cleon of Athens put it, in the course of regretting that the ‘assembly made itself a dupe for every new proposal’.21 Bentham and Jefferson, however, were more open-minded about changes in procedural rules.
Speaking of ‘every article of rules’ in a procedural code, Bentham declared, that ‘a good system of tactics will presÂent a general advantage’. ‘The more nearly it approaches perfection’, he continued, ‘the more completely will it facilitate to all the co-operators the exercise of their intelligence and the enjoyment of their liberty’.22Notes
1 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 3.36-3.50.
2 Ibid, 3.36.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 3.37.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibtd., 1.21.
7 Ibtd., 1.22.
8 Ibtd., 3.37.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibtd.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 3.49.
14 Bentham, Essay, 330.
15 Burke, Works, 2:267; Speech Presenting... A Plan for the... Economical ReforÂmation of the Civil and Other Establishments (1780).
16 Bentham, Essay, 302.
17 Ibid., 365.
18 Jefferson, Papers, 33:134-52.
19 Burke, Works, 3: 231 at 310; Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
20 Ibid.
21 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 3.38.
22 Ibid.