What Machiavelli knew about power, and what the post-truth age has perfected Sometime in the middle of the sixth century BC, long before the democracy of Pericles made Classical Athens famous, an extraordinary procession approached the city. Riding in a chariot was Peisistratus, an Athenian aristocrat and military figure who had already seized political power…
Alfred the Great survived invasion, humiliation, and near-collapse. What he did next turned a desperate comeback into a kingdom built to endure. Almost everyone who thinks of Alfred the Great remembers the cakes. The story is irresistible. A defeated king, hiding anonymously in a peasant woman’s house, is told to watch some cakes baking by…
The qualities that carry people into power are often not the qualities needed to use it well. Sometimes they are their opposites. A society may therefore select its most dangerous leaders not despite their defects, but because those defects first appeared to be strengths. One of the strangest failures in public life occurs when everyone…
Boethius, Fortuna, and why success may prove a greater test of leadership than failure. The worship of a leader does not remain confined to the worshipper. It ascends. Repeated applause begins to sound like evidence. Electoral victory, commercial success, military triumph, or rapid promotion may cease to appear as temporary outcomes shaped by many forces….
The ancient world understood something we prefer to avoid: corrupt power does not survive only by deceiving people. It survives by giving them strength, revenge, belonging, and permission. One of the revealing moments in public life comes when people stop saying, “This leader is not corrupt,” and begin saying, “Perhaps they are corrupt, but they…
The ancient world did not treat leadership as a set of presentation skills. It asked a tougher question: can a person govern anger, fear, ambition, vanity, and desire well enough to be trusted with power? We speak often today about emotional intelligence. The phrase is modern, but the concept is ancient. Long before leadership programs…
