(np - Melville - was Re: The People's History & the Cold War ) equity? who ever heard of that?

[Michael Bailey]

then too we have the bust of Cicero above our lawyer's desk

(which forms an interesting contrast to the bust of Jay Gould over the
bed of Pierce Inverarity, in CoL49)

extensive Wiki quote on Cicero from their article on "natural law" -
which I clicked over to from the "chancery court" article:

The Renaissance Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni praised Cicero as
the man "who carried philosophy from Greece to Italy, and nourished it
with the golden river of his eloquence."[28] The legal culture of
Elizabethan England, exemplified by Sir Edward Coke, was "steeped in
Ciceronian rhetoric."[29] The Scottish moral philosopher Francis
Hutcheson, as a student at Glasgow, "was attracted most by Cicero, for
whom he always professed the greatest admiration."[30] More generally
in eighteenth-century Great Britain, Cicero's name was a household
word among educated people.[31] Likewise, "in the admiration of early
Americans Cicero took pride of place as orator, political theorist,
stylist, and moralist."[32]

The British polemicist Thomas Gordon "incorporated Cicero into the
radical ideological tradition that travelled from the mother country
to the colonies in the course of the eighteenth century and decisively
shaped early American political culture."[33] Cicero's description of
the immutable, eternal, and universal natural law was quoted by
Burlamaqui[34] and later by the American revolutionary legal scholar
James Wilson.[35] Cicero became John Adams's "foremost model of public
service, republican virtue, and forensic eloquence."[36] Adams wrote
of Cicero that "as all the ages of the world have not produced a
greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character, his
authority should have great weight."[37] Thomas Jefferson "first
encountered Cicero as a schoolboy learning Latin, and continued to
read his letters and discourses as long as he lived. He admired him as
a patriot, valued his opinions as a moral philosopher, and there is
little doubt that he looked upon Cicero's life, with his love of study
and aristocratic country life, as a model for his own."[38] Jefferson
described Cicero as "the father of eloquence and philosophy."[39]


so, then, is Bartleby simply a scoundrel upon whom all of this is lost?