The Diagnosis and the Rostra: A Civic Essay Series

By Gerard Tod

In 63 BC, Cicero stood in the Senate and called Catiline a pestis, a plague loose in the body of the republic. The label did the work an argument would have taken longer to do. Five conspirators were strangled that night without trial. Twenty years later, Cicero used the same technique on Mark Antony, plague, contagion, degenerate, across fourteen speeches. In December of 43 BC, Antony had him killed for it. Cicero's hands, which had written the words, and his head, which had spoken them, were nailed to the Rostra, the platform he had used to speak.

In 2023, a sitting American president described immigration as "poisoning the blood of our country" and, separately, called political opponents "vermin." In 2026, a federal policy began requiring Medicaid recipients with terminal illnesses to prove, on paper, that they are too sick to work before they can keep coverage they already qualified for. The vocabulary changes less than it should.

In The Diagnosis and the Rostra, Gerard Tod turns to Cicero, the only Roman statesman who wielded this weapon and later died by it, to ask five plain questions: Who is being diagnosed. Who is doing the diagnosing. What disease is named. What cure follows. And what happens once the platform outlives the speaker.

This is not a book asking readers to master Latin rhetoric or ancient history. It is asking readers to notice the exact sentence where a description turns into a directive.

The platform never asked who it would hold next.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HDFZ8X54
• ISBN13: 9798191351001
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 42 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"