What Were Cicero's Fishponds?

Marc Andreessen says Cicero's fishponds were the country projects Rome's capable citizens perfected while they dropped out of public life. He puts the healthy, vital run of the Roman Republic and Empire at about 400 years and treats the figure as rough. Toward the end, as Rome stagnated and started to fall apart, the roads got dangerous and nobody could quite explain why. Competent citizens sat at villas in protected environments they controlled, focused on ornamentation, clothes, and lifestyle.

Cicero, one of the great Roman statesmen, wrote letters to aristocratic friends on exactly that theme. The call was to stop the fishponds, get back out, rejoin the Senate, and keep the system from caving in.

Trump's version on the campaign trail puts a resort and his golf clubs on the table as other ways to spend his life, then says he is staying because he needs to do the work. Trump is 78, with family and grandkids around him, and that campaign line does not reference Cicero. The spirit still matches what Cicero talked about: when times get tough, do people in a position to make positive change step up? A long stretch had passed in which they had not.