Far from the earliest example, I'm sure, but I'm reading Macaulay's History of England at the moment(*), and I've just come across a classic astroturf ploy:
There was scarcely a market town in England without at least a knot of separatists. No exertion was spared to induce them to express their gratitude for the Indulgence. Circular letters, imploring them to sign, were sent to every corner of the kingdom in such numbers that the mail bags, it was sportively said, were too heavy for the posthorses.
That's James I trying to enlist the support of Nonconformists against the Church of England, for anyone who's curious about context. (There's also a great claim-and-counterclaim PR fight between the Court and the Church - but that's just dirty politics, not astroturf.)
(*) Why, yes, I have been reading Ken MacLeod's Blog. Why do you ask?
Dave:
And of course, the cut-up technique for writing poetry was already old hat by 1943. See Tristan Tzara, "Pour faire un poème dadaïste", 1920.
Owlmirror:
Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates. One of his two best (with On Stranger Tides), in my opinion.
How about this, which the opening quote brings irresistably to my mind:
The cur foretells the knell of parting day;
The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
The wise man homeward plods; I only stay
To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.
I feel kind of bad now - if it wasn't for me then all those boxes of Newberry Fruits might still be circulating.
Just for the record, though, I'd like it to be known that I draw the line at "Wrath of Kahn" photonovels.
Greg:
IIRC, Newberry Fruits were soft fruit jellies with a liquid centre, sold in boxes like chocolates. Because they contained almost no natural ingredients they were about half the price of an equivalently-sized box of chocolates, and thus much in demand as gifts for people one didn't particularly like. Presumably, this also made them a top choice for corporate gifts from printers and the like.
I rather liked them, and I'm sorry they've gone - they were the only sweet I know of that included goosberry as a standard flavour.
abi:
...one was one of a few for which French was considered too accessible, and the facing page translation was in Italian instead.
I've seen this in old (first publiction circa 1925) editions of Martial and Petronius in the Loeb Classical Library, which my university had evidently picked up in used book sale somewhere. No French in those - just Italian, although some previous scholar had left a Complete Dictionary of Dirty Latin in neat pencil on the endpapers of (I think) one of the Martials.
One memorable scene in the Satyricon featured Our Heroes arriving at a dinner party where they are greeted by the hostess waving a sponge soaked in aphrodisac, six solid pages of Italian, and back to English in time for them to wake up the next morning with hangovers. A full English version could only have been an anticlimax.
Well, I'm British - and you're letting the side down.
I recommend Rococo for chocolate, myself. They do Valrhona single-bean estate and some good flavoured bars - the milk chocolate with sea salt is particularly good. They even do online ordering - but the cost of shipping to the US is insanely high, alas.
(Or if you prefer chocolates, then L'Artisan du Chocolat is the place. Except that they barely do mail order at all.)
matt:
Your novella is "Eyes of Amber", by Joan Vinge. You'll find it in the story collection of the same name, or as the cover story of a late-Seventies issue of "Analog" whose details I don't recall.
(Remember when Joan Vinge was the famous one?)
This is fall-of-the-empire stuff... Any parallels with Rome, a generation or so after Augustus?
I don't know exactly what you've got in mind here, but that's about a century before what's usually considered the high point of the Roman Empire, and about four centuries before the fall.
If you're looking for a tragedy of hubris in foreign policy and the corruptions of power then you're better off with Thucydides's "Peloponnesian War".
Oh, and I just noticed - "assassins and gladiators" (on the page that I link to) is best read as "assassins and gangsters" in this context. Literal translation over idiomatic again.
Theresa, my Latin's only just good enough to handle facing-text-and-translation (if you see what I mean) but the Perseus translation seems to be very literal, if a little archaic in the choice of words.
As for delivery... I don't really know, but I find it hard to imagine anything other than a really bombastic style with a lot of dramatic gestures. (Part of the pleasure for me is the image of a very young Cicero standing up in court and launching into this incredibly over the top speech that _begins_ by accusing the prosecutors of the murder his client is on trial for.) I think it would have been considered over the top at the time, too - his later speeches read more smoothly but are a lot less fun, in my opinion.
I know it's tangential at best, but I still say Cicero's "For Sextus Roscius" is unbeatable for sheer melodrama:
if any pretence for the accusation--if any suspicion of this act--if, in short, any, the least thing be found,--so that in bringing forward this accusation they shall seem to have had some real object,--if you find any cause whatever for it, except that plunder which I have mentioned, I will not object to the life of Sextus Roscius being abandoned to [his accusors'] pleasure.
As a Londoner who uses public transport, I'd consider him more heroic if he took the angle-grinder to the cars.
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