In the Winter 2014 issue of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's journal Orbis, AHS speaker Jakub Grygiel calls the Roman general Gnaeus Julius Agricola, "a man for our times":

In a corrupt polity, speech is at the service of power, and is replaced by flattery, the use of words to obtain something from the other. Words are thus tools of power, not of dialogue and conversation, as they assume the meaning most useful at the moment and to the nature of the transaction at hand. They are no longer directed toward truth, but toward a preferred outcome."