On Saturday she confirmed her departure herself on X, proclaiming the princeps kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic and hardworking, and calling it an honour to have served him. Six praises for five days: more praise than time. No reason for the removal was given in public. The censures of reporters and nameless officials are taken for the reason, as if a cause were whatever the ill-disposed say. Who vetted her beforehand, who approved her, why the charge about the examination was not discovered sooner: on all of it the reports are silent. A Roman magistrate would ask this first: not who fell, but who raised her up.

The Washington Examiner, however, digs deeper and asks what need there is of a herald when the princeps himself talks daily with reporters and with the people, often running ahead of his own heralds. To us the question is not new. So Augustus began "to rise by degrees, drawing into his own hands the functions of the senate, the magistrates and the laws, with no one opposing." The consuls remained, with name and chair and lictors; the substance had passed to one man. The same now happens to the voice: the office remains, the podium remains, the name remains; another man speaks.

In the same days, as Defense News reports, three officials, their names withheld, asserted that the order to slow Starshield, which the Ukrainians use in their war, came from inside the White House itself. A senior official, likewise unnamed, denied that the president had ever made any such request; asked about other officials, the White House did not answer. Here are the secrets of power: in light matters the princeps says everything himself, in grave ones he is silent, and those whom no one names speak for him. The public herald, whom all can see, is set aside; the hidden voices, whom none can see, endure.

Nor is Zacharia herself to be acquitted. Between abrupt defiance and degrading compliance the middle road is seldom kept, and she, dismissed, chose compliance. It is human nature to hate the one you have injured; here the injured party praises, which is a surer sign of servitude than hatred. Pallas and Narcissus, the freedmen of Claudius, had at least received power in exchange for liberty; she is left not even power, only the obligation to praise.

The remedy, if there is one, belongs to our ancestors: let the man who chooses a magistrate account for his choice, and let any mark of disgrace attach to the one who chose. Either give the herald authority, so that he may say something the princeps has not yet said, or abolish the title of the office, so that the appearance does not lie where the substance is lacking. All this took place some twenty days before the midterm elections, when every embarrassment is cut off faster than it is examined.

Five days were enough for her to learn what our fathers learned in a hundred years: under a princeps who does all the speaking himself, the herald's task is to praise and to go.