Sublime

When Gaius was acclaimed emperor on Tiberius’ death in 37 CE, he must have seemed like a welcome change. Just twenty-four years old, he had as good a claim to the throne as any Julio-Claudian could hope for. His mother, Agrippina, was the daughter of Julia, and so the granddaughter of Augustus in his direct bloodline. His father, Germanicus – once

The emperor Tiberius summed up the basic ethics of Roman rule rather well when he said, in reaction to some excessive profits turned in from the provinces, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not shaven’.

Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

Clodius’ subsequent reputation for outright villainy has been almost entirely formed by Cicero’s enmity. He has gone down in history as the mad patrician who not only arranged to be adopted into a plebeian family in order to stand for the tribunate but also put two fingers up to the whole process by choosing an adoptive father younger than himself.

Caligula incarne le nihilisme : pour lui, tout se vaut, tout est permis, rien n'est interdit. Il n'y a ni bien ni mal, ni bon ni mauvais. Il est engagé dans une folie à laquelle il donne son mouvement, sa force et son déroulé. Il veut exercer la liberté totale, absolue, sans limites, sans retenue, il sait qu'il paiera cet exercice de sa propre vie.

The emperor Commodus, dressed as a gladiator and threatening the senators in the front-row seats of the Colosseum by waving the head of a decapitated ostrich at them, is often taken to sum up the ludicrous sadism of corrupt autocracy.