DG posted this on Facebook (Can someone please drag him over to fedi?):
I recommend rewatching the amazing TV series of I, Claudius starring so many great British actors that it's a landmark.
It's also a warning.
Before the series starts, Julius Caesar marches army across the river Tiber. Oops, a conquering hero is not supposed to do that -- but Caesar declares himself emperor, and in that action, he destroys the power of the senate.
Later on, Caesar is assassinated by the Roman senate, and while much has been made of Caesar's death as a tragedy, I always root for the senate. Caesar was a dictator.
After some unpleasantness with Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Octavian becomes the emperor. He does not restore the senate's authority, he becomes Augustus, the emperor.
That's where I, Claudius begins and we see Augustus (Brian Blessed) trying to be a good emperor, but he is succeeded by Tiberius who is a terrible emperor who is succeeded by Caligula who is an even worse emperor. The Praetorian Guard assassinated Caligula and by all accounts they did a good thing.
Caligula was succeeded by Claudius, who ruled for over two decades. Rome settled down for a whle. Despite the portrayal of Claudius as a very good emperor, that's a fiction created by the author Robert Graves. More likely, Claudius was somewhat deficient, and the empire ran itself.
Unfortunately, Claudius was succeeded by Nero, about whom nothing flattering has been written.
We have enough fragments of the Satyricon by Petronius to get some sense of the time, but Petronius apparently pissed off Nero and committed suicide before the Roman guards could arrive to kill him. (The Satyricon, both the original story and the Fellini movie developed from it, suggest that homosexual relationships were commonplace and easily accepted in ancient Rome.)
The real tragedy here is that we really do not have enough information about the history of Rome, literacy was not common.
Future generations will find much more exhaustive records of the collapse of the American empire. Trump's name will probably rank with Nero or maybe Caligula -- and future generations will have mountains of evidence to demonstrate just how our particular empire collapsed -- and will argue at length whether or not we deserved it.
Or ... we can turn this thing around before it goes over the cliff, and future generations will read a much more admirable history of this time.
