The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, November 4, 2021

“History has been unfair to this “age of despots” because it has spoken here chiefly through the most brilliant and most prejudiced of historians. It is true that the gossip of Suetonius often confirms—or follows—the invective of Tacitus; but the study of literature and inscriptions has condemned them both as mistaking the vices of ten emperors for the record of an empire and a century. There was something good in the worst of these rulers-devoted statesmanship in Tiberius, a charming gaiety in Caligula, a plodding wisdom in Claudius, an exuberant aestheticism in Nero, a stern competence in Domitian. Behind the adulteries and the murders an administrative organization had formed which provided, through all this period, a high order of provincial government. The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power. Some disease in the blood, fired by the heat of loosed desire, had pursued the Julio-Claudians as fatally as the children of Atreus; and some flaw in the system had debased the Flavians in one generation from patient statesmanship to terrified cruelty. Seven of these ten men met a violent end; nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of a home. They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death. They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods.

–Will Durant, “Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization, Volume III” (1944).