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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2087 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

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Not a question as such, but I'm currently reading Tom Holland's Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar.

Holland does not like the artist who will be known as Augustus. He can't insult him and his motivations enough. And yet, funnily, he also gives him full credit for indeed bringing peace to Rome after the Civil War and ruling well.

Funnily enough, bits of the description remind me of Trump (not that I think Trump is on a par as a ruler with Augustus, but he certainly would share the taste for and admiration of marble and gold in pulling down the old shabby and putting up shiny new buildings, for one thing):

Indeed, the Princeps was widely known as a man who could enjoy a joke against himself. Meeting a young man who looked just like him, he asked, ‘“Tell me, was your mother ever in Rome?” “No,” came the answer. “But my father was – often.”’ Anecdotes such as these did wonders for the Princeps’s image. It helped as well that he could give as good as he got. Augustus’s sense of humour, like that of the vast mass of his fellow citizens, inclined to the raucous. Dwarves, cripples, people with gout: all prompted him to celebrated witticisms. Maecenas was joshed by the Princeps for his ‘loose, effeminate and languishing style’, Horace for being fat. Augustus meant it all affably enough. That he addressed the poet as ‘the very cleanest of pricks’ was a mark of affection, not contempt – and he was perfectly capable, in his dealings with those he cherished, of displaying sensitivity and charm. Yet there remained a toughness, an asperity about his character that reminded those with a taste for snobbery of the small-town conservatism from which he had sprung. Whether cheering on boxers in back streets, sporting a battered sunhat or roaring with laughter at the sight of a hunchback, Imperator Caesar Augustus retained just a hint of the provincial.

None of which did him any harm among the mass of the Roman people. It gratified them to think of the Princeps as a man without airs and graces. Intimate personal details, carefully leaked, helped to cast him as a citizen of honest, simple tastes. It was common knowledge that a man whose name served to place him midway between the earth and the heavens ate much like a peasant, that his bread was coarse and his wine of an unfashionable vintage. Divine appetites, even in the son of a god, were capable of causing bitter resentment. Augustus had discovered this the hard way. ...At a time when Rome was in the grip of famine, he had held a drinking party to which all the guests had come dressed as immortals. The groom himself had starred as the golden and eternally youthful god of light and music, Apollo. Down in the streets of the starving city, outrage at the news had blended with bitterness and scorn. ‘Yes, to be sure,’ men had cried, ‘Caesar is Apollo – Apollo the Torturer.’

The same parallels seem to have occurred to a Guardian reviewer back in 2015 when the book was published!

Tom Holland has gradually become one of my favorite authors, and one of the best working historians alive today. Though my beloved old history professor liked to refer to Augustus and the other imperatores of the late republic as "the Godfather and all those other little mafiosos" so perhaps I'm a little more receptive to some good-natured ribbing of the Princeps than the average bear. Dominion and In the Shadow of the Sword are also particularly good reads.

Lo and behold, he is not a formally trained historian, and actually got his start writing paranormal horror novels. Just goes to show how necessary the modern academy is to actually producing good, impactful, and readable history when a failed horror novelist with no credentials to speak of is eating their lunch.

I've enjoyed everything I've read by Tom Holland, he's great. Currently I have read Rubicon, Millennium (weirdly title changed in the US to The Forge Of Christendom), and Dynasty. Recently I was at the used bookstore and saw Dominion and Pax, and I'm really looking forward to both.

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