Which Emperor Does Trump Resemble?
Brief Lessons From 1800 Years Ago
I posted this on Medium eight years ago and, given the wages of memory, forgot about it until I tripped across it just now in my Finder. It’s not that I need to relive a rare instance of foresight. I think it still has something to say:
In February 2017, the distinguished academic Mary Beard gave a scholarly talk in Rome and, as a Classics professor at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the Royal Academy of Ancient Literature, mentioned that reporters often asked her which Roman emperor Donald Trump is most like.
She thought it “a silly question” and said she usually didn’t reply.
Donald Trump, of course, does claim imperial privileges, e.g., defying courts, Congress, science, and conventional norms of kindness. He once famously bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
A couple of months later, I ran across this: “Remember that I can do whatever I want to anyone.”
But that wasn’t from the president. The Trump predecessor who said that was the Roman emperor Caracalla. While the sentiment was disturbingly familiar, the name wasn’t. And, when looked up, other similarities surfaced.
Caracalla admired despots. His favorite was the tyrant Alexander the Great. He was so enthralled that he took to mimicking the long-dead Alexander in dress and style despite it being some 500 years out of fashion at the time. When it got so ridiculous that thespians satirized him, Caracalla traveled to see them in Alexandria and, like Alexander might have done, slaughtered the delegation that came to greet him. Then he looted and burned the city.**
This began to sound like a thin-skinned ruler who admired other despots, dressed funny, and seemed able to get away with anything.
Caracalla, who ruled from 198 to 217 CE, overspent on the military and thus ultimately debased the currency. His reign was one of domestic instability. He dumped a wife when he grew tired of her. He despised his challengers and schemed behind the scenes to defeat – in his case, kill – them.
Though the Roman Senate still existed, like ours, it had more or less willed itself into impotence. There was thus no one to check Caracalla, which was why he was free to do whatever he wanted. It included killing his brother and 20,000 of his brother’s followers. He then made it a capital crime to mention his brother’s name.
Lest you get carried away by these parallels, he was not impeached.
He was, however, stabbed to death by one of the many lieutenants he had once insulted and cashiered.
Professor Beard, during her talk in Rome, said she didn’t like to compare Trump to emperors “not because it was unfair to Trump, but because it was maybe unfair to the emperors.”
**When Alexander razed the Greek city of Thebes, he paid his allies by letting them sell some 30,000 Thebans into slavery. He was a prodigious killer. Somehow, 1300 years before the invention of gunpowder, Alexander and his armies managed to kill what historians estimate to be as many as several million people during his ten years of wars in Greece, Persia, Afghanistan, and beyond.