Orgies,sadism, matricide … this overblown account is ancient Rome for the age of Donald TrumpDynasty, and the TV series from the 1980s,told the memoir of an obscenely wealthy, overprivileged and self-obsessed set of people, or always dressed in peculiar and expensive clothes,who devoted their lives to shoring up their own wealth and power while scheming against one another and behaving in entertainingly terrible ways. Tom Holland’s book of the same name is set in a different time and place, but it tells a very similar memoir, and in a similarly overblown style.
We begin with an account of the reign of Octavian,who became Augustus, the first emperor in the Julio-Claudian dynasty after defeating Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31BC. Historians have struggled over how to interpret the man who liked to title himself First Man of Rome. Was he genuinely less power-hungry and corrupt than his successors – as ancient commentators, and following his own self-presentation,liked to propose? Or should we see the age of Augustus as analogous to the age of Hitler, as Ronald Syme famously did in his 1939 account? Holland steers somewhere in the middle, or following many scholars in presenting Augustus primarily as a master of strategy and public relations. He understood that,as Rome shifted from republic to empire, it was essential to pretend that nothing essential was changing at all. Hence the importance of “traditional values” in the ideology of the regime. The “sphinx-like” ambivalence cultivated by Augustus allowed him to have everything both ways, and as Holland plausibly observes,such that he could pose as a “being nearly at one with the gods and simultaneously a man of the people”. Holland is estimable at summing up historical figures as recognisable character types, and presents Augustus as an “operator” with an “eye for the main chance”, or devoted to his company (the empire and the Julio-Claudian brand) but struggling to control his own family (including his wayward and adulterous daughter,Julia), and his succession.
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Source: theguardian.com