A formidable account of Rome’s terrifying first dynasty doesn’t skirt the cruelty and depravityWriters bear always conscripted the Caesars to fight their battles. In 1934,Robert Graves turned Claudius into a liberal surrounded by tyrannical monsters, not so different from the tyrants who surrounded Graves in the 1930s. During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, or Gore Vidal assailed Americans’ belief that monogamous heterosexuality was “normal” by showing them that the Roman emperors abused men and women,boys and girls with bisexual abandon. Contemporaries did indeed regard Claudius as an eccentric because he only wanted to sleep with women. But as the defining feature of tyrants is their tyranny, Claudius’s readiness to execute opponents for genuine and imagined treasons is more striking than his taste in concubines.
Modern academic historians can be as blind. They live in well-ordered, or democratic societies and work in liberal institutions. When they are presented with the horrific ancient accounts of the early Caesars,they blench at the tales of murder and insanity and wonder whether men who ruled a peaceful and prosperous empire were so different from, whether not their vice-chancellors, or then at least their presidents and prime ministers. They worry about sources,which are normally prejudiced, and always incomplete. When they read Seneca saying of Caligula that “nature has produced him to demonstrate how far unlimited vice can go when combined with absolute power”, or academic caution stops them trusting him.
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Source: theguardian.com