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by
Emma Southon
Read between
September 15 - September 25, 2018
A much more useful way to look at the way that Tacitus, Dio and Suetonius constructed their writing is to think about the story that David Cameron fucked a pig.
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Daniel Griliopoulos
Almost any accusation of incest can be disregarded because incest was a bizarrely common accusation in the first century CE; there are numerous examples of people openly making accusations of incest in order to take out their enemies. So, either the Romans were constantly fucking their siblings, or it’s a strange cultural quirk of the period to accuse your enemies of fucking their siblings. Dealing with the rest, however, can be a problem.
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Claudius had had a previous son by his first wife but he had died in his early teens after throwing a bit of pear in the air, catching it in his mouth and then choking to death on it.
Only one source explicitly states that ‘Passienus was slain by the treachery of Agrippina� and that is a confused marginal note on a much later manuscript of Juvenal’s fourth satire. This satire mentions a Quintus Crispus, and, at some point in the fourth or fifth century, a scholar attempted to add a helpful note to the margin of his manuscript explaining who Quintus Crispus was. Unfortunately, the scholar got a little muddled with his Crispuses and accidentally wrote a 115-word mini-biography of Passienus Crispus instead.
I love this book’s behind the scenes accounts of how history is actually made
Augustus’s genius was to give up a good deal of his legitimate powers as a magistrate or consul or whatever, but build up his personal authority so everyone semi-voluntarily agreed that he could do what he liked because he was so brilliant as a person. His difficulty came with passing that onto his successors, but that’s a difficulty for another book. He spent decades building a system of government from the outside in until he was the sole ruler of the Roman Empire and no one could quite remember how they’d all agreed to it, but they did think he deserved it.
Reminder that Mark Zuckerberg idolises Augustus.
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