In the Caesarian section!
I was pondering this the other day but then Mr Gibbon beat me to the answer.
WASHINGTON - As part of the ongoing effort to determine his place among previous absolute rulers of the world, President Bush met today with historian Edward Gibbon. Gibbon, author of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, was given three minutes alone with Bush in the Oval Office to explain how unchecked power leads to institutional decay. Despite the limited time frame, Gibbon, speaking afterwards with reporters in the White House driveway, said he came away impressed.
"He is quite hard to classify in that he is more delusional than Caligula and less artistic than Nero. He is consistently cruel and self-centered in the manner of a Commodus, yet possessed of a combination of effeminacy and abject physical cowardice that I have never previously encountered."
Gibbon was not ready to give the President a final grade. "From everything I can tell this Bush person is perhaps a Caesar at best. It is said that the true Emperor lives deep beneath the sewers of a place called the Naval Observatory. Whatever that is."
I don't think Commodus was from the Julio-Claudian line. He succeeded Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Julio-Claudians [and a Stoic philosopher of some note as well]. But I could be wrong.
Don't think it's an insult to be label GWB a Caesar. Astute military leader, saw battle often. Neither of which is true of Dubya the Second.
Looking firther afield, I'd think maybe Constantine the Great [imposing his religious beliefs on the rest of the polity], Julian the Apostate [last pagan emperor ofRrome] or Stilicho [one of the many emperors made and deposed by the Praetorian Guard, of no real note except he's got a really cool name and way back in college in Intro to Art I recall a pic of a bust of this fellow].
You're right about Commodus, but wrong about "Caesar"
Caesar
Emperor, Junior Grade
In 27 BC Octavian Caesar, adopted son of Julius Caesar, assumed the title Augustus (revered one). This move is taken by historians as the beginning of the Roman Empire. Augustus, a title, has become the name by which Octavian is best known to history. Members of his family bore the name Caesar. Following the death of Augustus in 14 AD, Tiberius Caesar assumed the title Augustus and became emperor. Throughout the Julio-Claudian line (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero) the heir to the throne was a Caesar (his family name) but only one man, the emperor, bore the title Augustus. Following the death of Nero, last of the Caesar family, emperors continued to take both the names Caesar and Augustus as signs of their position. In 69, Vespasian Caesar Augustus became emperor and designated his sons Titus and Domitian as Caesars. Each would later become Augustus upon the death of his predecessor but coins were issued before they became emperor. This established a precedent that would continue for the next three centuries using the family name of Julius Caesar as a title for the heir to the throne. The emperor himself held both titles (Caesar and Augustus) the heir only Caesar. Interestingly, the title Caesar was not extended to the emperor's entire family but just to the heirs (some rulers gave the title to more than one son). Women were never Caesar but wives and daughters were titled Augusta.
Groucho Marx in the emperor
Sorry, I was referencing the original Caesar, Julius, lover of Liz Taylor, very unwilling pincushion for Brutus and company, and the subject of a stiring funeral oration by Marlon Brando [1954], Richard Burton [1963], and Charlton Heston [1970?], as told by some Elizabethian English playright whose name escapes me. I had assumed, wrongly it appears, that he was the founder of the Julio-Claudian line, since it bears his name.
See, that Seinfeld episode where George stopped thinking and sex and became really smart got it wrong. I never imagined that slavering, sex-crazed whoremongers [not you of course, it's a joke] could command such scholarship on dormant topics of such frightfully narrow interest to the masses. I mean, c'mon, between Jay-Z and Gibbon, between Beyonce and Livia, who do you think the masses can identify more readily?
Well, no matter. Frustrated classicists have found an unexpected home here. Who'da thunk it?
Caesar, as a title, lives on beyond the dead lamguage of Latin. Both the German "Kaiser" and the Russian "Czar" derive from it. There may also be a third one, but me forget.
And also, one of the emporer's tiles was "Pontifus Maximus" which the ever-wily Catholics unlawfully appropriated and adopted [and adapted] as a title for the Bishop of Rome [aka The Pope] - "Pontiff." The Pontifus Maximus title means something like "great bridge builder" but ought not to be taken literally as indicating that they were the Robert Moses of their time [though the Romans were the great civil engineers of classical antiquity].
I'm enjoying your erudition on things ancient.
In the Caesarian section!
most people think. Claudius survived all of his wicked stepmother's machinations and then his nephew Caligula,'s short reign.
Plus, everyone thinks Bush is an obnoxious dolt when he is not.
That makes a world of difference.
and remember when clark clifford referred to RWReagan as an "amiable dolt"?
I was always fascinated by the ancients. The thing that sealed it for me was the Pyramids. The realization, when I was very young, that to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the Pyramids were as ancient to him as he is to us just blew me away.
It does put things into perspective, doesn't it