Ask A Historian

[Alex K]

Was WW1 really completely pointless/avoidable?

Who says it was avoidable?

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Were Caligula and/or Nero as nasty as painted or were they smeared by later writers?

Was it Elvis or the CIA that fired from the grassy knoll?
(You don't have to answer the second one, I already know.)

Ooh, Julia, I love you.  Magnificent question.  Maybe hard to answer within the confines of a message board but I'll try.  Refer above to earlier answer about writers having an agenda and hold the thought.

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Now, to be clear, literacy in antiquity was the province of the elites.  Estimates in Greco-Roman history are that 90% of the population were illiterate.  But of the remaining 10% most had only a degree of functional literacy which enabled them to perform commercial tasks such as inventory, shipping, receiving, etc.  Only the top few percent could have read complex books on philosophy or what passed for Natural Science or History.  These works were also written by members of the same class so that is the story which we get to hear.  To your two examples let us add Herod the Great.  In all 3 cases what we have written about them was written by their class enemies.

The Julio-Claudian dynasty were the heirs to G. Julius Caesar's victory.  He was one of the Populares (Popular Party) and he defeated the Optimates (Best Men) led by Pompey the Great.  One of the bulwarks of Julio-Claudian power was maintaining the good will of the populace of Rome itself.  There were no uprisings against the Julio-Claudians because they took care of the people.  Now, as to be expected, it was the elites who paid the freight for their largesse.  Augustus and Tiberius through careful stewardship of the public funds left Gaius (Caligula) a bulging treasury.  Caligula was hailed by the people as a son of Germanicus (his father was a brilliant military leader) but shortly after assuming the throne he was stricken by some sort of illness and when he was ill there was genuine consternation throughout the Empire.  Upon recovery he seems to have become somewhat eccentric but it is a question of how bad his derangement was.  The primary biographers are Suetonius and Dio and both lived long after Caligula.  Philo and Seneca, living at the time, have little to say on the subject of, say, incest with his sisters which Suetonius drools over.  Further, Caligula set the stage for his Uncle Claudius' successful invasion of Britain indicating that he was either capable of planning or hiring people who could.  Tales are told of Caligula executing political opponents and seizing their fortunes but the coup against him seems to have been pulled off by the Praetorian Guard. 

Nero suffered through the Great Fire of Rome and while he was at Antium (Anzio) near Naples when it happened he hurried back to Rome and took care of such of the population as he could.  The rebuilding of the city would cost money and that money came from the Senatorial and Equestrian classes because that's where the money was.  We see a little of this sort of thing today where the wealthy elites feel no desire whatsoever to contribute to the public welfare.  Nero did have a political battle with the Senate and he lost and committed suicide.  His successor, Galba, reportedly managed to piss off everyone and his reign lasted barely 7 months which gives some indication that Nero was doing something right by keeping the people on his side.

Herod the Great, the third of our examples, was not "Great" for anything except his ability to survive Roman civil war politics and his building programs. But we can assume that his building projects earned him the gratitude of the commons because he was providing work and therefore money...money which again would have come from the Upper Classes which in Judaea meant the priests and their hangers-on. As with the earlier two, we have no indication of any sort of popular rising against him, merely intrigues by the former Hasmonean rulers and the nobles who would have preferred one of their own to be king rather than Herod who was basically an Arab. 

So, you are correct to doubt what these later writers had to say.  They represent the injured parties.

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When I was in Rome last year, I read that Nero's new palace was an unusually decadent and wasteful project even for the time, and that it was a sign that he had lost it. Is that an exaggeration?