1/9/2024 0 Comments Gaius julius caesar mussolini![]() Unfortunately, nothing remains of the ships, as they were torched under mysterious circumstances.īut Caligula's ships are difficult to forget: Rumors persisted about Mussolini leaving behind a third, 400-foot-long pleasure vessel. They were finally brought to light in the late 1920s under Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who ordered the lake to be partially drained. Indeed, two wooden ships, one measuring 230 feet in length, the other 240 feet, were first spotted at the bottom of the lake in the 15th century. The luxury ships disappeared from history, but their legend has persisted throughout the centuries. Augustus didn't play well or badly – he only played to win.The ships were most likely scuttled in a "damnatio memoriae" (an action aimed at erasing someone from history) 2,000 years ago, after the 28-year-old emperor was murdered in his palace on Rome's Palatine Hill by members of the Praetorian Guard who were enraged by his cruelty and excess. On his death bed, according to the historian Suetonius, Augustus asked how well he had played the farce of life, the mimum vitae. So began the rule of the so-called Julio-Claudian dynasty and the famous five Roman emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. Tiberius was therefore the stepson, the adopted son and son-in-law of Augustus – and not surprisingly, it was Tiberius who succeeded Augustus after his death in 14AD. He also adopted his step-son, Tiberius, and arranged for him to marry Julia after the death of Agrippa. No stranger to expedience, Augustus duly arranged for his friend and associate Marcus Agrippa to marry Julia, then adopted their children – his grandchildren – as his own. Augustus enjoyed many extra bottles of wine, as it were, but he had no son his only child was his wayward daughter, Julia. In sexual matters, Augustus was, in the novelist John Buchan's nice phrase, "no precisian, for sexual licence was to the Romans as natural and pardonable as an extra bottle of wine at dinner". Naturally, like all good autocrats, Augustus wished to hand on his power after his death. ![]() "He would retain the semblance of a republic, the semblance of liberty and freedom, and the semblance of the old constitution, and yet at the same time retain his absolute ascendancy." Augustus created the Roman empire from the Roman republic by making the republic into an autocracy. The historian John B Firth, in the first and in many ways still the best English biography of Augustus, described his rule as "an organised hypocrisy". Years of political wrangling and civil war ensued, until finally Octavian, as he became known, emerged triumphant against Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and was named Augustus, "the revered one", by the Roman Senate in 27BC. Despite being still in his teens, Octavius recognised his opportunity and seized the moment: he took on the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus and started to recruit support from among Caesar's followers and friends. In his will, Caesar adopted Octavius as his son and named him as his principal heir. ![]() He came from a wealthy equestrian family, but his father died when Octavius was just four, and he was only 18 when, in 44BC, his great-uncle Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by conspirators at the Senate house at Rome. He was born Gaius Octavius in 63BC, in the town of Velitrae, south of Rome. Augustus may be the politician's politician: he is also the despot's despot. Well, not quite everybody: Mussolini, maybe, and Hitler. As emperor of Rome, he created, according to Johnson, "an institution that, in many ways, everybody has tried to imitate in the succeeding centuries". Brilliant, shrewd, friendly and affable to all, he was also, needless to say, a megalomaniac, a schemer and a tyrant. Augustus was no Cesc Fábregas, and certainly no Wilf Mannion. "If you wanted to have a first 11 of the world's leading politicians, the most accomplished diplomats and ideologues of all time, you'd have Augustus as your kind of midfield playmaker, captain of the 11." It's a typically charming but utterly misleading comparison. "He was about the greatest politician the world has ever seen," remarked the mayor of London in an interview last year. So how did Augustus do it?Īccording to some, Augustus was simply an inspirational leader – like, say, Boris Johnson. To found an entire civilisation based on a family dynasty is entirely another. 'I f there is anyone who qualifies as the founding father of western civilisation, it is Augustus," writes Anthony Everitt in The First Emperor: Caesar Augustus and the Triumph of Rome (2006).
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