Tea at Trianon: The Worst Roman Emperor?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 14, 2025

The Worst Roman Emperor?

From Kyle Orton at It Can Always Get Worse:

In 218 AD, the Roman Empire was taken over by a teenage boy we know as Elagabalus. Four years later, the young Emperor was murdered by the Praetorians and thrown in the Tiber. Elagabalus’s reign is reported to have been marked by scandal on nearly every front, and he would acquire perhaps the worst historical reputation of any Emperor—combining the lurid depravity of a Caligula or a Nero, the cruelty of a Domitian or Caracalla, and the disaster-inducing incompetence of a Commodus or Maximinus Thrax. But is it true?
Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BC, igniting a period of civil war that—with various periods of uneasy truce—would last for the next twenty years. When the dust settled, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, was the victor. The old Roman Republic had been swept away in the chaos, but Octavian, probably the most skilled politician in Western history, understood that the Roman people, raised on the stories of their rise out of servitude to a King half-a-millennium earlier, would not accept monarchical autocracy, so the façade of republican government was carefully preserved.
Octavian had “extinguished the flames of civil war”, by his own account,1 and people were so grateful they did not dwell on his role in stoking the inferno. Octavian then made a great show of laying down his powers—over the army, provinces, and laws—and handing them back to the Senate on 1 January 27 BC.2 There followed a highly contrived spectacle of Senators—some fearing Octavian, some fearing his departure would reignite civil war—begging him to stay, and Octavian’s dramatic reluctance in acceding to their demands. A few days later, the Senate voted to make Octavian Princeps Civitatis (“First Citizen”), a title we usually translate as “Emperor”, and then named him Augustus (“Revered One”), a mark of Octavian’s role in mediating for the Roman people with the gods.3
The outward appearance of constitutionalism—of the Princeps serving at the behest of the Senate—veiled Octavian’s revolution as a Republican restoration. Caesar was assassinated and his regime disintegrated less than two months after being named Perpetual Dictator. Octavian died in his bed in 14 AD and the Principate endured, sustaining the Augustan peace for more than two centuries.4 (Read more.)