The Dark Side

Augustus

The Roman Empire is too this day greatly admired, but a lot of that admiration is based on the fact that it occurred so long ago so that the bruises of everyday knowledge of Roman power are softened by the nostalgia of distance in time. It is also helped by the fact that Greco-Roman culture was and is so widely admired as the foundation of Western Civilization.

The result is a tendency to whitewash the regime of the Emperors and to represent it as a benign institution except of course when “bad” Emperor’s ruled. Of course it is a common shibboleth in classic scholarship that a “bad” Emperor was one disliked by the Senate. The bottom line is that if the institution of Emperorship was so open to be so easily being “misused” then of course the problem wasn’t just with the individual but the institution as well.