… I’d also argue that the office [of Dictator as created by Sulla and then by Caesar] didn’t work for the goals of either of the men that recreated it.
For Sulla, the purpose of using the dictatorship was to offer his reforms to the Republic some degree of legitimacy (otherwise why not just force them through purely by violence without even the fig leaf of law). Sulla was a reactionary who quite clearly believed in the Republic and seems to have been honestly and sincerely attempting to fix it; he was also a brutal, cruel and inhuman man who solved all of his problems with a mix of violence and treachery. While we can’t read Sulla’s mind on why he chose this particular form, it seems likely the aim here was to wash his reforms in the patina of something traditional-sounding in order to give them legitimacy so that they’d be longer lasting, so that Sulla’s own memory might be a bit less tarnished and to make it harder for a crisis like this to occur again.
And it failed at all three potential goals.
When it comes to the legitimacy of Sulla’s reforms and the memory that congealed around Sulla himself, it is clear that he was politically toxic even among many more conservative Romans. A younger Cicero was already using Sulla’s memory to tarnish anyone associated with him in 80, casting Chrysogonus, Sulla’s freedman, as the villain of the Pro Roscio Amerino, delivered in that year. In the sources written in the following decades at best Sulla is a touchy subject best avoided; when he is discussed, it is as a villain. Our later sources on Sulla are uniform in seeing his dictatorship as lawless. Moreover, his own reforms were picked apart by his former lieutenants, with key provisions being repealed before he was even dead (in 78 BC so that’s not a long time).
Finally, of course, far from securing the Republic, Sulla’s dictatorship provided the example and opened the door for more mayhem. Crucially, Sulla had not fixed the army problem and in fact had made it worse. You may recall one benefit of the short dictatorship is that no dictator – indeed, no consul or praetor either – would be in office long enough to secure the loyalty of his army against the state. But in the second and early first century that system had broken down. Gaius Marius had been in continuous military command from 107 to 100. Moreover, the expansion of Rome’s territory demanded more military commands than there were offices and so the Romans had begun selecting proconsuls and propraetors (along with the consuls and praetors) to fill those posts. Thus Sulla was (as a result of the Social War in Italy) a legate in 90, a propraetor in 89, and consul in 88 and so had been in command for three consecutive years (albeit the first as a legate) when he decided to turn his army – which had just, under his command, besieged the rebel stronghold of Nola – against Rome in 88, precisely because his political enemies in Rome had revoked his proconsular command for 87 (by roughing up the voters, to be clear). And then Sulla has that same army under his command as a proconsul from 87 to 83, so by the time he marches on Rome the second time with the intent to mass slaughter his enemies, his soldiers have had more than half a decade under his command to develop that ironclad loyalty (and of course a confidence that if Sulla didn’t win, their service to him might suddenly look like a crime against the Republic).
Sulla actually made this problem worse, because one of the things he legislated by fiat as dictator was that the consuls were now to always stay in Italy (in theory to guard Rome, but guard it with what, Sulla never seems to have considered). That, along with Sulla having butchered quite a lot of the actual experienced and talented military men in the Senate, left a Senate increasingly reliant on special commands doled out to a handful of commanders for long periods, leading (through Pompey‘s unusual career, holding commands in more years than not between 76 and 62) to Julius Caesar being in unbroken command of a large army in Gaul from 58 to 50, by which point that army was sufficiently loyal that it could be turned against the Republic, which of course Caesar does in 49.
For Caesar, the dictatorship seems to have been purely a tool to try to legitimate his own permanent control over the Roman state. Caesar is, from 49 to 44, only in Rome for a few months at a time and so it isn’t surprising that at first he goes to the expedient of just having his appointment renewed. But it is remarkable that his move to dictator perpetuo comes immediately after the “trial balloon” of making Caesar a Hellenistic-style king (complete with a diadem, the clear visual marker of Hellenistic-style kingship) had failed badly and publicly (Plut. Caes. 61). Perhaps recognizing that so clearly foreign an institution would be a non-starter in Rome – unpopular even among the general populace who normally loved Caesar – he instead went for a more Roman-sounding institution, something with at least a pretense of tradition to it.
And if the goal was to provide himself with some legitimacy, the effort clearly catastrophically backfired. The optics of the dictatorship were, at this point, awful; as noted, the only real example anyone had to work with was Sulla, and everyone hated Sulla. Many of Caesar’s own senatorial supporters had probably been hoping, given Caesar’s repeatedly renewed dictatorship, that he would eventually at least resign out of the office (as Sulla had done), allowing the machinery of the Republic – the elections, office holding and the direction of the Senate – to return. Declaring that he was dictator forever, rather than cementing his legitimacy clearly galvanized the conspiracy to have him assassinated, which they did in just two months.
It is striking that no one after Caesar, even in the chaotic power-struggle that ensued, no one attempted to revive the dictatorship, or use it as a model to institutionalize their power, or employ its iconography or symbolism in any way. Instead, Antony, who had himself been Caesar’s magister equitum, proposed and passed a law in 44 – right after Caesar’s death – to abolish the dictatorship, make it illegal to nominate a dictator, or for any Roman to accept the office, on pain of death (App. BCiv, 3.25, Dio 44.51.2). By all accounts, the law was broadly popular. As a legitimacy-building tool, the dictatorship had been worse than useless.
So what might we offer as a final verdict on the dictatorship? As a short-term crisis office used during the early and middle republic, a tool appropriate to a small state that had highly fragmented power in its institutions to maintain internal stability, the dictatorship was very successful, though that very success made it increasingly less necessary and important as Rome’s power grew. The customary dictatorship withered away in part because of that success: a Mediterranean-spanning empire had no need of emergency officials, when its military crises occurred at great distance and could generally be resolved by just sending a new regular commander with a larger army. By contrast, the irregular dictatorship was a complete failure, both for the men that held it and for the republic it destroyed.
The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
September 16, 2025
QotD: The Dictatorship in the late Roman Republic
September 7, 2025
Long before the “Bad Orange Man”, there was “T.R.”
In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes points out some strong similarities between Donald Trump’s career and that of the Bull Moose himself, Theodore Roosevelt:
Though a century apart—TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.
The Trump-TR Parallels
But to the similarities. They start, for both men, pre–White House. As Trump did, TR staged his pre-presidential efforts as much with an eye to public recognition as to sustained reform or strengthening institutions.
Whenever TR stumbled, he pivoted to a new venture and publicized it like mad, though the medium in those days was the printed word, not season after season on The Apprentice. Before the cognoscenti had even absorbed the meaning of the young Roosevelt’s humiliating fourth-place score in a key 1886 New York City mayoral contest, for example, TR was off to the Badlands, memorializing his ranching experiences in dispatches and books such as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
As Trump does, TR routinely alienated GOP grandees, circumventing them to get ahead. As Trump has, TR skillfully cultivated the media — so skillfully that members of Congress were left trying catch up with whatever shifts in public opinion resulted from the politician’s press alliances. TR’s Rupert Murdoch was the widely syndicated William Allen White of Kansas’s influential Emporia Gazette. TR’s equivalent of Fox News was the New York Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, drummed a steady beat of support when Roosevelt called for war against Spain.
Today, Murdoch must be scratching his head over what his showcasing Trump has wrought, especially now that Trump decided to sue both Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. White, too, found that he had second thoughts about his decision to back TR: “Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,” White reportedly told a colleague.
[…]
BULLY
The occupant of what he labeled the Bully Pulpit — “bully” as in “excellent” — proved a literal bully as well.
As president, TR perpetually unnerved fellow Republicans, pivoting back to domestic politics. As Trump has, TR cast his campaigns in moral terms rather than economic ones. Where Trump launched his tariff war, TR made war against trusts, large combinations of companies. Relying more on whim than statute, Roosevelt segregated trusts into “good trusts” and “bad trusts”.
TR targeted an invincible-looking industry that, in those days, mattered as much as the interstate highways, or the internet, do today: railroads. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway took over a struggling competitor, Northern Pacific. Roosevelt asked Hanna what he made of the combined entity, Great Northern Securities. Hanna replied that it was “the very best thing possible for the future of the whole Northwest territory”. Roosevelt nonetheless sicced the Justice Department on the Great Northern.
J. Pierpont Morgan, a participant in the beleaguered deal, called on the president to inquire, as desperate steel importers these days do from time to time, whether their attorneys might work out the matter behind the scenes.
No.
Next, the disconcerted Morgan asked whether other investments of the House of Morgan might be assailed. Roosevelt’s reply captures the chill of arbitrary leadership. The administration would not go after the other Morgan companies, he said — unless “they have done something we regard as wrong”.
As Edmund Morris reports in Theodore Rex, to observers such as French ambassador Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt seemed “more powerful than a king”. That power suited many voters fine, which is why Roosevelt won so headily when he ran for office on his own in 1904.
Of course TR, like Trump, occasionally supported laws that aligned with his impulses. One example is the Elkins Act of 1903, which made it illegal for railroads to charge different freight rates for different customers. This shallow effort to achieve market “fairness” deprived the railroads of a standard business tool: the ability to provides discounts to those who buy the product in larger quantities. Shares in railroads promptly dropped more than 20 percent, a shift that undermined TR’s premise of railroad invincibility.
September 6, 2025
QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles
Anyway, young Cyrus […] and his classmates spend practically every waking moment being little Tai-Pans. They study in classrooms, receive military training,1 and shadow the magistrates in their official duties; but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction,2 the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.3
The most common sort of mission is a hunt, the boys are constantly going on hunts, because: “it seems to them that hunting is the truest of the exercises that pertain to war”. This is obvious at the level of basic physical skills: while hunting they run, they ride, they follow tracks, they shoot, and they stab. But the military lessons imparted by hunting are not just physical, they’re also mental. They learn to “deceive wild boars with nets and trenches, and … deer with traps and snares”. To battle a lion, a bear, or a leopard on an equal footing would be suicide, and so by necessity the boys learn to surprise them, or exhaust them, or to terrify them with psychological warfare, doing everything in their power to find an unfair advantage or to create one from circumstances.4 As Cyrus’s father tells him years later: “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”
There’s another reason that the boys constantly hunt wild animals, which is that it habituates them to hunger, sleep-deprivation, and extremes of heat and cold. When they depart on a hunt the boys are deliberately given too little food, and what they have is simple and bland (though that’s hardly an issue for those who “regularly use hunger as others use sauce”). Some of this is ascesis in the original Ancient Greek meaning of the word (ἄσκησις – “training”); by getting used to being tired and hungry and cold under controlled circumstances, they will be better at shrugging off these disadvantages when the stakes are higher.
But the real core of it lies in the phrase: “He did not think it was fitting for anyone to rule who was not better than his subjects.” Later, when they’ve reached manhood, the boys will oftentimes be called upon to share physical hardship with those they have been set over, and in that moment it is vital to this social order that they not be soft. “We must of necessity share with our slaves heat and cold, food and drink, and labor and sleep. In this sharing, however, we need first to try to appear better than they in regard to such.” Better in the sense of physically tougher, but also better in the sense of having achieved the absolute mastery of the will over any and all desires.5
Constant exposure to deprivation and hardship isn’t just supposed to improve their endurance, it’s also supposed to make them better at sneering at comforts.6 This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”7 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.
1. If you’ve ever been a little boy, or the parent of a little boy, you know how true this is:
“Now the mode of battle that has been shown to us is one that I see all human beings understand by nature, just as also the various other animals each know a certain mode of battle that they learn not from another but from nature. For example, the ox strikes with his horn, the horse with his hoof, the dog with his mouth, the boar with his tusk … Even when I was a boy, I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, even though I did not learn how one must take hold of it from anywhere else, as I say, than from nature. I used to do this not because I was taught but even though I was opposed, just as there were also other things I was compelled to do by nature, though I was opposed by both my mother and father. And, yes, by Zeus, I used to strike with the sword everything I was able to without getting caught, for it was not only natural, like walking and running, but it also seemed to me to be pleasant in addition to being natural.”
2. Not just explicit violations of the rules though: “they also judge cases of ingratitude, an accusation for which human beings hate each other very much but very rarely adjudicate; and they punish severely whomever they judge not to have repaid a favor he was able to repay”.
3. “In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession.”
4. Players of old-school tabletop role-playing games might be reminded of the distinction between “combat as sport” and “combat as war” or the parable of Tucker’s Kobolds.
5. Years later one of Cyrus’s classmates gives a long speech about how falling in love is optional — a real man can make himself love any woman he chooses, and conversely can restrain himself from loving any woman, no matter how desirable. All poetic references to being made a prisoner by love, or forced by love to do certain things, are excuses made by weaklings who wish to give into their desires. This is a message right in line with the most inhuman aspects of Greek philosophy, and to his credit Xenophon immediately subverts it by having the guy who delivers it immediately fall madly in love with his beautiful female captive.
6. One of the highest compliments ever paid to Cyrus is when an older mentor remarks of his posse that:
“I saw them bearing labors and risks with enthusiasm, but now I see them bearing good things moderately. It seems to me, Cyrus, to be more difficult to find a man who bears good things nobly than one who bears evil things nobly, for the former infuse insolence in the many, but the latter infuse moderation in all.”
7. Compare this to the American ruling class, which is also weirdly Spartan in its own way. The wealthiest Americans on average work a crazy number of hours, lead highly regimented lives, and avoid drugs. The difference is that whereas the Persian aristocracy does this as an example for the lower classes, the American aristocracy actively encourages the lower classes to consume themselves in cheap luxury and sensual dissipation.
September 5, 2025
QotD: Hillary Clinton in the White House
Among the military who served in the White House and the professional White House staff, the Clinton administration was infamously known for its lack of professionalism and courtesy, though few ever spoke about it. But when it came to rudeness, it was Hillary Clinton who was the most feared person in the administration. She set the tone. From the very first day in my assignment.
When I first arrived to work in the White House, my predecessor warned me. “You can get away with pissing off Bill but if you make her mad, she’ll rip your heart out.” I heeded those words. I did make him mad a few times, but I never really pissed her off. I knew the ramifications. I learned very quickly that the administration’s day-to-day character, whether inside or outside of DC, depended solely on the presence or absence of Hillary. Her reputation preceded her. We used to say that when Hillary was gone, it was a frat party. When she was home, it was Schindler’s List.
In my first few days on the job, and remember I essentially lived there, I realized there were different rules for Hillary. She instructed the senior staff, including me, that she didn’t want to be forced to encounter us. We were instructed that “whenever Mrs. Clinton is moving through the halls, be as inconspicuous as possible”. She did not want to see “staff” and be forced to “interact” with anyone. No matter their position in the building. Many a time, I’d see mature, professional adults, working in the most important building in the world, scurrying into office doorways to escape Hillary’s line of sight. I’d hear whispering, “She’s coming, she’s coming!” I could be walking down a West Wing hallway, midday, busier than hell, people doing the administration’s work whether in the press office, medical unit, wherever. She’d walk in and they’d scatter. She was the Nazi schoolmarm and the rest of us were expected to hide as though we were kids in trouble. I wasn’t a kid, I was a professional officer and pilot. I said “I’m not doing that”.
There was also a period of time when she attempted to ban military uniforms in the White House. It was the reelection year of 1996, and she was trying to craft the narrative that the military was not a priority in the Clinton administration. As a military aide, carrying the football, and working closely with the Secret Service, I objected to that. It simply wasn’t a matter of her political agenda; it was national security. If the balloon went up, the Secret Service would need to find me as quickly as possible. Seconds matter. Finding the aide in military uniform made complete sense. Besides, what commander in chief wouldn’t want to advertise his leadership and command? She finally relented because the Secret Service weighed in.
The Clintons are corrupt beyond words. Hillary is evil, vindictive, and profane. Hillary is a bitch.
Buzz Patterson, Twitter, 2025-05-17.
August 25, 2025
The Sharpest Pen of the Edwardian Age | Who Was Saki?
Vault of Lost Tales
Published 5 Apr 2025Delve into the razor-sharp world of Saki in this engaging author talk exploring his chillingly clever short story, “The Open Window”. Discover the man behind the pen name — H.H. Munro — and uncover how his biting satire, Edwardian upbringing, and darkly humorous worldview shaped this unforgettable tale. Perfect for fans of classic literature, Oscar Wilde-style wit, and unsettling plot twists, this literary deep dive offers historical context, thematic insights, and just enough spookiness to keep you on edge. Whether you’re a student, a short story lover, or just curious about the mind that created one of literature’s most deviously satisfying endings, this talk is your open invitation.
“Saki”, the wickedly sharp pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, masked a man whose wit could slice through Edwardian society like a silver butter knife through scandal.
Born in 1870 in British Burma and raised in England, Munro brought an acerbic wit to the drawing rooms of empire, crafting tales that balanced dry humor, social critique, and sudden, often shocking twists. Writing under the name “Saki”, he produced short stories that mocked the pretensions of the upper class, exposed the darkness beneath genteel facades, and made readers laugh — sometimes uncomfortably. His life, marked by loss, repressed identity, and service in World War I, ended tragically in 1916 on the battlefield, but his stories continue to delight and disturb to this day.
(more…)
August 23, 2025
QotD: The background of Tiberius Gracchus
Meanwhile, as D.J. Gargola has noted, Appian is also bending his account of Tiberius Gracchus’ reforms, in particular by presenting the Lex Sempronia Agraria as an entirely traditional, conventional response to a pressing crisis.1 But in fact, the provisions of the Lex Sempronia Agraria were not traditional: no similar law (save for a re-enactment by Gaius Gracchus) – had ever or would ever be passed in Rome and the legal precedent that Appian presents as providing the foundation for Tiberius’ law appears to be at least substantially an anachronistic invention. Meanwhile, the crisis Appian thinks Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing probably didn’t exist in the form he understood it.
But that’s what we have, so it is what we must work with. And we should note that both Plutarch and Appian are quite favorable to the Gracchi, even though both men were clearly very controversial in their day. So in a sense this is a reverse of the situation we had with Cleopatra, where we had to contend with relentlessly negative sources: here the sources are broadly positive.
So, on with what we know.
Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune in 133. His election was already unusual in that he seems to have run on something like a program (land reform, which we’ll get to); Romans generally ran on character and background rather than promising specific political actions if elected, so this was unusual. Part of the reason for it was doubtless that Tiberius Gracchus’ political fortunes were in difficulties. Now we should note here that while Tiberius Gracchus was a plebian (that is, not a patrician) that doesn’t make him a political outsider: Tiberius Gracchus was not remotely a political outsider or poor man or lacking in influence. His father (also Ti. Sempronius Gracchus) had been consul in 177 and 163 and censor in 169; his father (or grandfather) was consul in 215 and 213. Our Tiberius Gracchus’ mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the man who defeated Hannibal. Tiberius Gracchus was born into substantial wealth and influence, the sort of man whose eventual political ascent was almost guaranteed.
(Indeed, it was so guaranteed that he gets to bend the rules and hold many of his offices early. He’s quaestor at just 26, which implies that he started his military service at 15 or 16 instead of the normal 17, doing so as a military tribune, not a common soldier. I do think this is relevant to understanding Tiberius Gracchus: this was a man born with a silver spoon and a carefully paved, flat-and-easy road to power and influence laid out for him by his family and his political backers, the most notable among whom was his key supporter Scipio Aemilianus (destroyer of Carthage and shortly Numantia).)
Except. Except he got wrapped up in something of a nasty foreign policy scandal during his year as quaestor, when he was assigned to the amazingly named but less amazingly capable C. Hostilius Mancinus who as consul in 137 was supposed to deal with Numantia in Spain. Mancinus blew it and got his army effectively trapped and sent Tiberius – his quaestor and the next highest ranking Roman present – to negotiate to get his army out. Tiberius did this, but the whole thing caused a great stink and a scandal at Rome (Roman armies are supposed to go down fighting, not negotiate shameful retreats!). Indeed, the Senate was so enraged they rejected the treaty and instead sent Mancinus, bound in chains, to the Numantines as part of a ritual process by which his treaty was disowned. Tiberius doesn’t get packed off to Numantia, but some of the political stink does rub off on him, so while he’s connected enough to get elected as a plebeian tribune in 133, he must know he needs a big second act to get his political career back on track, or he may never reach the consulship. That context – a political insider who had a golden ticket but must now win it back, rather than an outsider without connections – is important for understanding the reaction he is going to get.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- 1. D.J. Gargola, “The Gracchan Reform and Appian’s Representation of an Agrarian Crisis” in People, Land and Politics, eds. L. De Ligt and S.J. Northwood (2008).
August 15, 2025
Ted Gioia on Hunter S. Thompson
I must admit that I got hooked on Hunter S. Thompson’s writing very early. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my mid-teens and it blew my mind. I couldn’t actually believe everything he wrote, but I couldn’t completely discount it either. I certainly haven’t read everything he wrote … especially his later sports commentary, but I have read most of the best-known books. On his Substack, Ted Gioia is running a three-part series on the writer and his work:
That’s Hunter Thompson. There’s always someone in control behind the wheel — even when he seems most out of control.
This hidden discipline showed up in other ways. Years later, when he ran for sheriff in Aspen or showed up in Washington, D.C. to cover an election for Rolling Stone, savvy observers soon grasped that Thompson had better instincts and organizational skills than some of the most high-powered political operatives. People rallied around him — he was always the ringleader, even going back to his rowdy childhood. And hidden behind the stoned Gonzo exterior was an ambitious strategist who could play a long term game even as he wagered extravagantly on each spin of the roulette wheel that was his life.
“I don’t think you have any idea who Hunter S. Thompson is when he drops the role of court jester,” he wrote to Kraig Juenger, a 34-year-old married woman with whom he had an affair at age 18. “First, I do not live from orgy to orgy, as I might have made you believe. I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people believe.”
That wasn’t just posturing. It had to be true, merely judging by how well-read and au courant Thompson became long before his rise to fame. “His bedroom was lined with books,” later recalled his friend Ralston Steenrod, who went on to major in English at Princeton. “Where I would go home and go to sleep, Hunter would go home and read.” Another friend who went to Yale admitted that Thompson “was probably better read than any of us”.
Did he really come home from drinking binges, and open up a book? It’s hard to believe, but somehow he gave himself a world class education even while living on the bleeding edge. And in later years, Thompson proved it. When it came to literary matters, he simply knew more than most of his editors, who could boast of illustrious degrees Thompson lacked. And when covering some new subject he didn’t know, he learned fast and without slowing down a beat.
But Thompson had another unusual source of inspiration he used in creating his unique prose style. It came from writing letters, which he did constantly and crazily — sending them to friends, lovers, famous people, and total strangers. Almost from the start, he knew this was the engine room for his career; that’s why he always kept copies, even in the early days when that required messy carbon paper in the typewriter. Here in the epistolary medium he found his true authorial voice, as well as his favorite and only subject: himself.
But putting so much sound and fury into his letters came at a cost. For years, Thompson submitted articles that got rejected by newspapers and magazines — and the unhinged, brutally honest cover letters that accompanied them didn’t help. He would insult the editor, and even himself, pointing out the flaws in his own writing and character as part of his pitch.
What was he thinking? You can’t get writing gigs, or any gigs, with that kind of attitude. Except if those cover letters are so brilliant that the editor can’t put them down. And over time, his articles started resembling those feverish cover letters — a process unique in the history of literature, as far as I can tell.
When Thompson finally got his breakout job as Latin American correspondent for the National Observer (a sister publication to the Wall Street Journal in those days), he would always submit articles to editor Clifford Ridley along with a profane and unexpurgated cover letter that was often more entertaining than the story. In an extraordinary move, the newspaper actually published extracts from these cover letters as a newspaper feature.
If you’re looking for a turning point, this is it. Thompson now had the recipe, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs:
- The story behind the story is the real story.
- The writer is now the hero of each episode.
- All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.
Why can’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson …
July 28, 2025
Claudius: The Disabled Emperor Who Conquered Britain
The Rest Is History
Published 27 January 2025This is part 4 of our series on Suetonius and the Emperors of Rome.
00:00 The rebirth of the republic?
10:05 Who is Claudius
15:18 The relationship between Augustus and Claudius
16:20 The scholar emperor
21:12 Claudius’ relationship with Caligula
28:53 Claudius’ rule as emperor
45:50 The problem he had with his wives
56:40 The rise of Nero
58:40 Was he poisoned?
59:51 The lack of sources in Ancient historyProducer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor
July 23, 2025
The Most Bitter Man In All Of Ancient Rome: Meet JUVENAL
MoAn Inc.
Published 27 Feb 2025
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July 21, 2025
Caligula: Was He Really Mad?
The Rest Is History
Published 3 Feb 2025Enough of the Princeps, what remains to be described, is the monster …
The Roman emperor Caligula endures as one of the most notorious figures in not only Roman history, but the history of the world. Famed as a byword for sexual degeneracy, cruelty and corruption, the account of his life written by the Roman historian Suetonius has, above all, enshrined him as such for posterity. Throughout the biography there is a whiff of dark comedy, as Caligula is cast as the ultimate demented Caesar, corrupted absolutely by his absolute power and driven into depravity. Born of a sacred and illustrious bloodline to adored parents, his early life — initially so full of promise — was shadowed by tragedy, death, and danger, the members of his family picked off one by one by the emperor Tiberius. Nevertheless, Caligula succeeded, through his own cynical intelligence and cunning manipulation of public spectacle, to launch himself from the status of despised orphan, to that of master of Rome. Yet, before long his seemingly propitious reign, was spiralling into a nightmare of debauchery and terror …
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the most notorious emperor in Rome: Caligula, a man said to have slept with his sister, transformed his palace into a brothel, cruelly humiliated senators, and even made his horse into a consul. But what is the truth behind these horrific legends? Was Caligula really more monster than man …?
00:00 A mysterious emperor
05:18 Why are the stories about Caligula so bad?
08:40 Germanicus: the best man in Rome
16:20 Caligula is the heir
19:30 The death of Tiberius
20:55 Caligula’s cynical intelligence
22:50 Caligula’s skill playing to the gallery
28:39 Caligula’s turn to evil (according to Suetonius)…
31:35 Caligula as Suetonius’ monster
37:22 Caligula confronts the senate
45:10 The conspiracy against him moves
48:14 Did all this actually happen?
58:43 Did he make his horse a consul?Producer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Video Editor: Jack Meek
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor
July 14, 2025
Emperor Hadrian and Antinous the God
Reginald Godwyn reviews a new monograph from Dr. Sean Gabb:
Sean Gabb’s The Cult of Antinous is not a hagiography. It is something better: a quiet, erudite demolition of pious lies from both the ancient and modern world. The lecture-turned-book is a brisk, sardonic tour through the most decadent cult of the Roman world, and one of its most effective. The boy died, yes — but what followed was a miracle of political opportunism and spiritual success. Gabb does not flinch from the disturbing parts. Nor does he genuflect before the fashionably uncritical idolatry now surrounding Antinous as gay icon. This is not a work of celebration. It is a work of historical thought, dressed as a lecture and sharpened with scepticism.
It begins, as it must, with a photograph of Hadrian and Antinous — stone fragments now housed in the British Museum, staring out from beneath museum glass and centuries of self-serving speculation. “Hadrian is on the left”, Gabb says, “Antinous on the right”. But from then on, it is the boy — not the emperor — who takes centre stage. The story is simple enough. Antinous was a Bithynian youth, met Hadrian at around age twelve, became his lover, travelled with him, and died in the Nile under suspicious circumstances. Hadrian made him a god. Cities were built. Statues were raised. Coins were minted. Shrines were erected. And the worship spread quickly and widely—and in ways that make some modern historians uncomfortable.
Gabb’s treatment of all this is not exactly kind, but it is always fair. He reminds us that, when it comes to Antinous, we know almost nothing. The written sources are sparse: Dio Cassius gives a few lines; the Historia Augusta offers rumour. Most of what we “know” is based on “could have”, “may have”, “might have”. And yet on this we have built dissertations, operas, novels, and now neopagan blogs filled with inverted pentagrams and airbrushed torsos. Gabb is not impressed. His repeated refrain is “castle of supposition”. And rightly so. Royston Lambert, he notes, was especially fond of these castles.
But for all that, there is a real story here. Gabb walks us through the ancient views of sex, pausing only to make the necessary disclaimer for his mixed audience of Chinese undergraduates and English middle class language students:
Please be aware that other civilisations frequently have or had views of sexual propriety different from our own. This lecture will discuss, and sometimes show depictions of, sexual relationships between adults and persons somewhat below the present age of consent. Some of these relationships involve disparities of legal status. Though not recommended for imitation in modern England, such relationships are nowhere explicitly condemned. The lecture will also not avoid language that many may consider indelicate or obscene.
What follows is a lesson in ancient sexual economics. Among Greeks, boy-love was structured: older men pursued beautiful adolescent boys, usually between 12 and 17, who were supposed to receive but not enjoy. The Romans were less sentimental: they cared only who did the penetrating. “To use was fine. To be used was shameful.” Gabb’s phrasing here is withering, but accurate. There is no anachronistic moralising — just the dry, clinical reconstruction of a culture with different priorities.
Tiberius: Rome’s Most Underrated Emperor?
The Rest Is History
Published 31 Jan 2025The Roman historian Suetonius’ biography of the controversial Emperor Tiberius is one of his most shocking and salacious, condemning Tiberius to infamy. But was Tiberius really the perverted monster Suetonius would have us believe? Born of Rome’s most illustrious family and a sacred bloodline — the Claudians — Tiberius’ mother Livia was unceremoniously taken from his father while she carried him, to marry the great Emperor Augustus. So it was that Tiberius grew up in the very heart of imperial power, proving himself intelligent, and a superb military commander. But, following the unforeseen deaths of Augustus’ young heirs, he found himself primed to become the next Caesar of Rome. The reign that ensued would prove largely peaceful, prosperous and stable, though Tiberius himself was increasingly plagued by paranoia and fear. While the last of Augustus’ bloodline were wiped out one by one, he retired to Capri, much to the horror of the Roman people. Before long, rumours had begun percolating of the heinous deeds, sick proclivities, and vile abominations Tiberius was practicing on his pleasure island …
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Tiberius, the impressive though widely lambasted second emperor of Rome. What is the truth behind the sordid myths and mysteries of his reign …?
00:00 The bad emperor?
06:45 Was he depraved?
08:30 The Roman version of the Kennedys
13:29 How he became the heir
16:50 The greatest general of his generation
17:53 Tiberius is manoeuvred into the succession
21:23 Tiberius the emperor
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July 11, 2025
William F. Buckley
In Quillette, Ronald Radosh reviews the long-awaited biography of arch-conservative William F. Buckley by his friend Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America:
President Reagan meeting with William F. Buckley in the White House, 21 January, 1988.
Photo from the White House Photographic Collection via Wikimedia Commons.
William F. Buckley Jr. was a polymath of unusual erudition. The author of scores of books (including nearly two dozen novels), Buckley was an ardent apostle of conservatism at a moment when American liberalism was ascendant. But he was also an accomplished musician who played the harpsichord, a sailor who entered competitions and spent most summers on the sea, and an avid skier who spent his winters on the slopes of Gstaad after a morning of writing. Most Americans knew him as the host of a weekly television talk show called Firing Line, in which he interviewed and debated a wide range of politicians and intellectuals, most of whom he vehemently but politely disagreed with. (Many of these episodes are now available to view on YouTube.)
Television allowed Buckley to display his not inconsiderable wit and charm. He interviewed prominent socialists like both Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, but he invited fellow conservatives onto his show as well. He had fellow conservatives on his show too, but he particularly relished debates with ideological opponents like Julian Bond (the young black leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), author Norman Mailer, journalist Christopher Hitchens, Ramparts editor Robert Scheer, and leaders of the Black Panther Party. The only people he would refuse to debate, he told the TV network, were communists lest he lend them legitimacy. Agents of the Soviet Union, he maintained, were not worth engaging with.
Buckley’s other major accomplishment was founding and editing America’s first nationwide conservative magazine. The bi-weekly National Review was the conservative counterpart of the influential liberal publications of the day, including the New Republic, The Nation, The Reporter, and the New Leader. Those liberal magazines all had rather small circulations but they also had the field to themselves until Buckley’s NR came along. Buckley hired a roster of old-style conservatives and ex-communists, including the former Trotskyist James Burnham, the former Communist agent (and accuser of Alger Hiss) Whittaker Chambers, Willi Schlamm, and Frank Meyer. As time went by, he added prominent young conservatives to the magazine’s masthead, many of whom would go on to become political leaders in the new American conservative movement. His prize protégé may have been Gary Wills, who eventually left NR‘s ranks and, much to Buckley’s disappointment, became an influential American liberal. Other NR contributors went on to become important American essayists and authors in their own right, like Joan Didion, George Will, and John Leonard, who edited the New York Times Book Review during the 1970s.
Buckley was the scion of a wealthy Connecticut family with a great estate in Sharon, Connecticut, that his father William F. Buckley Sr. named “Great Elm”. However, Buckley Sr. was also a Texan who identified closely with the American South, and after he made his fortune speculating in oil in Mexico and Venezuela, he purchased a mansion in Camden, South Carolina, for use during the cold Eastern winters. He named it Kamchatka, and the neighbouring residents, Tanenhaus writes, embraced the family “as Southerners who had come home”. Kamchatka had previously been the home of a Confederate general and senator who left office when Lincoln was elected President in 1860, but Camden would play an important role in the civil-rights movement.
By the 1950s through the ’60s, Tanenhaus writes, “the institution of Jim Crow — the legacy of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction — was being shaken at its foundations”. In the ’50s, the nation learned about the brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmet Till and massive protests by the black population began to appear across the South. The liberal magazines of the day covered the rise of the civil-rights movement and did what they could to mobilise Northerners in support of Southern blacks. In the deep South, activist efforts culminated in the famous Freedom Summer movement for black-voter registration in 1964. Camden, too, became the centre of a massive resistance movement.
Yet all this political and social upheaval never received a word of positive coverage in the pages of National Review. The reason for this was not complicated. Buckley’s family believed that “race was a settled question” and that racial separation was justified “as a matter of law as well as custom”. The Buckley family, of course, hired black help for their Camden mansion, whom they treated with respect and support. But members of the “Negro” race, as blacks were then called, had to know their place. So, Buckley wrote a number of unsigned editorials in February 1956 defending the South’s “deeply rooted folkways and mores”. The South, he argued, “believes that segregation is the answer to a complex situation not fully understandable except to those who live with it”, just as his own parents and siblings did. He vigorously objected to the Supreme Court’s verdict in 1954 outlawing segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, and he wrote editorials arguing that the Court’s decision was not an interpretation of the Constitution but rather “a venture in social legislation.”
In Camden, meanwhile, the Buckley family started and financed a newspaper called the News, which was meant to be a vehicle for the white South’s racist population and their “Citizens’ Councils”. Instead of burning crosses and lynching, the Councils preferred to use “legal threats, economic harassment, and public denunciation” in defence of segregation. In one case, a business owned by a black protestor was destroyed and his family harassed by the Council, after the owner tried to register to vote. As the violence in Camden became more extensive and widely reported, Buckley responded with an unsigned NR editorial on 10 January 1957 in which he argued that “the Northern ideologists are responsible for the outbreak of violence”. He did also condemn the “debasing brutality” of the white population’s behaviour, and for years, that remark remained his strongest condemnation of white violence. He continued to ignore the support provided to the Councils by South Carolina authorities.
One of Tanenhaus’s most stunning revelations is that, in 1956, Buckley dispatched an NR contributor to report on the National States’ Rights Conference in Memphis. The man he sent was one Revilo Oliver, whom Tanenhaus correctly describes as “a fanatical racist and anti-Semite”. The following year, NR published Buckley’s most infamous editorial, titled “Why the South Must Prevail”. The white community, he wrote, had a right to defend segregation because “for the time being, it is the advanced race”. The white South, he wrote, “perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’; and intends to assert its own”. And since NR “believes the South’s premises are correct”, the black population could justifiably have its interests thwarted by “undemocratic” but “enlightened” means. That editorial, Tanenhaus rightly notes, “haunts [Buckley’s] legacy, and the conservative movement he led”. Buckley also believed that if suppression of the black vote violated the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, then that and the Fifteenth Amendment should be considered unconstitutional — “inorganic accretions to the original document, grafted upon it by victors-at-war by force”.
July 7, 2025
Augustus: Visionary Statesman or Destroyer Of The Republic?
The Rest Is History
Published 27 Jan 2025The Roman historian Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars, written during the early imperial period of the Roman Empire, is a seminal biography covering the biographies of the early emperors of Rome, during two spectacular centuries of Roman history. Delving deep into the personal lives of the Caesars and sparing no detail, no matter how prurient, pungent, explicit or salacious, it vividly captures Rome at the peak of her power, and those colourful individuals at the heart of everything. It is an unsettling yet fascinating portrait of the alien and the intimate, that sees some of history’s most famous characters revealed as almost modern men, plotting a delicate line between private and public, respectability and suspicion. From the showmanship of Augustus, the first Caesar, and his convoluted family melodramas, to Tiberius, a monster in the historical record famed for his sexual misdeeds, to Caligula, who delighted in voyeuristic moral degeneracy, and the looming shadow of Nero; all will be revealed …
00:00 A humble plug from Tom
02:55 The most spectacular two centuries in Roman history
05:25 The value of Suetonius as a biographer
08:43 Suetonius’ interest in the love lives of the Caesars
12:58 Suetonius’ influence on popular culture
16:15 Augustus: Rome’s greatest actor
21:25 Roman politics as spectacle
21:55 Augustus as the model of a good emperor
24:30 What kind of monarchy was this?
28:00 The life of Suetonius
35:52 How did Roman histories work?
39:04 Why Romans had no idea of privacy
40:05 Did Roman emperors sexual misdemeanours matter
42:08 How we see sexual relations different to the Romans
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July 4, 2025
July 4, 1826
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 4 Jul 2022On the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, the US lost two of the men most responsible for its creation. Independence Day 1826 might be the most important since July 4, 1776.
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