Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe I’m buying his propaganda, and maybe I’m a sucker for humility, but I suspect that the Romans bought it, and I also suspect he himself believed it. I mean, there is such thing as good kings. There’s kings that understand the downside, the dark side of absolute power and can wield that power properly. And to give both sides here, Augustus wasn’t all nice. I mean, there were moments where he was extremely cruel. So, early in his career when he’s still fighting, when he’s… for power, he goes all in on prescriptions, which is where he and Anty and other people basically post lists of their enemies and say, “It’s legal for anyone to kill these people.” And so, hundreds are massacred there, including Cicero, the Great Order is prescribed and killed. There’s moments when he’s really cruel. One slave once gets him angry, and he has him tortured in particularly cruel manner. So, I mean, on the one hand, he had this clemency. On the other hand, he could be really hard-nosed and hard edged, and I think he was a very calculating person. Yeah. So, the thing I would love to know is what he was actually behind the mask.…

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