Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I would really like to know what Romans of his time thought. If you were alive at that moment, would you honestly believe, “Oh, okay, we’ve got this guy Augustus, but he’s brought peace. He’s just keeping in charge for a while until things settle down. We’ve just had a hundred years of civil war. I think we still have a republic,” or would you say, “Nah, we have a king now.” And I don’t know what the answer to that is. I will tell you that it takes 200 years before we have the first Roman source that bluntly calls Augustus a king. So, 200 years, it takes the Romans 200 years to admit to themselves. And that’s a guy who comes along 200 years later and says, “Hey, Augustus, he looks like a king. He acts like a king. Let’s just call him a king, because he had every aspect of a king except the patriae Title.” 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.…

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