James Mattis Is an Ancient Roman Action Hero – Foreign Policy

/james-mattis-is-an-ancient-roman-action

  • James Mattis Is an Ancient Roman Action Hero – Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/27/james-mattis-is-an-ancient-roman-action-hero

    Since the 2016 election, comparisons between the United States and ancient Rome abound, motivated as much by President Donald Trump-Emperor Nero analogies as anything. Commentators have dwelled on the traits of theatricality, brutality, solipsism, narcissism, cruelty, and cowardice these men seem to share.

    There’s a problem, however, with these comparisons: their source material. Most have turned to the work of Suetonius as their Nero-knowledge arsenal. Author of The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius was antiquity’s Michael Wolff: a gossipy and glib chronicler of fear and loathing in imperial Rome. His account of Caligula planning to make a horse one of his consuls and Nero singing while Rome burned makes for sensational and spellbinding reading, just as does Wolff’s portrait of Trump eating cheeseburgers in bed and warning the maid not to touch his toothbrush in his book Fire and Fury. Whether they are actually true is another, less promising, matter.
    […]
    In contrast, Tacitus would find a different and more effective fighter in the person of Secretary of Defense Mattis. By now, many of us know that the retired general kept a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations by his side during his tour of duty in Iraq. But since joining the Trump administration, Mattis seems to have plucked an edition of Tacitus’s works from his sizable personal library. Like Agricola, he embodies an ethos of service — one that is civic as well as military — which the United States desperately needs.

    #Néron #Suétone #La_Vie_des_Douze_Césars
    #Marc_Aurèle #Pensées_pour_Moi-même