One of my favorite YouTube programs is “Tasting History” with Max Miller. His most recent show was about the last meal of Emperor Commodus.
You may remember this emperor from the first Gladiator movie. He was played by Joaquin Phoenix. When I watched the movie, I couldn’t help but see the resemblance between the evil emperor and our evil president. Watching Max’s show, the resemblance was even stronger.
See if you agree. Here, courteous of Gemini is a list of Commodus’s offenses as emperor. Okay, Some of these are beyond Donnie except in his dreams.
Emperor Commodus’s reign (180–192 AD) was marked by extreme cruelty, administrative neglect, and severe paranoia. He devastated the state treasury, purged talented generals and senators, forced himself into gladiatorial matches, and plunged Rome into a period of deep instability. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
The darkest aspects of his emperorship include:
Sadism in the Arena: Commodus forced himself to participate in gladiatorial combats, often demanding to fight opponents who were tied up, disabled, or equipped only with imitation weapons so he could guarantee his own “victory”. He also took joy in torturing and slaughtering disabled individuals in the Colosseum. [1, 2]
Reckless Purges and Paranoia: Fueled by his paranoia following multiple assassination plots, he mercilessly executed many of Rome’s top generals, politicians, and intellectuals, filling the Senate with his sycophantic cronies. [1, 2]
Severe Misrule: He abandoned his father’s (Marcus Aurelius) successful campaigns against Germanic tribes, completely neglected daily governance, and handed absolute power to corrupt imperial favorites—such as Cleander—who bankrupted the state and sold public offices. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Megalomania and Renaming Rome: In the final years of his reign, his behavior became entirely delusional. He considered himself the reincarnation of Hercules, renamed the city of Rome after himself, and changed the names of all twelve months to reflect his personal titles. [1, 2]
Scapegoating Friends: When a severe famine caused rioting in the streets, Commodus deflected blame entirely onto his top advisor, Cleander, by pointing to him and allowing the angry mob to beat his own friend to death. [1, 2, 3]
Historical overviews highlight that while his populist bread-and-circuses kept him somewhat popular with the common mob and army, his cruelty ultimately brought an end to the Pax Romana and a century of instability. [1, 2]
My bold in the last paragraph.
(Interesting that he was the son of Marcus Aurelius.)
Feel free to take this discussion in other directions re the megalomaniacs of history.
The emperor Nero had a 100-foot statue of himself built. It was known as the colossus. A large sports arena for gladiator contests was built next to it was built beside the statue. At the time, it was known as the arena at the colossus. sometime later, the statue was gone but the arena was known as the colloseum.
Checks. Huh, that was a real thing, I’d never heard of it before somehow.
The Colossus of Nero (Colossus Neronis) was a 30-metre (98 ft) bronzestatue that the Emperor Nero (37–68 AD) created in the vestibule of his Domus Aurea, the imperial villa complex which spanned a large area from the north side of the Palatine Hill, across the Velian ridge to the Esquiline Hill in Rome. It was modified by Nero’s successors into a statue of the sun god Sol. The statue was eventually moved to a spot outside the Flavian Amphitheatre, which (according to one of the more popular theories) became known, by its proximity to the Colossus, as the Colosseum.
I was a megalomaniac leader completely unmoored from reality. I declared war on the environment. I led many unsuccessful invasions and declared victory anyway. I built monuments to myself and insisted that my minions worship me as their god. I engaged in heinous sex acts and even lusted after my blood relatives. And finally, I routinely humiliated senators and political adversaries with childish nicknames like “Little” Marco Naevius, “Sleepy” Tiberius, and “Crooked” Cassius Chaerea.
Again, everything I’ve just described must be completely foreign to the United States in 2026.
Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the richest men in Rome, thanks to shady real estate deals. He decided to attack Parthia but got his ass handed to him. The apocryphal tale has the Parthians killing him by the pouring of molten gold down his throat. The true story is that they played football with his severed head. I love happy endings.
Don’t compare people to Roman emperors - it flatters them, even when you don’t intend to. In the cultural zeitgeist, even the least of the Caesars was cooler than we are; same with Norsemen or any of the steppe nomads.
If you want to compare someone you don’t like to anyone, try the Habsburgs. Nobody thinks they were cool.
Just today I watched an episode on Prime of Greatest Mysteries Ever about Ramses II, and it was eerie, talking about how he glorified himself and rewrote events to his advantage. Really eerie…
I’ve always thought Trump had much in common with Kaiser Wilhelm II (megalomania, nationalistic belligerence, propensity for saying incredibly stupid things, revering a monarch who secretly loathed and and was able to manipulate him*), with the exception that William was considerably more intelligent and liked dogs (dachshunds).
…
So in a real sense we are living in the midst of a reenactment of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, not a second American Gilded Age. No, I’m not one of those men who thinks about ancient Rome all the time. But there are some obvious parallels.
While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex, there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?
The death throes of the Republic went on for many years. Politicians declared their rivals enemies of the state, deployed violent gangs to disrupt the rule of law, established temporary dictatorships, and more. The installation of Augustus as emperor in 27 BC was just the final act.
And during this long twilight of constitutional government, one of the ways the extremely wealthy and powerful sought both to demonstrate their wealth and to curry favor with the mob was by sponsoring gladiatorial games:
The vulgarity of the Trumpian elite isn’t in itself that important. But it’s a symptom of a collapse in values and norms that, unless confronted and reversed, may herald the end of the American experiment. We should heed the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
Gee, do you suppose Paul follows the Dope? Nah, comparison with the trumpire to the decline of the Roman Empire is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
