United States or South Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Oh, blessed kingdoms that are governed by such hearts! and oh, most miserable ones that are at the mercy of a man without justice a fellow-creature without feelings! Our Italy is full of such, who will have their reward from the pens of posterity. Greater wretches never appeared in the shapes of Neros and Caligulas, or any other such monsters, let them have been who they might.
The reason, too, which Mr Mill has assigned for taking this course strikes us as most extraordinary. "Experience," says he, "if we look only at the outside of the facts, appears to be DIVIDED on this subject. Absolute monarchy, under Neros and Caligulas, under such men as the Emperors of Morocco and Sultans of Turkey, is the scourge of human nature.
That in Barere as in the whole breed of Neros, Caligulas, and Domitians whom he resembled, voluptuousness was mingled with cruelty; that he withdrew, twice in every decade, from the work of blood, to the smiling gardens of Clichy, and there forgot public cares in the madness of wine and in the arms of courtesans, has often been repeated.
Something can be made of those failures of men, for After last returns the first, though a wide compass round be fetched; What began best can't end worst, nor what God once blest prove accurst. But such men, the Neros, Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in the great human family. Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram.
They excite a certain suspicion in the mind that our sentiments are only prejudices, which have become rooted in man, brought up in the obscurity of humble life. Here is the apology of religion. The Caligulas, the Neros, those potentates of the universe, have trembled in their turn as well as the meanest of their subjects.
A street of joyous Caligulas and Neros, with here and there a Ghengis Khan, an Attila. The high buildings waver like gray and golden ferns in the sun. The sky stretches itself in a holiday awning over our heads. A breeze coming from the lake brings an odorous spice into our noses. Adventure and romance! Yes and observe how unnecessary are plots. Here in this Circe of streets are all the plots.
Imperial Rome is the beau idéal of the present government of la belle France; and we must own, that, when perusing the exhilarating pages of Suetonius, it has often occurred to our mind that there is something wanting in the list of high deeds related of those superb specimens of humanity exhibited in the Caligulas and Heliogabali. They did so much for cookery!
Every sensible mind must revolt at the bare recital of the torments, inflicted on the greatest criminal; but cruelty is much more apt to excite indignation, when void of motives. The most sanguinary tyrants, the Caligulas, the Neros, the Domitians, had, at least, some motives for tormenting their victims.
Unlike the day of the later Caesars, the populace does not abandon itself in imitation of its Neros and Caligulas. Instead, we have the spectacle of a populace apathetic toward the spirit of its time. The Puritan debauch is the logical culmination of the anti-Paganism and backworldism launched two hundred centuries back.
The hippodrome, the sacred asylum of the pleasures and the liberty of the Romans, was polluted with heads and limbs, and mangled bodies; and the companions of Phocas were the most sensible, that neither his favor, nor their services, could protect them from a tyrant, the worthy rival of the Caligulas and Domitians of the first age of the empire. Part III.
Word Of The Day