“Thrones Wreathed in Shadow: Tacitus and the Psychology of Authoritarianism”, 2020-07-01 (; backlinks; similar):
[Examination of Roman historian Tacitus’s accounts of tyranny in his Histories, focusing on the dictators Tacitus lived through, particularly the 15-year reign of Domitian.]
The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.
…Even Tacitus, as critical as he was of the cravenness of Rome’s senatorial class and of the tyrannical excesses of different emperors, was resigned to the fact that a return to the halcyon days of the republic appeared, by his time, to be impossible. As contemporary scholarship has shown, illiberal governments spawn self-replicating patterns of corruption and networks of patronage that serve only to entrench undemocratic norms and practices. By the time Tacitus was alive, the authoritarian rot had set in too deep, and the memory of past liberties was too vague. As the emperor Galba wearily tells Piso, his designated successor, in Book I of The Histories, Rome’s populace had been irredeemably altered, being now composed of “men who could endure neither complete slavery nor complete freedom.”..Although Tacitus held various responsibilities under several emperors, Domitian’s 15-year rule of terror (81 to 96 C.E.) seems to have etched the deepest psychological scars…certain passages in Agricola provide some moving indications of the author’s trauma and, as we shall see, of his survivor’s guilt. Indeed, the detailed descriptions that we do have of Domitian—most notably those provided by Suetonius and Dio Cassius—paint a bleak portrait of an increasingly unhinged despot whose behavior fuses the flamboyant eccentricities of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov of Turkmenistan with the raw sadism of the Afghan warlord Rachid Dostum. Executing at least 11 senators of consular rank and exiling many more over the course of his reign, Domitian, according to Suetonius, “took a personal insult to any reference, joking or otherwise, to bald men, being extremely sensitive about his appearance”, even publishing a haircare manual in which he whined about his capillary loss. Suetonius, ever one for colorful anecdotes, recounts how, in his spare time, the disturbed ruler would while away the hours in solitude “catching flies—believe it or not—and stabbing them with a needle-sharp pen.”
Accounts of Domitian’s reign are punctuated with episodes of savagery and degradation, with the tyrant feeding a circus attendee to a pack of ravening hounds for supporting the wrong gladiator or ordering that a 90-year-old Jewish man be publicly stripped to establish whether he had been circumcised…those who emerged, staggering, from the 15-year ordeal of Domitian’s rule were “maimed in spirit, dazed and blunted.” Tacitus gives voice to this sentiment when, in Agricola, he portrays the Domitianic era as a dark, energy-leeching vacuum that drained the statesman and his peers of their youth and intellectual vitality:
During the space of fifteen years, a large portion of human life, how great a number have fallen by casual events, and, as was the fate of the most distinguished, by the cruelty of the prince; whilst we few survivors, not of others alone, but, if I may be allowed the expression, of ourselves, find a void of so many years in our lives, which has silently brought us from youth to maturity, from mature age to the very verge of life!
…as the political theorist Roger Boesche observed, one of the great themes that pervades all of Tacitus’ writings is “the idea that under despotism everyone becomes an actor and all of society wraps itself in insincerity, role-playing and pretense.”…Shame, guilt, a lingering sense of powerlessness, and self-loathing: These are all emotions common to individuals living under tyranny…Dark currents of hatred course deep below the surface of all such brutalized societies, and Tacitus provides terrifyingly vivid descriptions of the ugliness of pent-up rage and mob violence in the event of regime collapse.
…Tacitus, however, did not descend to such levels of cynicism. While he stressed the importance of compromise in order to serve the public good, he was at his most powerful when describing instances of remarkable courage emerging from some of the more unlikely places: “an emancipated slave and a woman”, who died under torture and “set an example which shone the brighter at a time when persons freeborn and male, Roman knights and senators, untouched by torture, were betraying each his nearest and dearest”; or Petronius, Nero’s “arbiter of elegance”, a court dandy whom nobody took seriously but who died laughing and, in one last gesture of theatrical defiance, embarrassed the emperor by publishing a list of his patron’s secret sexual habits and partners. Like many regime insiders-turned-dissidents, Petronius knew that the public unveiling of the tyrant’s squalid personal habits would be far more devastating than any fiery moral condemnation. Nevertheless, this author’s personal favorite would have to be the guard colonel Subrius Flavus, who, upon being condemned to death, openly vented the depth of his hatred and disdain to a rattled Nero’s face. Hauled off to a nearby field for his execution, Flavus witheringly commented on the grave that had been dug for him, which he deemed too narrow and shallow. “More bad discipline”, he let out in one final contemptuous snort before bowing his head for the executioner’s blade.