Powerful men do love a transhistorical man-crush – fixating on an ancestor figure, who can be venerated, perhaps surpassed. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has told the New Yorker about his particular fascination with the Roman emperor, Augustus – he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have even called one of their children August.
“Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace,” Zuckerberg explained. He pondered, “What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today ...” On the other hand, he said, “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things”.
Zuckerberg loved Latin at school (“very much like coding”, he said). His sister, Donna, got her classics PhD at Princeton, is editor of the excellent Eidolon online classics magazine, and has just written a book on how “alt-right”, misogynist online communities invoke classical history.
I’m not sure whether the appealing classics nerdiness of Zuckerberg’s background makes his sanguine euphemisms more or less alarming. “He had to do certain things” and “a really harsh approach” are, let’s say, a relaxed way of describing Augustus’ brutal and systematic elimination of political opponents. And “200 years of world peace”? Well yes, if that’s what you want to call centuries of brutal conquest. Even the Roman historian Tacitus had something to say about that: “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”. They make a desert and call it peace.
Let’s be charitable and suggest that it’s not the ruthless crushing of his enemies and domination of the known world that attracts Zuckerberg to Augustus, but the intellectual exercise of thinking about the historical problem that he presents.
It’s true that his reign has been reconsidered time and again: it is one of those extraordinary junctions in history – when Rome’s republic teetered, crumbled, and reformed as the empire – that looks different depending on the moment from which he is examined. It is perfectly true to say that Augustus ended the civil strife that overwhelmed Rome in the late first century BC, and ushered in a period of stability and, in some ways, renewal, by the time of his death in 14 AD. That’s how I was taught about Augustus at school, I suspect not uncoincidentally by someone brought up during the second world war. But in 1939 Ronald Syme had published his brilliant account of the period, The Roman Revolution – a revolutionary book in itself, challenging Augustus’s then largely positive reputation by portraying him as a sinister figure who emerged on the tides of history out of the increasingly ungovernable Roman republic, to wield autocratic power.
Part of the fascination of the man is that he was a master of propaganda and a superb political operator. In our own era of obfuscation, deceit and fake news it’s interesting to try to unpick what was really going on. Take his brief autobiography, Res Gestae Divi Augusti. (Things Done By the Deified Augustus – no messing about here, title-wise).
The text, while heavygoing, is a fascinating document, listing his political appointments, his military achievements, the infrastructure projects he funded. But it can, with other contemporary evidence, also be interpreted as a portrait of a man who instituted an autocracy that cleverly mimicked the forms and traditions of Rome’s quasi-democratic republic.
Under the guise of restoring Rome to greatness, he hollowed out its constitution and loaded power into his own hands. Something there for Zuckerberg to think about, perhaps. Particularly considering the New Yorker’s headline for its profile: “Can Mark Zuckerberg fix Facebook before it breaks democracy?”
• Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
