sycophant of the Tiberius administration. Some of his themes are close parallels to the propaganda
of today's Bush machine.
In addition to feeding the personality cult of Tiberius, Paterculus also lavished praise on Lucius
Aelius Sejanus, the Prefect of the Pretorian Guard and for many years Tiberius's number one
favorite, second in command, and likely successor. In many respects Sejanus was not unlike James
Baker III undeCapri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day control of the vast empire and its 100,000,000r the Bush regime. While Tiberius spent all of his time in seclusion on his island of
subjects. Paterculus wrote of Sejanus that he was "a most excellent coadjutor in all the toils of
government...a man of pleasing gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness...assuming nothing to
himself." That was the voice of the red Studebaker school in about 30 AD. Paterculus should have
limited his fawning to Tiberius himself; somewhat later the emperor, suspecting a coup plot,condemned Sejanus and had him torn limb from limb in gruesome retribution.
But why bring up Rome? Some readers, and not just registered Republicans, may be scandalized by
the things that truth obliges us to record about a sitting president of the United States. Are we not
disrespectful to this high office? No. One of the reasons for glancing back at Imperial Rome is toremind ourselves that in times of moral and cultural degradation like our own, rulers of great evil (^)
have inflicted incalculable suffering on humanity. In our modern time of war and depression, this is
once again the case. If Caligula was possible then, who could claim that the America of the New
World Order should be exempt? Let us therefore tarry for a moment with these old Romans,
because they can show us much about ourselves.
In order to find Roman writers who tell us anything reliable about the first dozen emperors, we
must wait until the infamous Julio-Claudian dynasty of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius, Nero and the rest had entirely passed from the scene, to be supplanted by new ruling
houses. Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 AD; Caligula, his designated successor, fromand Nero from 54 to 68 AD. But the first accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors 37 to 41 AD; (^)
comes from Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a very high Roman official, and it appeared about 115-
AD, late in the reign of the emperor Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to write and publish a more
realistic account of the Julio- Claudian emperors because one of the constant themes of Trajan's
propaganda was to glorify himself as an enlightened emperor through cseries of bloody tyrants. omparison with the earlier
Tacitus is important because he manages to convey something of how the destructiveness of these
emperors in their personal lives correlated with their mass executions and their genocidal economic
policies. Tacitus was familiar with the machinery of Romrank, served as consul in Italy in 97 AD, and was the governor of tan Imperial power: he was of senatorialhe important province of western (^)
Anatolia (today's Turkey) which the Romans referred to simply as Asia. Tacitus writes of Tiberius:
...his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant.
Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and
aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversions were invented. Slaves were charged to locateand procure his requirements. [...] It was like the sack of a captured city.
Tiberius was able to dominate the legislative branch of his government, the senate, by subversion
and terror: It was, indeed, a horrible feature of this period that leading senators became informers
even on trivial matters-- some openly, many secretly. Friends and relatives were as suspect asstrangers, old stories as damaging as new. In the Main Square, at a dinner-party, a remark on any (^)
subject might mean prosecution. Everyone competed for priority in marking down the victim.
Sometimes this was self-defense, but mostly it was a sort of contagion, like an epidemic. [...] I
realize that many writers omit numerous trials and condemnations, bored by repetition or afraid that
catalogues they themselves have found over-long and dismal may equally depress their readers. But