The more we learn about Nero the more we see the similarity with Obama.
Posted on 09/22/2014 8:39:03 AM PDT by ComtedeMaistre
No...Nero was not there to destroy the Roman empire....the Romans did that to themselves....but Nero helped to destroy Rome, but could not go far enough along that path, because his own Pretorian Personal Guard murdered him....and, his buddy Caligula, too!!!
Those,Democrat. liberal, Obamabots here in the USA are thinking like Romans, Rome can never be invaded by an outside enemy...it was (Twice). I can assure you, USA, you are one step away from tyranny and slaughter. Obama, the Muslim is the enemy at our gates...broom him, politically!!!
A good analogy to use in describing the fall of the Roman Empire would be the Southern Border. Picture those illegal immigrants armed to the teeth, highly trained and led by competent military leaders rampaging across the Rio Grande. That is what the Roman Empire faced for its last two hundred years of existence. The Rhine and Danube was their Rio Grande. The difference is that Rome’s invaders admired and adopted Roman civilization, while ours will not have any use for our civilization.
However, the "Romans" were a dying breed even then, and during the Silver Age that you refernce the Emporers were from the provinces, beginning w/ Trajan.
The population of true Romans had begun to decline even before Nero, hence Augustus' laws to reward marriage & childbirth via tax breaks--it didn't work.
Finally, Tacitus is a very respected historian, even among modern historians.
It could be a slow death, with something else landing the fatal blow.
Rome survived Nero by more than 300 years.
It's widely believed it was the dilution of their coinage that eventually brought Rome down.
In today's America, mentioning this could be a hate crime unless you immediately added not that there's anything wrong with that!
Not only Tacitus but Suetonius alludes tot he same in Lives of the Twelve Caesars:
Nero not only abused freeborn boys, and seduced married women, but also forced the Vestal Virgin Rubria. He virtually married the freedwoman Acte, after bribing some ex-consuls to perjure themselves and swear she was of royal birth.
He tried to turn the boy Sporus into a woman by castration, wed him in the usual manner, including bridal veil and dowry, took him off to the Palace attended by a vast crowd, and proceeded to treat him as his wife. That led to a joke still going the rounds, to the effect that the world would have been a better place if Nero’s father Domitius had married that sort of wife.
Nero took Sporus, decked out in an Empress’s regalia, to all the Greek assizes and markets in his litter, and later through the Sigillaria quarter at Rome, kissing him fondly now and then.
He harboured a notorious passion for his own mother, but was prevented from consummating it by the actions of her enemies who feared the proud and headstrong woman would acquire too great an influence. His desire was more apparent after he found a new courtesan who was the very image of Agrippina, for his harem. Some say his incestuous relations with his mother were proven before then, by the stains on his clothing whenever he had accompanied her in her litter.
Book Six: XXIX His Erotic Practices
He debased himself sexually to the extent that, after exploiting every aspect of his body, he invented an erotic game whereby he was loosed from a cage dressed in a wild animal’s pelt, attacked the private parts of men and women bound to stakes, and when excited enough was ‘dispatched’ by his freedman Doryphorus. He even became Doryphorus’s bride, as Sporus was his, and on the wedding night imitated the moans and tears of a virgin being deflowered.
I have been told, more than once, of his unshakeable belief that no man was physically pure and chaste, but that most concealed their vices and veiled them cunningly. He therefore pardoned every other fault in those who confessed to their perversions.”
The more we learn about Nero the more we see the similarity with Obama.
Solid, honest historians are a rare breed. Revisionists abound.
Actually I think we're closer to the stage at the end of the Roman Republic.
The United States may still be the strongest nation militarily, our forces are not overwhelming and unlike the Romans, we have not been ruthless. At the turn of the 20th Century, we were far more severe against the Muslim rebels in the Philippines than we were a few years ago against Muslim rebels in Iraq and Afghanistan. No hand wringing or verbose justifications for waterboarding, the military just did it en masse, and much worse.
Over the last quarter century, there has been no great power with the ability to challenge the United States. The same could have been said about Spain at the apex of its power. Then the Spanish Armada was defeated. England and France arose as roughly equal powers to Spain with their own colonial networks and military interests.
Facially, she might make an ugly dude. But she's not one. Her backside that goes halfway up her torso puts her clearly out of the maleness league.
“Roman” was a term that changed its meaning drastically over the centuries. The only people better at assimilating others in all of history has probably been Americans.
A freedman could rise to great power and wealth in Rome. His son could be accepted into society and even become a senator. The grandson of a slave could become a consul.
The Romans managed to combine an almost worshipful revernce for ancestry with surprising social mobility, at least over generations. One of the more attractive features of their society, to modern eyes, though the Romans themselves often expressed their disdain for this “weakness.”
By the first century AD, the vast majority of “Romans” were not descended primarily from the old families of Rome itself.
I believe all five of the 2nd century “Good Emperors” were of Roman or at least Italian ancestry, though some were born in the provinces, mostly Spain.
Sounds like a real love triangle ...
Emperor Nero IS Caliph Zero!
“Nero was despised for his affinity for Greek culture over Roman culture. A lot of the tales about him were exaggerated to get across the point of the superiority of the Roman over the Greek.”
This may explain why the man Nero was said to have married and had public sex with, was a famous representative of Greek culture, Pythagoras, who had died over 500 years earlier.
Or it could have been another guy named Pythagoras, from down at the bath house.
Yes, I know. And I’d agree but that she has a records trail evidently tracking her through high school. And their kids came from somewhere.
But she sure does work hard at looking masculine.
Funny, my very libertarian economics instructor taught me that the Roman empire declined, in part, because of currency debasement.
I suspect it doesn't matter which one of them was correct as we are getting both in spades.
Even though emperors were known to be homosexual, it was still considered a vice to most Romans. Emperors like Nero and Elagabulus and Caligula flaunted their bisexuality/homosexuality as a way of rubbing the people’s nose in the fact that emperors were above petty human laws.
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