By: Rudolf Marku

1. In an apocryphal episode, when visiting communist Beijing in 1972, in his role as National Security Advisor to the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger asks Zhou Enlai, the prime minister of China, what he thinks of the importance of the French Revolution of 1789. It is too early, too early, to be able to express an opinion on an event that happened only a few centuries ago – was the enigmatic answer of the most enigmatic prime minister of that time.

I was reminded of this episode while reading the lives of the Roman emperors these days. The lives of the ten most famous emperors of the Roman Empire, who have left their mark on the history of ancient Rome. And not only on that of ancient Rome. Is it too early to judge the history of ancient Rome? Not to judge it, because this is beyond the capabilities of modern man, but so that we can at least draw some similarities with the history of our times? I don't believe it's too early. Just as I tend to believe that it's never too late.

What is noticeable as a similarity of all emperors is their irresistible attraction to being authors, creators; it is the great complex of autoromania, a complex that all politicians and people who suffer the dividing abyss of ambition with anonymous mediocrity or the abyss between temporary power and eternity have.

All Roman emperors wrote, some of them even wrote well. They wrote their memoirs, they wrote about military campaigns, they wrote instructions for their citizens, they wrote treatises on history, on linguistics, on philosophy, they wrote against their opponents. The emperors of ancient Rome, of course, through no fault of their own, were not so lucky as to write on the Internet, in Facebook, in Twitter, in WhatsApp ... Their attraction to artistic creativity is noticeable.

Julius Caesar, besides the famous book of descriptions of the campaign in present-day Germany, wrote, as did the old tragedians of Greece, an “Oedipus”. Of course, far from the genius of the ancient Greeks. But, nevertheless, with the ambition to write the same subject. Augustus writes an “Ajantus” - which is true with great difficulty, so much so that he used to say, with amazing sincerity, that this time Ajax is suffering many times more from the style of Augustus himself than from the real wounds he had received. Tiberius wrote an “Elegy on the Death of Julius Caesar”. Claudius, a ruler as gloomy as he is attractive in his gloom, will be remembered as a pedantic ruler who tried to reform the Latin alphabet. He was also one of the first to take an Etruscan history seriously. Nero was obsessed with the fame of poetry and with artistic creativity. He wanted to be accepted as an artist at all costs. As an author. Julius Caesar and Augustus were prose writers and those obsessed with artistic fame; each of them wrote in classical Latin, in old Latin, in direct Latin. Augustus especially despises what he calls the “Asiatic Style” - the style of unclear, scattered expression, with phrases deliberately confused to appear as speculatively as possible knowledgeable ...

What the Roman emperors had in common was the fear of the knife, the dagger, and sudden murder. What they had in common was the insecurity that power gave them. All of them, without exception, kept in their courts, in addition to bodyguards, advisors and ministers who knew how to decipher horoscopes, who knew how to read warning signs, who knew how to decipher dreams (Freud was very late in his theory of dreams) ... They all testified that they suffered from insomnia (centuries later, an English writer named William Shakespeare would say of a ruler that murders had once and for all killed his sleep) ... And they all shared psychological disorders. Caligula was mad. Nero, who at the beginning of his reign as a promising, successful emperor, became progressively irrational. Tacitus, the Roman historian, notes how Tiberius quickly turns into a human ruin, destroyed and transformed by the violent influence of absolute power.

The unifying leitmotif of the Roman emperors was their envious adoration of Alexander. The young Julius Caesar sighs over the grave of the great Macedonian. Augustus orders his tomb to be opened, so that he can at least see the skull of the world-conquering leader. Nero called his guard the "Phalanx of Alexander the Great". Meanwhile, in our country, it seems that all the prime ministers of post-communism, in one way or another, have shown and continue to show, directly or indirectly, their adoration of Enver Hoxha ... It is the adoration of power for power's sake, so enviable in our modern times. In our times governed by the Caesars of power, where people are treated neither more nor less as things, objects, even worthless things ...

2. In the famous novel Autumn of the patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells us about a tyrant who ruled for hundreds of years, if not forever. Perhaps since Roman times. The dictator's own death and the destruction of his regime do not happen because the time has come for him to die and with him his regime to be destroyed. The dictator's death happens because time itself dies. The story of the dictator of The patriarch's autumn is like a journey into a black hole in outer space. The past returns not only to what it was, but also to what it is and what it will be. It seems that the dictator of Marquez's novel has many lives within one life. The present is both future and past. The dictator of fALL is one of the Roman emperors or one of the communist or post-communist dictators (since these two terms do not have any great difference between them). Or one of the modern leaders. The dictator lives and dies and lives again; he is simultaneously dead and alive at every moment. He repeats himself during a reproductive process in different guises and with different ages, because we must not forget that he is immortal. Perhaps this is what the Chinese prime minister had in mind in his enigmatic response in that distant year 1972 ...

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