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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;johnmilton, post: 4562644, member: 101855&quot;]I am not nearly as harsh or hostile toward Caesar Augustus.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have been educating myself about the Roman emperors and the British kings and queens. One of the messages that comes out loud and clear from those studies is that, as the late Leo Durocher put it, “Nice Guys Finish Last” or in Rome, dead.</p><p><br /></p><p>Unlike the nice, clean transfers of power that we Americans and much of the civilized world have become accustomed to, Roman rulers had a choice. You either liquidated those who violently opposed you, or they liquidated you.</p><p><br /></p><p>From what I’ve read about Caesar Augustus, he had a long and prosperous rule that brought peace, prosperity and importantly, stability, to Rome. He set a standard for the emperors who would follow him. When he died, at the ripe age of 77, there was genuine sadness that he had passed.</p><p><br /></p><p>One of the errors that many young people make when they are evaluating the performances of historical figures is that you can’t take people out of the context of their times. While some of the things that Caesar Augustus and other affective leaders did might look cruel and even barbaric to us today, they had to deal with the mores of their time.</p><p><br /></p><p>When I was in undergraduate school in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, some college radicals dumped on Abraham Lincoln. Even the in Broadway musical “Hair,” he was the “mother f**king freer of the slaves.” What those young critics didn’t realize, or perhaps acknowledge, was that Lincoln was trying to win the war and restore the Union. If he had failed in that, the slaves would have been in bondage for even longer. Some people say that slavery could have survived until 1900. Sometimes he had to delay actions, like the Emancipation Proclamation, until the political climate was right. What looks right and easy to the casual observers today was anything but that in 1862.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1129453[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1129454[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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