This week, I attended a Rose Cafe featuring Professor Michael Fontaine, who is in the classics department at Cornell. The discussion was an overview of the history of Rome spanning hundreds of years. I didn’t previously know this, but Rome started as a city roughly the size of Ithaca. This city began as a representative republic, similarly to the United States (the founding fathers built the constitution based off of early Roman government). However, competition from surrounding areas forced Rome to fight and expand, and once they started expanding they never stopped. Over the course of 400 years, the small Roman city expanded across the entire Mediterranean Sea. From this point, Rome was so big that it was impossible to rule as a republic. This is when Augustus Caesar took control of Rome and steered them to become an Empire. The Empire stood with a fake senate to give the illusion of the Empire holding for another 400 years, expanding more and more before finally falling.

The most interesting part of this discussion was the parallel Professor Fontaine drew between Rome’s emperors and dictators from the mid 1900’s. Augustus Caesar referred to himself as “The Leader”, which is identical to the language used by dictators such as Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler. Additionally, Caesar had his statue erected all over the Roman Empire to remind people who their leader was. As he aged, the statues remained in the image of his younger self to give the image that his reign was still as strong as ever. Even today, there are some countries where the prime minister have their portraits in every important building in the country. These parallels show that the signs of overreaching governments do not change over time, tyrannical leaders seek absolute control and tend to act in very similar ways to each other.