A detail in last September's New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg likely struck many readers as odd, odder even than the many other eccentricities of one of the world's wealthiest men. Zuckerberg, writer Evan Osnos discovered, is obsessed with Augustus Caesar. The Facebook founder's wife accused him of bringing the emperor along on their honeymoon in, obviously, Rome, and the couple named their second daughter August. Having studied Latin in high school—it's like coding, Zuck said—he dove deep into Roman history and eventually found himself clinging, like the Roman people, to Julius Caesar's heir amidst the chaos of the city's civil wars.
Osnos quotes Zuckerberg: "You have all these good and bad and complex figures. I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace."
Not oratory, but interesting. It has not been long since such familiarity with Roman history by American elites was normal, even expected, when there was nothing odd about this country's wealthiest and most powerful thinking much and often of that predecessor republic, especially its decline and end. Of course the architects of our Constitution made free reference to Rome's regime and res publica in their public debates over what would be this country's new order for the ages. And Federalists and anti-Federalists alike wrote under classical pseudonyms. But even an American aristocracy of more recent times, such as that epitomized by the late George H. W. Bush, was taught to look back to Livy and Tacitus for lessons and examples. History was known to be the school of statesmen, and John and Bobby Kennedy were like the Gracchi brothers, beloved by the people and struck down.
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