this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Rough Roman Memes
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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.
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Explanation: Octavianus, later known as Augustus, was the first Emperor of Rome. The position was not actual formalized as such - rather, Augustus, through a mixture of lawful and unlawful means, took all meaningful power into his own hands, ensuring the Roman people would never have to worry about having a legal avenue for government decision-making ever again.
This has no relevance to current events, and I don't currently feel like a burned-out husk ready to crumble into ash.
This never happened in an empty vacuum either ... it's not like one person or one personality just suddenly appeared, was all powerful, changed things on their own, forced people do things, had magical powers to convince people to do things and voila! changes government!
It was a long serious of events that led up to that moment and it involved lots of greedy, short sighted people who were all hungry for power ... mostly because wealth was concentrating itself to ever smaller groups of people while the majority of everyone else had less and less ... not unlike what is happening today.
It was good for the top wealthiest for a while but that system couldn't last and it eventually collapsed.
We're just repeating history and everyone in power thinks that they can do things differently and get away with it this time .... they probably thought the same thing in ancient Rome too.
Funny enough, the ascension of Augustus and the Empire replacing the Republic led to a temporary reversal of that concentration of wealth because of his reliance on professional soldiery, rather than the political support of the aristocracy, to maintain his position. Not that I expect anything so even incidentally fortuitous to happen in our current situation.
But yeah, you're right about all the rest.