If you could eliminate one person from history...who would it be?

[Jack Rabbit]

397. Critique

(T)he Republic was doomed anyway.

The Republic was of no consequence. In spite of what you may have been told, it was about as democratic as a Tea Partier's vision of America. The Senate was a rich man's club and it membership was largely hereditary. It existed to impose its order on the slaves and plebeians. It was fundamentally tyrannical and elitist. For most Romans, there was little difference in life under the Caesars as under the Republic and the Republic was scant improvement to life under the Tarquins.

My objection to the Roman Empire is not for what it was to Romans compared to the Republic, but for what it was to subjugated peoples in the outer reaches of the Empire. Gallic tribes were better as self-governing entities than as subjects of foreign conquerors. Empires come into and tell the people "we're better than you and can take your natural wealth, kill your men and enslave your women and children." Check out what happened to the Dacians in 117 AD.

Caesar was just . . . (a) slightly less bloodthirsty version of (Pompey) and then Sulla before him.

Tell that the Gauls. Caesar decimated their numbers by wiping out entire villages. After the Gauls surrendered, Caesar had the hand of every tenth Gaul cut off to remind them all just who was in charge. Caesar was a genocidal maniac, no more majestic as Custer or the Nazis.

If he'd died, there would have been someone else. Probably Augustus.

Augustus was another piece of work, but he rode to power on his great uncle's reputation. He wouldn't have amounted to anything had he not been Caesar's grandnephew. He was good at only one thing, really: self-promotion. Come to think of it, that was Julius Caesar's greatest gift, too. Take a look at Augustus' successors: of the five emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, only Claudius was hard working, competent administrator who could let his deeds speak for themselves. Otherwise, following the self-promoter Augustus we have Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. Such luminaries! It may have taken 500 years from Augustus to the formal end of the western Empire in 476 AD, but it has always looked to me as though the Empire was in decline from its inception.