Ordinary people, moulded by Hollywood, have a lofty idea of the Roman Empire (as a child, for example, I was impressed by the scene in which Ben-Hur arrives in the triumphal chariot with Quintus Arrius, first consul of Rome, before the emperor Tiberius) and no idea of the Roman Republic, betrayed by Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. As we have seen, the subtitle of Roldán’s Calígula is ‘The Immature Autocrat.’ In the chapter ‘The First Crisis’ the author speaks of the tyrannical behaviour of the emperor and how, unlike in the times of the Roman Republic, in imperial times senators had to behave in the most crawling manner on pain of death. On page 222 we read:
A collective such as the senatorial one, torn by envy, jealousy, resentment and ambition, could only react with vileness to the challenge of imperial tyranny. Meeting the next day, now without Gaius [i.e., Caligula who was in his twenties], they found no other way out than to humiliate themselves lowly, pretending to regard him as a sincere and loyal prince, who had condescended to spare their lives and who, for that, deserved thanks expressed in the granting of new honours. Accordingly, they voted to offer annual sacrifices [of animals] in honour of his clementia, on the anniversary of the day on which he had addressed them, and, to celebrate it, a golden image of the emperor was carried in procession from the Palatine to the Capitol, accompanied by a choir of children from the noblest families, who sang commemorative hymns. [my translation]
Since the Principate was a de facto monarchy the senators could not counteract but react with creeping flattery. Then Roldán adds that Augustus and Tiberius had done the same, but with more hypocrisy: not as blatantly as Caligula did. Since Julius Caesar the Senate had been reduced to the role of a mere coryphaeus willing to endure the worst humiliations, although this situation only became obvious with Caligula’s so-called Principate. On page 131 we read:
The condemned, whose names Gaius took care that they should be publicly exposed, ended up either in prison or hurled down the rock of Tarpeia unless they tried to escape public shame by committing suicide. There were no guarantees even for those sent into exile, who could die en route or during the time of exile. Of the few known cases, one senator, Titius Rufus, was prosecuted for denigrating the Senate as an institution by accusing the House of thinking one way and acting another. Such statements were permitted only to the emperor. For the rest of the mortals it meant death, which Titius anticipated by committing suicide. [my translation]
Imperial Rome was a joke. From Julius Caesar onwards there were problems with Jewish empowerment, as William Pierce tells us. If we recall Eduardo Velasco’s masterful essay in The Fair Race on Judea’s surreptitious war against Rome, one Aulus Avilius Flaccus was appointed governor of Roman Egypt from 33 c.e. until the reign of Caligula (Flaccus grew up with the sons of Augustus’ daughters and was a friend of Tiberius). His rule coincided with the riots against the Jewish population of Alexandria and in Velasco’s essay he is portrayed as a hero. Although Caligula undertook anti-Semitic measures because of the tremendous problems caused by the Alexandrian Jewry, he finally consented to the killing of Flaccus. The Jew Philo portrays the execution this way (page 242 of the Roldán’s book):
The officers therefore pursued him without stopping to take breath and arrested him; and then immediately some of them dug a ditch, and the others dragged him on by force in spite of all his resistance and crying out and struggling, by which means his whole body was wounded like that of beasts that are despatched with a number of wounds; for he, turning round them and clinging to his executioners, who were hindered in their aims which they took at him with their swords, and who thus struck him with oblique blows, was the cause of his own sufferings being more severe; for he was in consequence mutilated and cut about the hands, and feet, and head, and breast, and sides, so that he was mangled like a victim, and thus he fell, justice righteously inflicting on his own body wounds equal in number to the murders of the Jews whom he had unlawfully put to death.
And the whole place flowed with blood which was shed from his numerous veins, which were cut in every part of his body, and which poured forth blood as from a fountain. And when the corpse was dragged into the trench which had been dug, the greater part of the limbs separated from the body, the sinews by which the whole of the body is kept together being all cut through.
Can you see why I say that the paradigm is Hitler’s Third Reich and not Rome? It was only until the 20th century that the Aryans became authentically Jew-wise, at least for a brief historical moment.