alt Hacker NewsEh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
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An emperor choosing a bad heir is much easier to explain than the general population of a democracy choosing this.
Interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia [1]:
> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]
> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]
> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...