The Rise of History’s Greatest Emperor: An Untold Story - Alex Petkas
In a Nutshell
Alex Petkas champions studying Roman history through Plutarch-style **monumental history** for emulation and personal inspiration, exemplified by Julius Caesar's tears before Alexander's statue, sparking his ruthless ambition amid factional civil wars, pirate crucifixions, and the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus. Caesar's conquests in Gaul, Rubicon crossing, Pharsalus victory, Cleopatra alliance, and pardons of enemies built unmatched loyalty but provoked an **honor crisis** among Roman elites, who assassinated him on the Ides of March 44 BC to reclaim agency from his monarchical power consolidation. Key takeaways: Emulate greats like Caesar for self-transcendence; true leadership fuses charm, frontline bravery, and gifts to forge fanatical loyalty; unchecked ambition disrupts traditional honor systems, birthing assassins who prioritize meaning over subservience.
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Learning about Roman history is useful for the modern world because it provides inspiration and examples of greatness. Nietzsche's early book On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life warns that history can drain life, cause questioning of decisions, overload with knowledge, and lead to retreat into the library as an opiate for an unfulfilling life. However, history can quicken and enliven, as Goethe said: > "I hate all knowledge that does not quicken and enliven me like away with it."
Nietzsche frames the most enlivening approach as monumental history, embodied by Plutarch, the great ancient philosopher and entertaining biographer. This approach seeks examples of greatness across subjects like kings, battles, art history, engineering, statuary—not just precise facts, but resonance for achievement and finding one's true self in figures representing the greatest version of one's life. Greats emulate history, e.g., Julius Caesar weeping before Alexander the Great's statue. History is ultimately about emulation and imitation.
Ancient peoples approached history similarly: ancient Egypt had Egyptologists studying 5,000 BC in 2,500 BC; late antiquity (4th century AD) was as far from Homer as we are from Charlemagne; Plutarch (Greek philosopher under Hadrian/Trajan, ~100 AD) wrote biographies of figures 100-700 years earlier, with a deep sense of tradition.
Caesar in his early 30s as quaestor (chief of staff to a governor) in Spain tours a temple to Hercules (like a museum with statues and dedications). He lingers weeping before Alexander the Great's statue. His friends ask why; he replies: > "Do you not think it is a matter for tears that when Alexander was my age, he was the ruler of so many great peoples and yet I have done nothing worthy of great renown?"
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