Caligula’s Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored | Hacker News Reader

Caligula’s Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored

nytimes.com

60 pointsdiodorus29 comments

There's a wonderful 4 part BBC documentary about Italian Gardens, presented by Monty Don. Monty travels around Italy and visits some amazing gardens. He discusses how gardens where used by the rich to flaunt their wealth and display their power. The competition between the wealthy as to who could build the most beautiful garden, resulted a sort of one one-upmanship. It pushed technology and art forward, and columnated in gardens that amaze to this day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY413RwBzB0

I saw all four of them! Absolutely recommend it to anyone who likes gardens. Same series has gardens of France that is also high on my list of recommendations.

http://archive.is/aNcgw

Beautiful marble. Evil man.

Sure, but whether he was really any more evil than the average Roman Emperor is debatable. Eye witness accounts don't describe any of the horrors associated with him, and the other accounts are generally written well after the fact...and describe not what Caligula did, but what -people said he did-. A key difference, when it was common to blackmail a predecessor when your own ascension was caused by assassination.

Not really important either way, obviously, but an interesting side note.

Sorry, not blackmail, but 'blacken the reputation of'

Why does the author feel the need to draw two comparisons to Trump in the first two paragraphs? Or detracts from what otherwise would be an interesting piece.

There are no mentions of Trump in the first two paragraphs.

In the first, the author likens Suetonius, author of "The Twelve Caesars", to Michael Wolff, author of a book about a Trump WH scandal and intrigue.

In the second, he references Mar-a-Lago.

If these comparisons to the present "detract" from the "interest" of the article for you, rest assured that's a personal thing.

I don't think it was simply a comparison to the present that irked the GP, I think it was the comparison between Trump, who, for all his faults, isn't quite at the level of a guy who had incestuous relations with his sisters, had people killed for amusement, and had a desire to make his horse a consul. It is mostly a harmless admission of the writer's bias - if this was written in the early '70s, there'd be comparisons to Camp David instead of Mar-a-Lago most likely. I don't particularly think it detracts from the piece.

> isn't quite at the level of a guy who had incestuous relations with his sisters, had people killed for amusement, and had a desire to make his horse a consul.

Note that the sisters and horse thing are probably not true; I don’t think either are taken particularly seriously by modern historians. Caligula certainly did do plenty of strange things, though.

I’m guessing the part you didn’t quote at the end of the paragraph: “ As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.”

Milonia is close to Melania. This doesn’t add anything useful to the article (what does it matter what his wife’s names were unless they were famous in their own right?), which is why I’m guessing the OP found this objectionable.

Of course she was famous, she was the empress of Rome!

Milonia Caesonia and Caligula were in love before he took her as 4th (and final) wife, after ditching the previous one because she gave him no children and was labeled as infertile.

Milonia gave Caligula his only daughter, Giulia Drusilla.

Legends say she gave Caligula a love potion that made the emperor crazy for her and they conceived their daughter the first night of marriage, other say one month later.

When Caligula was killed, few hours later Milonia was stabbed by a centurion and the poor Giulia Drusilla was crushed against a wall. She was only one year old.

The Julio-Claudian era of Roman history is so incredibly fascinating. The family ties are hard to keep track of though. But it helps to hear the stories told multiple times. Currently I am listening to the Emperors of Rome podcast. It is one if the best podcasts I have listened to, all categories included.

As I understand, the two main sources of the era were Suetonius and Tacitus, and between them Suetonius were more of the gossipy type in comparison. Thus, the comparison with Wolf seems quite well founded.

It seems to be part of the New York Times style guidelines to put everything into context of presidential politics.

For example, they published an article yesterday about the technical merits of hypersonic missiles, but instead of focusing on the details, it was full of phrases like “Biden will have to decide on the future of Trump’s program...”

In reality, the president doesn’t get into the minutiae of weapon system design. I find the NYT’s style very irritating to read, since I have to spend too much time filtering out the rather meaningless political fluff to find the nuggets of useful information.

I'd argue that much of modern military research and engineering is more politics than defense, so in that sense the political angle of the news story has more meat than the technical.

That seems perfectly reasonable; it’s very common for a change in administration to result in the killing off of various weapons programmes, especially those on the more exotic end of the spectrum. These are often political projects as much as military ones; the progenitor administration may be attached to them, but they’ll be reevaluated with a change of administration and if they’re not much good they may be cut.

But the article doesn’t actually explain any of those politics! That’s the point, they just dropped in Biden’s name, despite the fact that he has no position on this issue, and despite it being largely in the hands of congress to decide the fate of the program’s funding. They took a newly published technical report and said “how can we connect this with the big news this week to make it sound more relevant”, just as they did with Caligula’s garden.

It’s even more irritating if you’re from the UK. The NYT seems to think of us as either champagne-swilling toffs in fancy dress or xenophobic troglodytes.

I remember a time when you didn't even know who was President if you weren't paying attention.

When was that, for you?

Could have forgotten if the media didn't shove it down our throats, No wars, Decent economy, well until the chyna thing happened.

Why not? To many he’s synonymous with shit so has entered common parlance in that way.

That actually completely flew over my head. Politics aside, I think that's a clever little easter egg.

Kudos for catching it!

It's a symptom of the mental illness that is so widespread among "journalists". Mr. Lidz seems to be suffering from persistently invasive thoughts, caused by spending too much time in hatred and rage cycles.

To be honest, you'd have some mental health issues too if you woke up every morning to some man screaming some random bs at the world for four years.

Because he’s a shitty dangerous clown who’s currently in power and calls to mind horrible rulers of the past? That’s my guess.

It's not like there's a reasonable historical link between Caligula, and Trump, or the comparison serves any enlightening purpose. It's "we hate him that's why". Looks really unpleasant when you came looking for history as headline promises. Just to put things into perspective I live in a real unimaginary dictatorship, and still most people here can discuss history without artificially pulling current political news into it. That's just US media's special feature to push obsessions, anxiety, anger, and fear. My guess it's calculated to keep attention through emotion.

Because it's extraordinary coincidence, calm down.

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