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Comment by gentleman11 | Hacker News Reader

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If you fell into a timewarp and somehow woke up in the first century BC you'd be more than horrified. The Celtic war chief Brennus had tried (and failed) to wipe out the Greeks a hundred or so years before. He had managed to capture and decapitate the Macedonian king. Greek women and children were embedding themselves in with infantry units so they could die on the battle field versus being taken captive by Celts...People did terrible horrific things to each other in the name of land and money and slaves and you can see some of that same mentality with tribal politics in 2023.

I think you’re misunderstanding the meaning of “great” in “great man theory.” It means “big” as in “significant,” not “good.”

Great Man Theory is about individual people[1] having a large impact on history. If Cæsar did all those things then he was a “great man” in that sense.

[1] Snickering side-note about male-supremacy v.s. “man” being gender-neutral.

Except the real "Great Man" in this case was Sulla. Caesar was just copying him successfully. Once Sulla had broken precedent, more repeats of his "one neat trick" (of marching on Rome and taking power by force) were inevitable.

Caesar was a great man because he won. We'd be saying the exact same thing about Hitler today instead of, say, Churchill had WW2 turned out differently.

Seeing how right wing is growing around Europe, when we are a couple of years away to "celebrate" 100 years from the start of WW II, it isn't that surprising.

Expect similar reverence of other dictators with enough centuries in between.

Both things are true: Caesar was a narcissistic genocidal man who destroyed what was left of the Roman republic (characterizing the Roman state as "one of the oldest democracies" is correct in a sense, but it was really so corrupt and oligarchic that it rings hollow). Also, his actions and the words written about those actions would shape history in a grand way for millennia to come.

> who destroyed what was left of the Roman republic

Somebody else would've done it instead. It was a semi-permanent state of civil strife or even war for the past 100 years or.

From the perspective of Roman (or even ordinary Romans) aristocrats Ceasar was much preferably to other tyrants they had like Sulla, Cinna, Gaius Marius or even Augustus because he wasn't really into mass murdering his political enemies or sacking Roman/Italian cities.

Not that this did him any good in the end, he failed because he was to 'merciful' and not genocidal enough towards other Romans. Not that he had similar concerns about Celts and other 'barbarians'?

But I don't think the was particularly inherently more cruel or geocidal than most other conquering generals at the time (Cesar was just massively more successful so had the opportunity to murder/enslave a much larger number of people than anyone else). However what the Romans did to Carthage or some Greek cities etc. was no different.

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