The Men Who Would Be Napoleon
Caligula, Nero, Commodus, the mad, bad Roman emperors, arouse in us pity for the people who could not find a better system of government - and, at a certain level, incredulity and incomprehension. The same, when we read about, say, 19th century slavery in America, in which black people were bred on special farms and often worked to death over a short span of murderous exploitation in six or seven years. Or that until not so long ago women lacked most civil rights; that women got the vote in most of Europe only after the Second World War; or that, forty years and less ago, the US democracy...