The Folly of the Baiae Bridge

I have seen this scene play out before, countless times, under different names and different skies. They call it hubris—the overweening pride that blinds a man to the reality of his own constraints. The tale I shall tell you is of Emperor Gaius, whom history remembers as Caligula, and his grand, pointless gesture.

In 39 AD, Caligula ordered the construction of a massive, temporary pontoon bridge across the Bay of Baiae, a distance of over three miles. He didn't do it to improve commerce, or to expedite a military campaign, but, as the historian Suetonius recorded, to prove a local astrologer named Thrasyllus wrong. Thrasyllus had once declared that Gaius had "no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse dry-shod across the Gulf of Baiae."

Caligula, now emperor, had the entire regional merchant fleet commandeered, linking the ships in a double line, planking them over and covering them with earth. This colossal, unnecessary display of absolute power drew so many vessels that it caused a severe famine in Rome, crippling the very supply lines that fed his people.

When the bridge was complete, the Emperor—dressed in a gold-cloth cloak, sword, and shield—spent two days riding his horse triumphantly back and forth across his self-made land bridge, celebrating a "victory" over the sea itself. He proved his point, but at the cost of his empire's stability.

The American Echo

Now, look at the American landscape. You see the same heedless command of vast resources, not for the people's common good, but for a leader's symbolic victory or personal vanity.

Consider the recent years: the relentless focus on building a massive, symbolic wall along the southern border. This was not a policy debated and designed by experts for maximum efficacy, but a monumental promise fueled by a political leader's insistence, a totem of personal will. The cost in material, manpower, and political capital diverted from actual crises—failing infrastructure, crippling debt, a fragmented society—parallels Caligula's draining of the merchant fleet. The wall became the project, not the purpose.

We have leaders who demand a spectacle, a triumph to be paraded before the masses, regardless of the real-world consequence. Just as Caligula drained the food supply for a vanity bridge, the American state can become consumed by projects of pure political theater, satisfying a leader's psychological need to dominate the narrative while the practical machinery of the Republic grinds to a halt. The absurdity of Caligula's "victory" over the sea finds its modern parallel in the spectacle that political humorists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert dissect nightly—the endless performance that distracts from the tangible decay.

We are watching the precious, finite resources of a colossal empire—be it its wealth, its attention, or its political will—being sacrificed to the whims of its supreme leader's ego. The bridge at Baiae was dismantled; the famine was real. This is the tragic cycle of an empire more concerned with its leader's glory than its citizens' bread.

Source: Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, Life of Caligula, Chapter 19.

The Tale of Diocletian’s Deadly Edict

The later Empire, reeling from the "Crisis of the Third Century," stood on the precipice. This was an age defined by economic madness—a frantic scramble by the state to pay for an impossibly large army and endless public works while its currency was literally melting in its hands. The tale is of Emperor Diocletian and his disastrous attempt to impose control on chaos.

The root rot was National Debt and Fiscal Decay. For decades, emperors had desperately financed wars and bribed the legions by engaging in severe currency debasement. They reduced the intrinsic value of the silver denarius and the antoninianus to near nothing, flooding the market with coins that were barely more than copper with a silver wash.

The inevitable consequence followed: Hyperinflation. Prices skyrocketed as citizens—from soldiers to merchants—demanded more and more of the worthless coins to equal the value of the goods they were selling. In some parts of the Empire, the price of goods increased by 15,000%. The government's bills could only be paid by minting more worthless money, spiraling the state into insolvency.

The Tyranny of the Price Tag

In A.D. 301, Diocletian—a man of rigid order who could not tolerate disorder—issued one of history's most famously failed economic policies: the Edict on Maximum Prices (Edictum de Pretiis Rerum Venalium).

This was a colossal act of state-sponsored delusion. The Edict fixed the maximum price for over a thousand goods, services, and wages, from a bushel of wheat to the fee paid to a lawyer. The penalty for charging more than the official, maximum price was execution. Diocletian effectively substituted the Tyranny of the Narrative for the Law of Supply and Demand. He declared that prices were rising not because the money was worthless, but because the merchants were greedy.

The result was textbook economic collapse:

 * Shortages and Hoarding: Merchants and farmers, unable to sell their goods at a profit—or often, at a price that even covered their costs—simply withdrew from the official market. They either stopped producing or sold their goods on a vast, flourishing black market.

 * Market Shutdown: The official economy seized up. Goods vanished from the storefronts of Rome's major cities. In effect, the state had successfully eliminated inflation by eliminating trade itself.

 * Labor Crisis: Wages were also capped, leading skilled laborers and artisans to abandon their trades, making shortages of finished goods even worse.

Diocletian's brutal edict confirmed a painful truth: a government cannot legislate value into a debased currency. It failed to stop the inflation, caused widespread famine, and was eventually and quietly ignored, proving that the free market, however imperfect, is more powerful than a tyrant’s decree.

The Parallel: Ignoring the Inevitable

The American Republic today faces its own version of a structural, runaway fiscal crisis, exhibiting the core Roman decay:

 * The Debased Dollar and the Debt Pile: Where Rome debased the metal in the denarius, America debases the confidence in its currency by expanding the money supply and accepting levels of national debt that are mathematically unpayable under current policy. This constant deficit spending is our modern currency debasement—it is the financial equivalent of continually reducing the silver content of the coin to pay the legions (e.g., funding trillion-dollar budget deficits).

 * The Tyranny of the Narrative (Economic Edition): Just as Diocletian blamed "greed" instead of money supply, modern political leaders (across the political spectrum) employ the Tyranny of the Narrative to misdirect blame. They demonize corporations, speculators, or foreign trade when the true cause is the fundamental, structural mismatch between what the state spends and what the state collects. Any attempt to enforce price controls (or wage controls) in a modern economy, whether on insulin, energy, or labor, is the ghostly echo of Diocletian's disastrous attempt to substitute political will for economic law.

 * The Inevitable Outcome: The Roman experience teaches that when a state sacrifices fiscal prudence to sustain an imperial lifestyle and placate special interests, the end result is a collapse of the currency and the economy. The crisis will not be solved by threats of execution but by the painful restoration of monetary discipline and a severe downsizing of the imperial scope—a lesson the American political class seems determined to ignore.

The Tale of the Historian and the Burning Scrolls

The old walls of the Senate House still hold the echoes of suppressed truth. This tale reminds us that when a state slides from republic to tyranny, the Tyranny of the Narrative begins not with the jailing of men, but with the burning of books.

The Tale of the Historian and the Burning Scrolls

The event takes place in the year A.D. 25, during the suffocating, paranoid reign of Emperor Tiberius. The Roman state had officially transitioned from a system where deeds were prosecuted to one where words were lethal.

The man was Aulus Cremutius Cordus, an esteemed historian. He was not a revolutionary, but a man clinging to the ghost of the old Republic. In his historical chronicles, he committed what became, under the Empire, the ultimate crime: he praised Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius—the assassins of Julius Caesar—calling them the “last of the Romans.”

This was not a call to violence; it was merely a statement of historical admiration for men who had violently sought to preserve the Republic. But in a system where the Emperor’s word was the measure of all things, praising the Republic’s heroes was treason against the Principate.

The Charge and the Eradication

Cremutius was brought before the Senate, accused under the terrifying Lex Majestatis (the law of treason), which Tiberius had weaponized to crush any verbal dissent. The real mover behind the prosecution was Sejanus, the ruthless Praetorian Prefect and Tiberius's power broker, who sought to silence any voice that might suggest an alternative to the current authoritarian structure.

Facing certain condemnation and a brutal execution, Cremutius made his final, heroic defense, as recorded by the later historian Tacitus. He pointed out the absurdity: if the great Roman historian Livy could praise Brutus and Cassius, why could he not? He argued that history itself would judge the regime, stating:

> "Conscript Fathers, my words are brought to judgement—so guiltless am I of deeds! You may sentence me to death, but then not only Brutus and Cassius will be remembered. I, too, shall not be forgotten."

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Cremutius then walked out of the Senate chamber and committed suicide by starvation, preempting the Emperor’s verdict and denying the state the spectacle of his execution.

But the Tyranny of the Narrative was not satisfied with his death. The Senate, by decree, ordered the Aediles (magistrates) to search Rome and gather every copy of Cremutius’s work. His historical accounts were publicly burned in the Forum—a violent act of historical revisionism and a stark example of Damnatio Memoriae applied to the written word.

The Parallel: The War on History and Expertise

The destruction of Cremutius’s scrolls finds its echo in the modern American regime’s systematic campaign against expertise, facts, and institutional memory—a war fought not with fire, but with digital erasure and high-volume denial.

 * The Attack on Institutions: Cremutius’s crime was placing the Republic above the person of the Emperor. The modern equivalent is the pervasive attack on any institution—science, journalism, intelligence agencies, or even the electoral process—that produces verifiable data contradicting the leader’s narrative. The institutions themselves are declared "corrupt" or "fake," just as the Emperor declared Cremutius’s history "seditious."

 * The Scrutiny of Thought: The modern political regime, particularly in the orbit of Donald Trump, demands not just loyalty, but credulity. Anyone who retains the capacity for critical historical analysis or who points out the constitutional heroes (the "Brutus and Cassius") of a more virtuous past is exiled or subjected to a digital Damnatio Memoriae. They become RINOs or traitors—their words immediately dismissed as lies, their memory purged from the loyalist dialogue.

 * The Ultimate Lesson: As Tacitus observed, the effort ultimately failed: “The persecution of genius fosters its influence; foreign tyrants, and all who have imitated their oppression, have merely procured infamy for themselves and glory for their victims.” Though officially burned, Cremutius’s books were secretly saved by his daughter Marcia and others, eventually republished when the regime relaxed its grip. This is the weary hope—that despite the loudest voices in the modern media circus (the digital Aediles), the truth is often squirreled away, saved in digital archives and private accounts, waiting for a less tyrannical age to be read again.

The history of the Republic, whether Roman or American, is not defined by the strongman, but by those few who refuse to let the truth perish in the flames.

Source:

Tacitus, The Annals, Book IV, Chapters 34-35.

A discussion and translation of this historical event can be found via the following source: Brill: Historiography and Freedom of Speech: The Case of Cremutius Cordus