One word comes up again and again as the media, legal experts, and longtime government officials try to describe what Trump has done in retaking power and launching a campaign of revenge against his enemies: “unprecedented.” It seems there is little to which his ferocious rule and brazen corruption can be compared, at least in the past two and a half centuries of the American republic. But the United States is still a young country, and a longer, more global view yields fascinating parallels to our moment that date back to antiquity. Here, seven historians tell Rolling Stone how monarchs, elites, and dictators of the past anticipated someone like Trump, the results of their often brash and short-sighted decisions, and what kind of legacies they ultimately left behind.
The stories aren’t road maps to the future, exactly. As most of these academics pointed out, history doesn’t really repeat itself. But, as they say, it can rhyme — and those echoes can help us make sense out of chaos.
An Uprising of the Peloponnesian War
Roel Konijnendijk, a classics professor and Darby Fellow in ancient history at the University of Oxford, warns that we should be careful in trying to draw connections between the Trump era and previous incarnations of brute power. “The regime’s particular combination of far-right bigotry and illegal asset stripping seems to me a unique product of the country’s character and history,” he says of the current White House. “There are plenty of cruel strongmen in ancient history with a total disregard for the responsibilities of office, but they never had the ideological context to imagine some of the things we’re seeing now.”
Still, he points to ancient Greece, and the commentary of Thucydides, the Athenian historian who lived in the 5th century BC. In his writings on the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens for dominance in the Hellenic world, Thucydides remarked on the causes of an uprising in the city of Corcyra, where proponents of democracy overthrew a wealthy ruling class and put many of them to death. The civil strife in Corcyra, Thucydides notes, was the sort that “happened then and will forever continue to happen as long as human nature remains the same.” As Konijnendijk puts it, Thucydides “goes through a long list of familiar items: partisan rhetoric, distortion of truth, corruption of judgment, suspicion and paranoia, glorification of violence, faithless backstabbing, cruel vengeance, and polarization of society to the point where the moderate citizens are ‘destroyed’ and appeals to decency are ‘laughed out of sight.'” In the end, Konijnendijk says, “the democratic party annihilated the oligarchs in a seven-day orgy of violence.”
While it’s true that material conditions were vastly different in Greece almost 2,500 years ago, here in a post-Capitol riot U.S., popular armed revolt against the super-rich doesn’t sound quite as far-fetched as it did a few decades ago.