Quick Take: the Roman Joe Biden

Looking at Rome's over-the-hill statesmen who tried to hang on to power

I’m a guy who has lived in the US for some time, and worked for an American newspaper for over a decade, but I am a foreigner with an accent, so other foreign people see me as a sort of international interpreter of US politics. This is why, in recent years, they often asked me how come that Joe Biden is the US president, rather than somebody who looks vaguely like an actor playing an American president — somebody like Paul Ryan or Gavin Newsom or, say, like Harrison Ford in the 1990s.

I always tell these foreigners: well, it’s not such a strange case, there were several Roman emperors who were kind of like Biden. There’s a historical compulsion towards picking people like Biden, people who are few people’s first choice but are still acceptable for many. I just noticed I never actually wrote this explanation up, and yet I did write about the Roman precedents for Donald Trump, so there I go.

First of all, it’s safe to agree that US President Joe Biden has been a consensus guy, a career politician who was long known as a reach-across-the-aisle type who would get deals done with the other party, a Congress lifer. He’s very old now, and was finally forced to drop out of the re-election race last month. I still appreciate his grit and endurance, in the face of, well, let’s be honest, senility. We will all be there one day.

History has a long cast of characters who desperately clung to power in old age, with or without reason, much like Biden is doing right now, hoping he doesn’t forget where he left those darned nuclear codes. Rome in particular has several of these types. Now that Biden is riding into the sunset, I will review these Romans one after the other and you guys can tell me in the comments which one you think sounds more like Biden, and whether you think I should have provided other examples too:

Number One: Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. This is the only person in the list who actually was never an emperor, mostly because he lived in the Republican era. Already in his sixties (a pretty advanced age for the 3rd century BC) when Hannibal the Carthaginian attacked Italy, he was like Biden a reach-across-the-aisle guy who still managed to become leader of a powerful faction, the one opposed to the more photogenic and charismatic, Newsom-like Scipios.

Verrucosus means “warty,” so that gives you an idea of just how photogenic old Quintus was, even during his warty prime. Biden, had he been Roman, would have probably be called “Baldy” or “Comb-Over-Y” because of his long, doomed fight to hide his hair loss especially in the 70s and 80s.

Verrucosus was appointed dictator after a string of Roman defeats, and opted by an extremely cautious strategy that gained for him the additional surname of “Cunctator” or “Delayer” as he had Roman forces shadow Hannibal’s army movements across the peninsula, while avoiding pitched battle; Hannibal, in response, punished Roman allies while recruiting fresh troops among Roman enemies. People who are unhappy with the degree of American involvement in the Ukrainian War may see similarities with Biden there.

At the end of Verrucosus’ term, the Scipios managed to get one of their allies elected as consul and provided with a massive army to crush Hannibal. Disaster ensued at the Battle of Cannae, so Verrucosus returned to the fore of Roman politics and continued his cat-and-mouse game with Hannibal for a little while longer. At least he didn’t lose the war.

Verrucosus was a wily dude. He was happy to give important military commands to his enemies, hoping they’d get killed while on campaign, which happened often enough. His last such move didn’t work, though: he left a young Scipio move to Spain to take command of the Roman army there, and this young fucker was wildly successful, becoming Africanus, the guy who did win the war for Rome.

Number Two: Galba. A minor celebrity in Roman historiography, Galba succeeded the extravagant Nero upon his death in 68 AD. He was sixty-five at the time, and had a long, Verrucosus-style career in the senate behind. Most of his peers there were happy when Galba proclaimed himself emperor in Spain, even before Nero died.

Galba was almost a decade older than the long-dead Caligula; he had only rebelled reluctantly and after others did it first and hadn’t even succeeded in securing control in much of Spain and Gallia, but he was widely perceived as a safe pair of hands that the senate could work with, much like Biden in 2020.

Poor Galba was a disappointment, to the extent that his name became forever associated with one of the coolest Latin sentences ever, when Tacitus called wrote about him that “Maior privato visus dum privatus fuit, et omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset.” That is — “he seemed too excellent to be a mere citizen so long as he remained one, and all would have agreed that he was worthy to the imperial office, if he had never held it,” words applicable to many rulers before and since.

Better at self-presentation than management, as emperor Galba identified himself as descending from Jupiter on his father’s side, and Pasiphae, mother of Crete’s Minotaur, on his mother’s. Within a few months, Nero’s ex friend Otho — a bewigged, plump courtier — murdered Galba; this guy Otho definitely was more like Chris Christie than Biden.

Number Three: Nerva. Call him Galba 2.0. In a reprise of Galba’s senate-engineered accession, he was sixty-six when a plot ended with the last emperor of the Flavian dynasty murdered in 96 AD. Emperor Domitian had been more popular with the masses than the elites, so another elderly, well-connected and malleable man was needed to reassure everyone about continuity and stuff.

Nerva proved to be as malleable as advertised. A true Schelling point in a toga, he never contradicted his handlers, and was immediately forced by the praetorians to execute individuals involved in the plot against his predecessor, to calm the popular rage.

The sixteen-month reign of Nerva was a mere footnote in Roman history, characterized by one very important decision that may have had little to do with Nerva himself, or perhaps was his idea all along: early in his reign a call was made so that Christians were recognized as legally separate from Jews, and not required to pay the so-called Fiscus Judaicus tax anymore. Maybe Biden will thus be remembered by posterity, because of something that he did or didn’t regarding Jewish people or Israel that will have massive consequences down the line. Any ideas?

Number Four: Gordian I, Pupienus and Balbinus. The year 238 AD really should be called “The Year of the Three Bidens.” We don’t know all that much about these fellas, other than they were cranky, elderly senators (all over sixty) driven by the senate to take control of the state in 238 AD.

Rome entered that year under the firm, if slightly aggressive, grip of Emperor Maximinus, a fearsome military man who had taken power violently and violently despised the senate. When the senate first rebelled against the brute, it appointed a blue-blooded Roman living in Africa as emperor.

Gordian I was such a perfect Biden that the similarities are baffling: he was 80 on accession, and his eldest surviving son, co-emperor Gordian II, was a Roman Hunter Biden through and through. He was only known by his contemporaries as a great seducer, sometimes called “the Priapus of the century” because of his sexual exploits.

These two could have been fodder for great books. Both Gordians, however, were killed by Maximinus loyalists, so two more elderly senators — Pupienus and Balbinus — were called to bring some stability and reach-across-the-aisle pizzazz, after Maximinus himself was also murdered.

The two oldsters ruled Rome, and little outside the city of Rome itself, for about three turbulent months filled with a bunch of malarkey. Old men can bear grudges all right and they soon started to hate each other, and everyone got bored of them, so they were both murdered by the Praetorian Guards. If Pupienus and Balbinus ever had a televised debate, I bet it would have been pretty similar to the two Trump and Biden had in 2020. They would have squabbled over the Roman equivalent of golf with the same passion.