Dear Editor:

The historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69 CE - 122 CE) is best known for his Lives of the Caesars, short biographies of Julius Caesar and the next eleven Roman emperors. It makes for fascinating reading, not least because he salts his otherwise conventional narratives with salacious and deeply disturbing details of his subjects’ lives and reigns. His work has taken on new meaning and urgency during our own “golden age” (as the White House website calls it), when our imperious president is acting more and more like a deranged Roman potentate.

Tiberius became the second emperor of Rome in 14 CE. Soon the responsibilities of government repelled him; frequently absent from office while enjoying his southern estate on Capri, he manifested the character defects he had tried to conceal early in his reign. Spending days in the company of a wealthy, degenerate ex-senator, he caroused with naked girls and boys who served food and wine at their orgies. (Mar-a-Lago, where “entertainment and personalized services has [sic] created an incomparable atmosphere,” and Epstein’s island come to mind).

Suetonius tells us that “Tiberius did so many wicked deeds under the pretext of reforming public morals — but in reality to gratify his lust for seeing people suffer — that many satires were written against him.” (The ratings of late-night comedians are off the charts, thanks to our own malignant narcissist.)

Increasingly paranoid and insecure, Tiberius created a surveillance state in which his spies were everywhere and summary confiscations and executions were commonplace. (Trump has institutionalized hostile investigations and purges of anyone insufficiently loyal to him. He threatens his opponents with incarceration, deportation, and execution.)

Of course, they aren’t astral twins. Tiberius was fluent in Greek, well-versed in Greek and Latin literature, and took his preparation for imperial rule seriously; Trump’s stints as real estate developer and fake TV boss constituted his entire political apprenticeship.

But if Donald Trump read books, he might see himself in this biography of a cruel hedonist who succumbed to the intoxication of unlimited power. Tiberius was universally reviled; historians have already ranked Trump among the worst of U.S. presidents.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay