Olasky Books: Three interesting gusts of Augustus

August, named after Augustus Caesar, is a good time to look at three books that apply lessons from ancient Rome. The best is Harry Sidebottom’s Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator (Knopf, 2026). In it we can learn that the lean gladiators of Hollywood spectaculars were rare: A diet heavy on barley stew fattened them up so they could “take flesh wounds that would bleed profusely but would not prevent them from continuing to fight. Fat gladiators made a better visual spectacle.”

Augustus (63 BC – AD 14) reintroduced monarchy to Rome but did not introduce gladiatorial games. They had gone on for centuries, with the careers of individual gladiators averaging three years. Gladiators fought only once or twice a year, more often than not survived a match, and “were at the heart of Roman culture. [They] were sex symbols, despite being overweight and often having bad teeth, bad breath, and bodies marked and altered, sometimes to the point of deformity.”

Human rights were low, but animal rights were non-existent. Augustus said he staged 36 imperial animal-killing spectacles with a death count of 3,500 African beasts. Later emperors outdid him with extravaganzas, perhaps fictional, that included a one-day killing of 1,000 ostriches. Another day’s bill of fare supposedly brought “the turn of 100 lions, 100 Libyan leopards, 100 Syrian leopards, 100 lionesses, and 300 bears.”

Gladiatorial contests decreased as the influence of Christians increased. Tertullian (AD 155 – 220), in On the Spectacles, saw gladiatorial games as idolatrous and argued that Christians should not attend. Sidebottom observes that “Christian munificence was aimed at building churches and giving alms to widows, orphans, and the poor, not funding gladiatorial games…. Christianity killed the Games.”

Emma Southon’s Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2026) emphasizes the brutality of an economy based on enslaving millions and coercing through torture and terror. Southon argues that not until Constantine in AD 319 was it against the rules to drown slaves, “beat them to death with a club, throw them off a cliff, hang them, poison them, or deliberately torture them to death.”

In August it’s worth quoting Southon about “the only time that we really see an outcry of any kind about a person killing enslaved people.” She says Augustus was at a dinner party when a young waiter dropped a crystal bowl and broke it, an offense deserving torture and perhaps death. The boy dropped to his knees at the emperor’s feet, begged to be pardoned, and revealed that his master, Vedius Pollio, threw those who offended him “into a pond of enormous sea lampreys to be torn to pieces and eaten.”

Augustus supposedly saved that boy, but not others, “and Pollio was simply remembered as a bit of a dick.” I like Southon’s pointed non-academic style, but when reviewing a book about awful practices it may seem pearl-clutching to reveal that she repeatedly uses another four-letter word that ends in ck. I hope she’ll grow up before her next work.

In an academic but readable book, The Fall of Republics (Princeton U. Press, 2026), Thomas Madden starts with ancient Greece and Carthage and guides us through Rome’s history of “factions, street violence, and civil war.” As Augustus consolidated his power from 27 BC to AD 14, the Roman Republic “had its mourners, but not many.” Madden then shows us Venice and other states: He sees the US “experiencing many of the same stressors” that killed our predecessors, including polarized politics and some political violence.

So far the US is “bearing up much better than Rome,” and we do not have “illegal or extralegal actions by government officials that persist even after Supreme Court order to the contrary.” Nor are we facing a suspension of elections, open murder of political rivals, or the armed takeover of part of the capital by one political party, but to make those events unlikely Madden emphasizes the need for “educational reform,” with a particular emphasis on teaching American history and civics.

Briefly noted

Parents and children doing school reports will benefit from two precisely-written and well-illustrated books: Bats of the World by Winifred Frick and M. Teague O’Mara (Princeton U. Press, 2026), and Clouds: How to Identify Nature’s Most Fleeting Forms by Edward Graham (Princeton U. Press, 2025). Old folks might benefit from The Over-50 Advantage: Because What You Do Today Still Matters (BTTB Publishing, 2026) by Arnie Cole and Rick Lawrence.

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