Rome’s Augustus and the allure of the strongman

On his 2012 honeymoon to Rome, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took so many photos of the Roman Emperor Augustus’s sculptures that his wife joked it was like there were three people on the honeymoon. The couple even named their second daughter August.

Explaining his fascination for Rome’s first emperor, Zuckerberg recently told The New Yorker that “basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace (…) What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today (but) that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.”