8 ms·

I recently read a biography on him. I had to stop about 60-70% through because I came to dislike him so much. Apparently he was, if not clinically, my understan

I recently read a biography on him. I had to stop about 60-70% through because I came to dislike him so much. Apparently he was, if not clinically, my understanding of a narcissistic sociopath.

willcipriano 3y ago
I did thrice offer him a kingly crown that he did thrice refuse, is this naracism? Ceasar was a ruler for the people. He increased the citizens grain allotment (doubled it?), took many captives for Rome and put the ransom towards the general fund and left most of what he owned to the people in his will. The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  >did thrice offer him a kingly crown that he did thrice refuse, is this naracism It's politicking. He already had the power of a king, and knew the title would only harm him. It's why August called himself the "first citizen of Rome" rather than king or emperor. They weren't forgoing the power, just the title. >The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy. Augustus got to write history on him, and that provided an overly rosy view that wasn't heavily questioned for centuries, likely still providing a rosy view of him two millennia later.
  - throwaway2048 3y ago
    Imperator (in English Emperor) was a title specifically invented by Augustus to avoid the title king. It might be roughly translated as "Commander", in a military sense.
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago
      You're right, he did go by imperator, my memory is poor, but his primary titles provided by the senate were "augustus" and "princeps."
    - scott_w 3y ago
      That's definitely not correct. The first sentences in Wikipedia date its use to the Roman Kingdom and Republic, long before Augustus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        Soldiers hailing their commanders Imperator on the battlefield was a requirement for a triumph under the Republic. Octavian did not invent the title.
- user3939382 3y ago
  The biographer had very sound methods for sourcing so I don’t think we can just dismiss what we now know about him. As an example he slept with the wives of the senators as a sport. He may have been effective in governing but he comes across as a despicable human being.
- gumby 3y ago
  He, Octavian, and Marc Antony overthrew the republic. He made himself into a bad guy. Coming from a patrician family (the Julii, through his father; his mother was of more significant birth), he was hardly a man of the people. He took a traditional Patrician path to power (priest, war, tribune, governor, imperator, author, senator ...)
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Almost all of his conservative opponents like Pompey, Cicero or Cato were not patricians on the other hand.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - gumby 3y ago
      The fact that Pompey and Cicero were patricians is irrelevant. None of them really had the interest of the masses at heart. Increasing the grain allotment made Caesar no more a man of the people than becoming a tribune had. Augustus did much more in that regard (he personally paid off the public debt!) and he was no man of the people either.
- a_shovel 3y ago
  Historia Civilis's summary of the crown incident is convincing to me. > It's highly dramatic, and it seems to have played out a little too perfectly. In my opinion it's pretty clear that Antony and Caesar coordinated the whole thing ahead of time. Cicero reached the same conclusion. ... > Some say that this Lupercalia incident was Caesar testing the water. If the crowd had been into it, he would have accepted the diadem. Others say that this was a performative rejection of the crown, staged so that he could continue to wield his other king-like powers as he wished. > I'm kinda in the first camp. Caesar was vain. He liked being flagrant and wearing his Triumphator outfit during festivals. He liked his special little golden chair that was definitely not a throne. He liked all of the pomp and circumstance. My feeling is that in his heart, he wanted a crown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj2UksH_nSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj2UksH_nSI [20:27 - 21:30]
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  > Ceasar was a ruler for the people. ...or as we'd say today, a typical "populist". I don't think there were any genuinely "good guys" among the Roman political elite just by process of natural selection. Politics in Rome was a cut-throat business, and much closer to an oligarchy or mafia state than what we understand today as a "republican democracy". I have no doubt that Caesar only had his own political advancement in mind with the ultimate goal to become an autocratic ruler when he pretended to care about the "people". PS: all my own opinions of course, formed by reading the usual sources :)
  - toyg 3y ago
    > Caesar only had his own political advancement in mind with the ultimate goal to become an autocratic ruler when he pretended to care about the "people". Oh, exactly like 90% of modern politicians then...
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > exactly like 90% of modern politicians Roman politics, one could even say culture, had a fundamental flaw in equating military competence with political savvy. (Our modern analog is commercial and governance.) Sulla and Marius and Pompey and Caesar personally raised armies, legitimately and then otherwise. This gave every Roman commander a practical veto unthinkable in modern politics.
      - joycian 3y ago
        Actually, I think it could be said that Pompey did it illegitimately before he did it legitimately (legitimately meaning: with the support of the sitting government in Rome), raising troops in support of Sulla's invasion force. Of course, legitimacy is a bit strange in the Sulla-Marius years.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    To start ask what is populism? From Google: > a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. I find the more educated you are (read: elite) the less you like populism. Funny that.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  Stalin submitted his resignation from the role of secretary general I believe 6 or 7 times, and all times the resignation was refused. What's your point? Also, wasn't the guy who wrote history on him his nephew and protwge?
- jasmer 3y ago
  [dead]
- matthewowen 3y ago
  My degree is in Classics and this was something I found frustrating. It's clear that Imperial Rome under Augustus was a more egalitarian and meritocratic society than the oligarchical one which preceded it. But I honestly came away from tutorials being surprised at the extent that my tutors seemed genuinely convinced by the arguments made by that deposed oligarchy that Rome had become "less free".
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy. The people who killed him lost. Caesar Augustus, caesar's adopted son, ultimately prevailed. The history we get from that era is mostly the one that julius caesar himself wrote and what his allies wrote. As churchill said, history will be kind to me because I intend to write it. That's why millenia after caesar's death, everywhere from Russia (czar) to germany ( kaiser ) exalt him. Dante didn't put caesar in the mouth of satan in the center of hell. Dante put Brutus and Cassius in the mout of satan for eternity. You yourself quoted a shakespearean play that praises caesar and denigrates his killers. Brutus is reviled like Judas or Benedict Arnold. It's a name that lives in infamy.
- nindalf 3y ago
  > The people that killed him got to write history No they didn’t. The primary sources for Julius Caesar’s life are Julius Caesar writing about his own campaigns, Plutarch, Suetonius and Appian. None of the conspirators wrote any history that has survived. They literally turned this man into a God after he died! By 42BC the Senate considered him a God. His successor adopted his name and called himself Gaius Julius Caesar because he wanted to be associated with the name. Many Roman emperors adopted the name Caesar. And German kaiser, Russian tsar and Turkish kaiser-i-Rum all refer to this one man.
saiya-jin 3y ago
Sounds like most people in power. Think a bit about a long path one has to go through to come to such power, all the backstage fights, quid pro quo deals, backstabbings. Normal straight balanced happy folks normally don't stand a chance. What you see usually is carefully made up PR personna tailored to given target audience. That narcissistic part is more variable but helps ie with public speeches, it can be also worse, ie sadistic.
francisofascii 3y ago
Precisely why he was (and arguably needed to be) assassinated.
secondcoming 3y ago
Would you have read his biography if you’d known he was a normal guy?
pjc50 3y ago
If you hated Julius Caesar, then boy howdy are you not going to like most of the other Roman Emperors.
- a_shovel 3y ago
  To be clear, that's a completely reasonable position to take on them.
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    If by "reasonable" you assume the moral standards of today.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      Quite a lot of them were hated at the time for the arbitrary murders.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      Even by the standards of 2000 years ago, Caesar was at best controversial (in the view of many Romans at the time, he essentially destroyed the country) and most of the emperors were widely loathed (note that it was a position with an extremely low life expectancy; they tended to be assassinated).
marginalia_nu 3y ago
de Bello Gallico is basically Why Julius Caesar is Great by Julius Caesar In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers. Although being incredibly full of yourself seems to have been going around at the time. Cicero was quite fond of quoting himself to back up an argument.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > Why Julius Caesar is Great LOL! > In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers. I'd disagree here. Love him or hate him, Julius Caesar had genuine accomplishments -- major ones. He wasn't just famous for being famous.
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers. He's a precursor to Churchill who wrote "history will be kind to me because I intend to write it". But then again, alexander the great was a precursor to caesar since alexander brought a team of writers with him to write about or invent his great exploits. Alexander was said to bemoan the fact that Odyseus had the great Homer but he himself had no one as great as Homer to write about him. Imagine having a large team of the best greek writers glorifying everything you do and still feeling cheated because none of them is Homer. From Alexander to Caesar to Churchill to Trump, regardless of whatever else they were and your opinions of them, they were great self-promoters.
Eumenes 3y ago
He was quite lite compared to future Roman leaders but try and find a humble military leader from antiquity... They don't exist
- ftrobro 3y ago
  The story of Cincinnatus might have been embellished, but still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus
gsatic 3y ago
Someone has to sit in the chair and pretend to be in control of the uncontrollable. And its usually the clueless or the insane. My boss calls them the mindlessly ambitious. You need them cuz the other side has them too. Keeping them on a leash and fully occupied so they don't destroy the universe is called the Central Economic Problem.
- andrewpolidori 3y ago
  What does keeping them on a leash and fully occupied look like in a modern coprorate context?
Veen 3y ago
What sort of personality did you expect the man responsible for the Gallic Wars to have? He was a genocidaire, a slaver, a rapist, and more. All of these 'great' historical leaders were murderous shits when viewed from a modern perspective. The 'nicest' Roman Emperor was an utterly terrible human being by our standards. But that doesn't mean there is no benefit to learning about them.
anon25783 3y ago
Does this come as a surprise? I can't imagine anything different from someone who believes themself to be competent and justified to be an autocrat as Caesar did. In fact I would be very surprised to find an example of someone who aspires to autocracy who doesn't have narcissistic/sociopathic traits.
n1b0m 3y ago
Not to mention his brutal conquest of the Gaul.
flohofwoe 3y ago
I don't think he stood out much compared to his peers, "narcissistic sociopath" was basically the precondition for climbing the career ladder in Rome.
weatherlight 3y ago
Julius Caesar demonstrated some characteristics that could be associated with narcissism. He had a strong desire for power, a high level of ambition, and a considerable concern with his public image. We should also take into consideration that these traits were common among Roman political figures and military leaders of the time. Additionally, many of our understandings about Caesar's personality and actions come from historical accounts, some of which were written by his contemporaries who had their own political agendas, and others were written long after his death. Therefore, these accounts may not provide a completely accurate or unbiased view of his personality. I'd like to note that the moral and ethical standards for the upper echelons of Roman society was very different than today's western standards. Different traits were championed. For example, "De Bello Gallico" (On the Gallic War,) is not a neutral historical account; it was written by Caesar for a Roman audience and aimed to defend and promote his actions. His conquest of Gaul would amount to genocide in a modern context but the Roman Public (the common people), at the time didn't seem to mind too much and thought his actions heroic.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  Well the senate wanted him to put on trial for ‘war crimes’ amongst other things which sparked the civil war. Of course by war crimes they meant unsanctioned warfare and breaking treaties. Murdering and/or enslaving entire populations was not a big deal..
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > We should also take into consideration that these traits were common among Roman political figures and military leaders of the time. Any place or any time, as far as I can tell.
artursapek 3y ago
That's funny, I had the opposite reaction the more I read about him
AlbertCory 3y ago
You don't read a lot of biographies from that period, do you?
itairall 3y ago
I am sorry but this is a ridiculous reason to stop reading a biography of a historic military dictator and one of the all time cult of personalities. Did you think he was going to be gentle soul? HN never ceases to blow my mind. "I started reading the biography of Genghis Khan but had to put it down when I realized he wasn't a good person after all."
- user3939382 3y ago
  I don’t have an obligation to study something or someone I find myself repulsed by.

I recently read a biography on him. I had to stop about 60-70% through because I came to dislike him so much. Apparently he was, if not clinically, my understanding of a narcissistic sociopath.

willcipriano 3y ago

I did thrice offer him a kingly crown that he did thrice refuse, is this naracism? Ceasar was a ruler for the people. He increased the citizens grain allotment (doubled it?), took many captives for Rome and put the ransom towards the general fund and left most of what he owned to the people in his will. The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
>did thrice offer him a kingly crown that he did thrice refuse, is this naracism It's politicking. He already had the power of a king, and knew the title would only harm him. It's why August called himself the "first citizen of Rome" rather than king or emperor. They weren't forgoing the power, just the title. >The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy. Augustus got to write history on him, and that provided an overly rosy view that wasn't heavily questioned for centuries, likely still providing a rosy view of him two millennia later.
- throwaway2048 3y ago
  Imperator (in English Emperor) was a title specifically invented by Augustus to avoid the title king. It might be roughly translated as "Commander", in a military sense.
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    You're right, he did go by imperator, my memory is poor, but his primary titles provided by the senate were "augustus" and "princeps."
  - scott_w 3y ago
    That's definitely not correct. The first sentences in Wikipedia date its use to the Roman Kingdom and Republic, long before Augustus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      Soldiers hailing their commanders Imperator on the battlefield was a requirement for a triumph under the Republic. Octavian did not invent the title.
user3939382 3y ago
The biographer had very sound methods for sourcing so I don’t think we can just dismiss what we now know about him. As an example he slept with the wives of the senators as a sport. He may have been effective in governing but he comes across as a despicable human being.
gumby 3y ago
He, Octavian, and Marc Antony overthrew the republic. He made himself into a bad guy. Coming from a patrician family (the Julii, through his father; his mother was of more significant birth), he was hardly a man of the people. He took a traditional Patrician path to power (priest, war, tribune, governor, imperator, author, senator ...)
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  Almost all of his conservative opponents like Pompey, Cicero or Cato were not patricians on the other hand.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gumby 3y ago
    The fact that Pompey and Cicero were patricians is irrelevant. None of them really had the interest of the masses at heart. Increasing the grain allotment made Caesar no more a man of the people than becoming a tribune had. Augustus did much more in that regard (he personally paid off the public debt!) and he was no man of the people either.
a_shovel 3y ago
Historia Civilis's summary of the crown incident is convincing to me. > It's highly dramatic, and it seems to have played out a little too perfectly. In my opinion it's pretty clear that Antony and Caesar coordinated the whole thing ahead of time. Cicero reached the same conclusion. ... > Some say that this Lupercalia incident was Caesar testing the water. If the crowd had been into it, he would have accepted the diadem. Others say that this was a performative rejection of the crown, staged so that he could continue to wield his other king-like powers as he wished. > I'm kinda in the first camp. Caesar was vain. He liked being flagrant and wearing his Triumphator outfit during festivals. He liked his special little golden chair that was definitely not a throne. He liked all of the pomp and circumstance. My feeling is that in his heart, he wanted a crown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj2UksH_nSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj2UksH_nSI [20:27 - 21:30]
flohofwoe 3y ago
> Ceasar was a ruler for the people. ...or as we'd say today, a typical "populist". I don't think there were any genuinely "good guys" among the Roman political elite just by process of natural selection. Politics in Rome was a cut-throat business, and much closer to an oligarchy or mafia state than what we understand today as a "republican democracy". I have no doubt that Caesar only had his own political advancement in mind with the ultimate goal to become an autocratic ruler when he pretended to care about the "people". PS: all my own opinions of course, formed by reading the usual sources :)
- toyg 3y ago
  > Caesar only had his own political advancement in mind with the ultimate goal to become an autocratic ruler when he pretended to care about the "people". Oh, exactly like 90% of modern politicians then...
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > exactly like 90% of modern politicians Roman politics, one could even say culture, had a fundamental flaw in equating military competence with political savvy. (Our modern analog is commercial and governance.) Sulla and Marius and Pompey and Caesar personally raised armies, legitimately and then otherwise. This gave every Roman commander a practical veto unthinkable in modern politics.
    - joycian 3y ago
      Actually, I think it could be said that Pompey did it illegitimately before he did it legitimately (legitimately meaning: with the support of the sitting government in Rome), raising troops in support of Sulla's invasion force. Of course, legitimacy is a bit strange in the Sulla-Marius years.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  To start ask what is populism? From Google: > a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. I find the more educated you are (read: elite) the less you like populism. Funny that.
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
Stalin submitted his resignation from the role of secretary general I believe 6 or 7 times, and all times the resignation was refused. What's your point? Also, wasn't the guy who wrote history on him his nephew and protwge?
jasmer 3y ago
[dead]
matthewowen 3y ago
My degree is in Classics and this was something I found frustrating. It's clear that Imperial Rome under Augustus was a more egalitarian and meritocratic society than the oligarchical one which preceded it. But I honestly came away from tutorials being surprised at the extent that my tutors seemed genuinely convinced by the arguments made by that deposed oligarchy that Rome had become "less free".
goodbyesf 3y ago
> The people that killed him got to write history so they made him into a bad guy. The people who killed him lost. Caesar Augustus, caesar's adopted son, ultimately prevailed. The history we get from that era is mostly the one that julius caesar himself wrote and what his allies wrote. As churchill said, history will be kind to me because I intend to write it. That's why millenia after caesar's death, everywhere from Russia (czar) to germany ( kaiser ) exalt him. Dante didn't put caesar in the mouth of satan in the center of hell. Dante put Brutus and Cassius in the mout of satan for eternity. You yourself quoted a shakespearean play that praises caesar and denigrates his killers. Brutus is reviled like Judas or Benedict Arnold. It's a name that lives in infamy.
nindalf 3y ago
> The people that killed him got to write history No they didn’t. The primary sources for Julius Caesar’s life are Julius Caesar writing about his own campaigns, Plutarch, Suetonius and Appian. None of the conspirators wrote any history that has survived. They literally turned this man into a God after he died! By 42BC the Senate considered him a God. His successor adopted his name and called himself Gaius Julius Caesar because he wanted to be associated with the name. Many Roman emperors adopted the name Caesar. And German kaiser, Russian tsar and Turkish kaiser-i-Rum all refer to this one man.

saiya-jin 3y ago

Sounds like most people in power. Think a bit about a long path one has to go through to come to such power, all the backstage fights, quid pro quo deals, backstabbings. Normal straight balanced happy folks normally don't stand a chance. What you see usually is carefully made up PR personna tailored to given target audience. That narcissistic part is more variable but helps ie with public speeches, it can be also worse, ie sadistic.

francisofascii 3y ago

Precisely why he was (and arguably needed to be) assassinated.

secondcoming 3y ago

Would you have read his biography if you’d known he was a normal guy?

pjc50 3y ago

If you hated Julius Caesar, then boy howdy are you not going to like most of the other Roman Emperors.

a_shovel 3y ago
To be clear, that's a completely reasonable position to take on them.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  If by "reasonable" you assume the moral standards of today.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Quite a lot of them were hated at the time for the arbitrary murders.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Even by the standards of 2000 years ago, Caesar was at best controversial (in the view of many Romans at the time, he essentially destroyed the country) and most of the emperors were widely loathed (note that it was a position with an extremely low life expectancy; they tended to be assassinated).

marginalia_nu 3y ago

de Bello Gallico is basically Why Julius Caesar is Great by Julius Caesar In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers. Although being incredibly full of yourself seems to have been going around at the time. Cicero was quite fond of quoting himself to back up an argument.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
> Why Julius Caesar is Great LOL! > In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers. I'd disagree here. Love him or hate him, Julius Caesar had genuine accomplishments -- major ones. He wasn't just famous for being famous.
goodbyesf 3y ago
> In a way, he's sort of a precursor to modern day social media influencers. He's a precursor to Churchill who wrote "history will be kind to me because I intend to write it". But then again, alexander the great was a precursor to caesar since alexander brought a team of writers with him to write about or invent his great exploits. Alexander was said to bemoan the fact that Odyseus had the great Homer but he himself had no one as great as Homer to write about him. Imagine having a large team of the best greek writers glorifying everything you do and still feeling cheated because none of them is Homer. From Alexander to Caesar to Churchill to Trump, regardless of whatever else they were and your opinions of them, they were great self-promoters.

Eumenes 3y ago

He was quite lite compared to future Roman leaders but try and find a humble military leader from antiquity... They don't exist

ftrobro 3y ago
The story of Cincinnatus might have been embellished, but still: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus

gsatic 3y ago

Someone has to sit in the chair and pretend to be in control of the uncontrollable. And its usually the clueless or the insane. My boss calls them the mindlessly ambitious. You need them cuz the other side has them too. Keeping them on a leash and fully occupied so they don't destroy the universe is called the Central Economic Problem.

andrewpolidori 3y ago
What does keeping them on a leash and fully occupied look like in a modern coprorate context?

Veen 3y ago

What sort of personality did you expect the man responsible for the Gallic Wars to have? He was a genocidaire, a slaver, a rapist, and more. All of these 'great' historical leaders were murderous shits when viewed from a modern perspective. The 'nicest' Roman Emperor was an utterly terrible human being by our standards. But that doesn't mean there is no benefit to learning about them.

anon25783 3y ago

Does this come as a surprise? I can't imagine anything different from someone who believes themself to be competent and justified to be an autocrat as Caesar did. In fact I would be very surprised to find an example of someone who aspires to autocracy who doesn't have narcissistic/sociopathic traits.

n1b0m 3y ago

Not to mention his brutal conquest of the Gaul.

flohofwoe 3y ago

I don't think he stood out much compared to his peers, "narcissistic sociopath" was basically the precondition for climbing the career ladder in Rome.

weatherlight 3y ago

Julius Caesar demonstrated some characteristics that could be associated with narcissism. He had a strong desire for power, a high level of ambition, and a considerable concern with his public image. We should also take into consideration that these traits were common among Roman political figures and military leaders of the time. Additionally, many of our understandings about Caesar's personality and actions come from historical accounts, some of which were written by his contemporaries who had their own political agendas, and others were written long after his death. Therefore, these accounts may not provide a completely accurate or unbiased view of his personality. I'd like to note that the moral and ethical standards for the upper echelons of Roman society was very different than today's western standards. Different traits were championed. For example, "De Bello Gallico" (On the Gallic War,) is not a neutral historical account; it was written by Caesar for a Roman audience and aimed to defend and promote his actions. His conquest of Gaul would amount to genocide in a modern context but the Roman Public (the common people), at the time didn't seem to mind too much and thought his actions heroic.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
Well the senate wanted him to put on trial for ‘war crimes’ amongst other things which sparked the civil war. Of course by war crimes they meant unsanctioned warfare and breaking treaties. Murdering and/or enslaving entire populations was not a big deal..
Turing_Machine 3y ago
> We should also take into consideration that these traits were common among Roman political figures and military leaders of the time. Any place or any time, as far as I can tell.

artursapek 3y ago

That's funny, I had the opposite reaction the more I read about him

AlbertCory 3y ago

You don't read a lot of biographies from that period, do you?

itairall 3y ago

I am sorry but this is a ridiculous reason to stop reading a biography of a historic military dictator and one of the all time cult of personalities. Did you think he was going to be gentle soul? HN never ceases to blow my mind. "I started reading the biography of Genghis Khan but had to put it down when I realized he wasn't a good person after all."

user3939382 3y ago
I don’t have an obligation to study something or someone I find myself repulsed by.