Years ago the Economist magazine had a striking cover in which Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was portrayed as a languid clone of the Roman emperor Augustus. This was inspired by stories that Zuck was fascinated by Gus. On honeymoon in Rome in 2012, for example, he took so many photos of the emperor’s sculptures that his wife joked it was as if there were three people on the holiday. The couple even named their second daughter August.
Explaining his fascination for Rome’s first emperor, Zuckerberg 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.”
