Also:
- Was a fucking bank robber for the cause, making him a cross between John Dillinger and Robin Hood
- Looked like a movie star in his prime.
Also also, a horrible despot and mass murderer.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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For me, Stalin falls out of the cool category due to deaths under his leadership (about 3.3 million officially recorded victims).
I have always enjoyed Alice Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's daughter. She was brash, witty, at full of antics. Here's an example: When it came time for the Roosevelt family to move out of the White House, Alice buried a Voodoo doll of the new first lady, Nellie Taft, in the front yard.
If we’re going for “cool story” rather than “admirable person”, then the Byzantine emperor Justinian II.
Tell us a story!
After ruling for ten years he was overthrown, had his nose cut off, and was exiled to the Crimea. Suspected of conspiring to return to power, he was summoned back to Constantinople for additional punishment; but instead he escaped to the Russian steppe where he married the sister of the Khazar kaghan. The usurpers bribed the kaghan to extradite his new brother-in-law back to the Byzantines, but Justinian was warned by his Khazar wife and killed the kaghan’s officials sent to arrest him. Then he escaped in a fishing boat to the Balkans, married his daughter to the Bulgar khan, and convinced the khan to lend him an army to defeat the usurpers. So after a ten-year exile he returned to Constantinople at the head of a barbarian army, but the city refused to surrender. Finally he used his knowledge of the city’s infrastructure to crawl in through the sewers, re-took the palace by surprise, and ruled another six years before being killed in a second rebellion.
Holy crap, that is wild. I'm going into a rabbit hole about him, this is great!
For a while, I've mentioned that the most logical course of action after the Napoleon and Oppenheimer movies is a Marcus Aurelius one, complete with Peter "Optimus Prime" Cullen as Marcus Aurelius.
I’d love to see a TV series about Hadrian where he arrives in a new province every episode and fixes stuff.
Interspersed are scenes of young Hadrian with Trajan, who is constantly badgered by mail by provincial governors (including Pliny the Younger) about trivial matters, as he tries (and fails spectacularly) to instill into Hadrian the importance of decentralized leadership.
Hadrian
Hank Scorpio is the only correct answer. Or maybe it's wrong, i dunno, but I think it's correct.
As a russian I'm saying: fuck Stalin and USSR. After Lenin it was seemed like Orwell's antiutopia. And now Putler wants it back...
Theodore Roosevelt
As he famously said:
What's up, bitches!
Cyrus the Great.