QUESTION TEXT: The traditional view of the Roman emperor…
QUESTION TYPE: Strengthen
CONCLUSION: The historians conclude that Caligula wasn’t a cruel and insane tyrant.
REASONING: There’s little direct evidence of Caligula’s alleged cruel behaviour. And most of the surviving histories about him were written by his enemies.
ANALYSIS: I could think of no prephrase here. And the facts are reasonable clear in and of themselves:
- We have little direct evidence of Caligula’s cruelty.
- The histories were written by his enemies.
The challenge here is in the answer. The right answer is subtle and indirect.
___________
- This just tells us we can’t really know much about Caligula’s reign. But it adds no specific support to the claim that Caligula wasn’t cruel. We already knew we had little evidence of his cruelty. Saying we have little evidence of, say, farming records from his era adds nothing to that lack of evidence.
- You may have picked this thinking that it means Caligula made many enemies by being unpopular, and these enemies wrote against him.
That’s just speculation: all leaders have enemies (especially emperors), so the mere presence of histories written by enemies doesn’t tell us how unpopular Caligula was. - CORRECT. This suggests the historians copied the allegations from earlier histories. E.g. Suppose Romulus was accused of beheading his advisors in an earlier history. And then historians also accused Caligula of beheading his advisors, with no direct evidence.
It might be the case that the historians hated Caligula, and looked through history books to find things to accuse him of. This answer helps cast doubt on the histories.(If historians had to copy allegations from earlier histories that means Caligula probably didn’t do those things himself.)
- This weakens the argument! It suggests that people thought Caligula was a tyrant.
- So? We’re not ranking tyrants here. The only question is whether Caligula was a tyrant. Not everything is a contest: you can be a tyrant even if you aren’t the worst one.
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