There is a curious continuity in the history of power: the powerful have often sought a place apart.
The island of Capri existed long before Emperor Tiberius. By his time, the Bay of Naples had already become a favoured retreat of Rome’s wealthy and powerful; a world of villas, pleasure, and escape from the obligations of the ‘urbs‘. Tiberius did not create this second Rome; he withdrew into it and, as emperor, made it his own. On Capri, the distinction between the two worlds became almost physical.
There was the Rome that Augustus proclaimed and restored: the ‘res publica restituta’—the public realm, founded upon common values, civic obligation, and the belief that the affairs of the community belonged to all. And there was the Rome of the powerful: private villas, privilege, patronage, appetite, and secrecy, a world inaccessible to most of the people. Both worlds occupied the same empire.
Centuries passed, and the ‘island’ returned in another form: this time before the public eye.
The island of Little Saint James belongs to today’s age and to an “emperor,” named Epstein. The juxtaposition is unsettling. Here, too, a beautiful place was separated from ordinary society, a private domain accessible through wealth, invitation, and connections to the powerful. And here the nature of power appears to have changed.
Tiberius stood at the summit. Those around him served the emperor. Epstein stood somewhere else within the architecture of power. He was not sovereign, yet he acted like an ‘emperor’ within his own secluded world, surrounded by people who themselves possessed wealth, status, and power.
The Roman Emperor commanded the powerful; the American ‘emperor’ gathered the powerful around himself. Yet both arrangements depended upon separation. The island created a boundary. Beyond the water lay another world—a world in which access was restricted, visibility reduced, and the ordinary public order seemed remote.
Tiberius could remain on Capri while Rome continued to be run by others. His physical withdrawal did not diminish his authority; if anything, the distance reinforced it. He could remain on the island while Rome continued beneath the shadow of his power.
The difference is that Tiberius possessed imperial power. Epstein performed it. And perhaps this is the deeper parallel: that a society can sustain two measures of conduct at once—one for the public world, where morality, law, and civic virtue must be displayed and believed; another for the private world of privilege, where those same principles become negotiable or outright erased.
But the existence of the second world is what gives the darkness its meaning. The stars shine above everyone. Capri and Little Saint James are separated by two thousand years. They are not the same story. But together they leave us with an uncomfortable question:
“How many worlds can exist beneath the same public order before the darkness becomes part of the order itself?”
History does more than reveal what happens. It reveals what persists.
