Rome’s emperors in all their egotistic and eccentric glory
• Mary Beard gives a peek into what they ate, how they dressed and how they dealt with slaves and senators
Idon’t like the Romans much,” says the renowned classics historian Mary Beard to surprised laughter from the audience at the Cape Town launch of her new book, Emperor of Rome. A few minutes later, of the emperors, she adds, “I hate them. But I think they are absolutely so interesting, enough to keep me going for a lifetime.”
This is the 20th book by the Cambridge University professor emerita, most of which have investigated and interpreted the ancient world, Rome in particular. She has also written and presented a number of BBC TV series, notably Meet the Romans and Civilisations,
which have contributed to ensuring ancient history remains accessible.
Her new work isn’t a sequel to her authoritative 2015 book SPQR, which is a chronological, narrative history of the Roman Empire. Emperor of Rome,
spanning the 300-year imperial phase between 44 BCE to 235 CE, featuring 28 emperors in the period before Rome split into the western and eastern empires, is both more focused and more exploratory.
It isn’t necessary to have any knowledge or background understanding of Rome, because the narrative connects key pieces of the bigger picture puzzle, and Beard provides two helpful timelines, one showing the sequence of the emperors as “main characters”, the other a more detailed overlay reflecting major events and literary figures. Indeed, she assures readers who are not certain of the difference between Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, or entirely unfamiliar with names such as Caligula, Claudius and Commodus, that “it is a fair bet that some of the inhabitants of the empire would not have been able to name the current emperor”.
Accordingly, Emperor of Rome doesn’t progress chronologically. It is structured thematically, the 10 main chapters have titles such as “Power Dining”, “On the Job” and “Time Off?” as they unravel Beard’s interest in an average day in the lives of these mortal gods-in-waiting. (Deceased emperors were customarily transformed into gods by vote of the senate.) What were the emperors’ routines — how did they dine, dress, interact with their servants, slaves and senators? Did some of them take an interest in governance, or were they entirely immersed in the luxuries and earthly pleasures available to them?
Her authorial voice is conversational, friendly and often humorous. Her curiosity is infectious; there are discoveries on all the book’s 450 pages — including fascinating origin stories of the remnants of Rome still embedded in Western culture today. The month of August, for example, was originally named to mark Octavian’s elevation to the inaugural title in 31 BCE. Augustus was his made-up name, a brand for a brand new regime. “It has a North Korean tinge to it,” Beard adds, wryly.
The expression we use to criticise inaction during an emergency, “fiddling while Rome burns”, goes back two millennia. In 64 CE the Great Fire of Rome may have been planned by Nero himself as a way to clear a third of Rome’s ground for a new, mammoth palace without having to go through the motions of senate approval. It’s unlikely that he actually played a lyre for the full week that the city burnt. That image was probably a propagandist fabrication by biographers of the subsequent Flavian dynasty emperors who seized power during the civil wars that followed Nero’s death. But multiple sources clarify that he scapegoated the new, rising Jewish sect of Christians, who were mercilessly tortured, burnt alive or crucified.
DEBAUCHED
Nero wasn’t even the cruellest of the imperial sadists. That would be the teenager Elagabalus, who was also the most eccentric emperor, says Beard. Contemporary sources say he asked his doctors for a sex change. His dinners were expressions of debauched, playful power. Beard writes that he may have invented the whoopee cushion, startling his guests when they reclined. A far worse fate befell the diners smothered and suffocated to death by an abundant shower of rose petals, or the satiated, dozing guests awakened by bears, lions and leopards let loose to prowl around the dining chamber.
The chapter “I Think I am Becoming a God” intriguingly focuses on how various emperors prepared to die — when they were permitted that process rather than being murdered. Vespasian, who ruled from 69 CE to 79 CE, insisted “an emperor should die on his feet”, but the context for this gallant phrase was a fatal bout of diarrhoea, not a glorious battle scene. Nevertheless, the flattering line of homage from his biographer Suetonius has merit, Beard says, because Vespasian was a diligent emperor “dealing with his papers and receiving embassies almost right up to the end”.
For most emperors, however, it was logical that they died violently because death was the only path towards succession. To all intents and purposes, only one Roman emperor, Diocletian, abdicated — in 305 CE, decades after the empire had split. “If you wanted a change of regime, you had to kill for it,” concludes Beard.
Individual emperors, then, were extremely vulnerable. Indeed, all of the first 12 emperors were murdered or there was a strong hint of assassination. But the resilience of the system of autocratic reign was lasting. Beard observes that after 40 CE we have no mention at all of anything that remotely challenges the principle of oneman rule being the way to rule Rome. “It’s the basic paradox that historians are very bad at solving,” she says at the book launch presentation —a musing that seems to apply to populism and dictatorships in modern times, too.
Asked whether there are lessons from ancient history and, by implication, from her new book, she answers ambiguously: “Well, no and yes. I honestly don’t think Rome offers direct lessons. The most common question I got asked by journalists during Trump’s presidency was which emperor he reminded me most of. My answer was Elagabalus. Not because I actually thought Trump was like Elagabalus, but because I knew the journalist would never have heard of him and I would have made him do some work to find out.”
DICTATORSHIP
The lessons are more obliquely discovered, she believes. A dictatorship, in any form, “replaces reality with sham, undermining your trust in what you think you see”.
I suspect she is also hinting at something else: the importance of the watchfulness that comes with humility. Reading of the mores and morals of 2,000 years ago, the misrule, excess and squander of autocrats, we shouldn’t feel superior or believe we are now more civilised. Like ordinary Romans, we fear what may come next even as we enjoy the spectacle of it all.
HER VOICE IS CONVERSATIONAL, FRIENDLY AND OFTEN HUMOROUS. HER CURIOSITY IS INFECTIOUS
FOR MOST EMPERORS IT WAS LOGICAL THAT THEY DIED VIOLENTLY; DEATH WAS THE ONLY PATH TOWARDS SUCCESSION