Emperors on trial
CATHERINE NIXEY salutes an original and witty take on the bad behaviour of Rome’s emperors – a book filled with lurid stories of greed, violence and dubious personal morals
“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me.” So Kenneth Williams’ Julius Caesar declared in the 1964 film
Carry on Cleo. The same, Jerry Toner argues in his new book Infamy, might be said of Rome itself. From the pages of Tacitus to the HBO series Rome, people have long portrayed this empire as “a place of infamy, riven with savagery, sin and corruption”. Not, it must be said, entirely without reason.
Take Caesar himself. In 58 BC, desperate to raise money and his profile, he began his Gallic Wars. Eight years later, a million Gauls were enslaved and a million more were dead. Other rulers were little better. In AD 25, Tiberius forced a rich man to leave him everything in his will – then compelled him to commit suicide. Then, of course, there was Nero, who reportedly slept with his mother then killed her – and then kicked his pregnant wife to death. But was the whole empire so bad? Here, to settle the question once and for all, Toner puts “Rome on trial” in order to “decide if the Romans were really any worse than us”.
It’s a nifty idea from an author who has previously had other nifty ideas – Toner’s previous books include How to Manage Your Slaves, which advised on such thorny matters as whether one should sleep with one’s slave (in short: absolutely – just make sure you don’t get carried away and pay too much for an attractive one at the slave market). Happily, Toner doesn’t just have good ideas; he also has a talent for execution.
The book divides Rome’s crimes into sections (morality, gluttony, war) then puts the evidence for and against in each case. It’s a crisp, clever structure that does away with the usual tedious demands for narrative, chronology, dates and whatnot. Instead it allows Toner to focus purely on the good bits – in other words, the bad ones.
Which, it must be said, were pretty bad. Take Elagabalus (c204–222), one of the many emperors
People have long portrayed Rome as ‘riven with savagery, corruption and sin’. Not, it must be said, entirely without reason
whose vicious crimes left him loathed by his people and loved by later historians. He allegedly chose members of his staff by the size of their, well, members; raped a Vestal virgin; and carried out human sacrifices. A few chapters in, and the case for the prosecution is looking pretty strong.
However, Toner, a classics fellow at Cambridge, is too good a historian to take such yarns at face value. Much of what we think of Rome today has been shaped either by elite historians or by later Christian authors. Both had their own agendas, demonising previous regimes (mortal or divine) to flatter the ones
in which they were writing. Narratives of Rome thus always tend to contrast a hellish past with a halcyon present.
This comparison is often made unfairly. There certainly was some high-profile violence in Rome, but emperors’ behaviour was not the norm. And Christianity, for all its talk of love and peace, actually changed very little. Slaves were not emancipated, women were not elevated and the state, if anything, grew more vicious. Indeed, there was an “increase in judicial savagery” under Christian rule. As Toner also notes, the rise of this new religion “probably changed the rhetoric concerning crime more than crime itself”.
That is just one fascinating insight among many in this superb book, which lifts the burden of guilt (a little) from ancient Rome. All the same, if Elagabalus sits next to you at dinner, you might want to move to another seat.