‘It’s hard to feel sorry for them, but I do a bit’
◆ In her new show, Meet the Roman Emperor, Mary Beard sorts out fact from fiction about the historic leaders, she tells Charlotte Mclaughlin
There were cruel Roman Emperors, stupid ones and some that were just very good at PR. For example – Marcus Aurelius was known as the philosophising ruler who oversaw a period of peace, but his reign was heavily punctuated by bloody imperial expansion and persecuting Christians.
Dame Mary Beard peels back the layers of Roman propaganda to show how power was wielded, and rather than chronicling events, she takes us inside the palace where smutty graffiti was written by slaves and Augustus, Nero, Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius and lesser known oddballs like Domitian and Elagabalus terrified their dining guests.
The historian and classicist, 69, is concerned with what stories – such as short-lived Elagabalus never wearing the same pair of shoes twice – tells us about his subjects, and how the mundane acts like paperwork took up much of an emperor’s time.
Dame Mary says the name recognition of figures like Nero and Julius Caesar means “we’ve got a pretty kind of clear idea about the lurid excesses of, and cruelty of Roman imperial power”, and by trying to get “behind that mask” viewers can visit the palaces in the Palatine Hill where we can more accurately find out how they ate, slept and plotted.
There are, of course, tales of “luxurious and stupid” dining, where the emperor and his subjects would sometimes sit in the middle of the sea and have their food floated down to them on little boats, but she cautions that many written accounts are not based on reality and the tales are “a bit similar” to “celebrity gossip”.
“There all these stories about Roman emperors – the emperor Domitian skewering flies with his pen, or Caligula deciding that he would make his horse a consul (a magistrate),” Dame Mary says. “I think the truth is we don’t know if they’re true.”
Much like the inner lives of today’s movie stars and royalty, she says they are vehicles for historians to understand how we projected “our own questions and anxieties and aspirations onto them”.
Dame Mary says: “I see both now, in celebrity terms, and in the ancient world, tons of people thinking, what would I do if I was the most powerful person in the world? If I could sleep with anybody, who would it be?
“And if I had more money and more wealth than anybody else, what would I eat? How would I dine? What would my dinner party look like? And to some extent, I think that in all of this, what you’re seeing is people’s attempts to imagine what it’s like.”
Dame Mary says eccentric Elagabalus’s reputation – who recently hit the headlines for being reclassified as an LGBT figure by a Hertfordshire museum because he was the focus of an unverified Roman tale that he asked doctors to make him a woman – “reminds us that some of our debates about gender and gender division are not new”.
“For 2000 years people have wondered about where the division lies between men and women, how that division can be crossed and I think… for me, whether it’s true or not, it is a reminder that… we’re not the first people to have grappled with these issues,” she adds.
“It does look as if Elagabalus was bothered about his pronouns, he also upturned versions of gender in all kinds of other ways… he is supposed to have tried to convene a female Senate…. In Roman times, that was utterly shocking… it was putting women in the public sphere so Elagabalus is constantly pushing, in the stories, gender boundaries.”
If we cannot be sure of contemporary accounts, what would Dame Mary like to journey back and see? She says she would like to visit a Roman bathhouse to get beyond the image of it being “all the blokes taking their clothes off ” to what was really going on in these private areas.
For the programme, one thing she most enjoyed was going to the main palace in Rome and seeing how “scary” it could be.
“Part of what the programme tries to do is to say, ‘it was terrifying for the emperor too’ and in the middle of this great sort of panoply of power, there was an ordinary guy who was trying to rule the Roman world, and was in some ways, a prisoner of his own palace,” she says.
“You know, he was the victim. He was surrounded by people who would never tell him the truth, they’d only really tell him what he wanted to hear.”
She notes the example of Domitian, who is said to have had the walls of his palace lined with shiny stone so he could tell who was coming around the corner, as emperors often got “assassinated in their beds” or poisoned at the dinner table, and rarely died in public.
Dame Mary adds: “I’m trying to create a world in which the emperor is sort of a victim of all this as well. It’s hard to feel sorry for them, but I do a little bit.”
She is quick to advise caution by “drawing exact parallels” between ex-us president Donald Trump and Julius Caesar, who both promised to return to a glorious past, but says dictators and autocrats “are also imprisoned by their own power”.
“When it comes to the end of their power, they end up in a seedy place, being put to death, and comforted or whatever by very few friends, it still is the pattern of what happens to the autocrat,” adds Dame Mary.