Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard

Yet it is also impossible not to be curious about emperors beyond the spin and the stereotypes. Can we get a view of those real-life human being, in all their ordinary human variety and frailty, who sat at the heart of the palace, as they hosted their dinners, greeted the senators at the salutatio, or just chatted to their slave barbers in the morning while they were shaved? And what was it like to be the ruler himself within a court culture of deference, deceit and dystopia? It is easy to understand how flattery humiliates the flatterers, even when it is spoken with knowing irony. We put ourselves more readily in the position of the underdog than of the autocrat. But the flattered are victims too. How did it feel to be the one person who knew that no one could ever be trusted to tell them the truth?

What must it have been like to be a Roman emperor? On one hand, you're so high above everyone else in the Empire that upon your death, you're likely to be elevated to the level of a god. Your face is on every coin, your words etched on buildings a thousand miles away; your likeness appears even on cookie presses, meaning you're devoured by your own subjects. On the other hand, much of your job, if it is a job, is taken up with settling small, petty disputes: as Mary Beard writes in Emperor of Rome, the central authority of the Emperor made him the final judge in all matters, and he spent a huge portion of his day settling disputes that came to him by mail, or were pressed into his hand by supplicants during his morning appearances. Perhaps more important was the emperor as symbol; first and foremost the emperors are called on to perform emperor-ness. Should we be surprised that emperors like Nero and Commodus took it a little too far, seizing the limelight on the stage, or the gladiatorial field?

I enjoyed Beard's SPQR, which sought to explain what life might have been like for ordinary citizens under the Roman Empire. Emperor of Rome, which takes the same methods and strategies but aims that at the top of Rome's social pyramid, left me even more impressed at Beard's abilities. What's so interesting about both books, I think, is that Beard really does manage to reorient one's perspective on ancient history, to see things in a new way, in a genre--let's face it, these are pop-history books; bound for airport tables--that rewards watered-down retreads. The magic is in Beard's simple, non-chronological approach. Instead of going emperor by emperor, Beard organizes the book into sections that deal with different aspects of the emperor's life: imperial banquets, royal palaces, foreign policy, relationships with slaves, relationships with women. The total impression is of a remarkably stable social system, with the emperor at top, that lasts for over two hundred years, before emperors became increasingly taken from outside Italy and power-sharing schemes became more common.

As in SPQR, one of the more interesting aspects of Emperor of Rome is the skeptical eye Beard turns toward our traditional notions of "good" and "bad" emperors. She begins the book with Elagabalus, remembered today--if he's remembered at all--for sexual perversions and cruel tricks. (Although, as Beard notes, there's an increasing acknowledgement of Elagabalus as a proto-trans figure, who implored his doctors to help him become a woman by surgically removing his genitals.) Beard reminds us that Elagabalus was only fourteen when he became emperor and eighteen when he was assassinated--how much of a true tyrant could he have been? The stories about Elagabalus--and Nero, and Caligula, and others--ought to be seen, Beard suggest, less as true indications of their character and rule, and more as stories that serve other interests: to posthumously illustrate the and govern the relationship between the emperor and the empire, or to indemnify a ruler whose claim to inheritance is shaky. Similarly, the stories of the "good" emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, were spread at least in part by their successor who wanted to emphasize the unbroken--and virtuous--nature of their own power.

It doesn't sound all that fun to be emperor. You got to eat a lot of good food, but mostly you had to share it with senatorial guests at banquet to show your largesse. You could build your own house, and make it as big as you wanted, wherever you wanted, but in many ways you were a prisoner in that house, and as likely as not it would end up the site of your assassination. You had unlimited power, but the exercise of that power could be dreary, taken up by niggling complaints from your provincial governors and subjects alike. (As Beard notes, there was no such thing as a "grand strategy" or political agenda for most emperors, whose rule was mostly reactive rather than active. Even acts of conquest were mostly meant to project success and achievement "at home," and many conquered lands were barely governed and quickly abandoned.) There was no such thing as a private life; every aspect of your identity, from your family to your sexual preference, was absorbed into the empire. Your own flaws became the empire's flaws, and you'd better keep up performing your virtues, because those are the empire's virtues. You might become a divus when you die, but you could hardly enjoy that while you are alive. Still, it was a life that elevated men to such a symbolic status that we still remember their names today--for better or worse.

SPQR by Mary Beard

I no longer think, as I once naively did, that we have much to learn directly from the Romans--or, for that matter, from the ancient Greeks, or from any other ancient civilisation... But I am more and more convinced that we have an enormous amount to learn--as much about ourselves as about the past--by engaging with the history of the Romans, their poetry and prose, their controversies and arguments . Western culture has a very varied inheritance.  Happily, we are not the heirs to the classical past alone.  Nevertheless, since the Renaissance at least, many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty have been formed, and tested, in dialogue with the Romans and their writing.

When Mary Beard's SPQR is described as a "popular history of Ancient Rome," it might be easy to miss the resonances hidden in the acronym: Senatus Populusque Romanus--the Senate and the Roman people.  It's a history which is written for the layperson, sure, but Beard's title intentionally draws our attention to that second populus, which is part of what makes the book so engaging.  It's not just a story of Great Men--though there are plenty of them here, from Romulus to Cincinnatus to Hannibal to Julius Caesar to Augustus--but also a book that pays special attention to what life was like for the average Roman citizen, who tends to get lost in the historical narrative.  What was it like to be a woman in Rome?  What about a slave?

That kind of approach can seem like a fuzzy kind of history, one that forsakes the clarity of what happened for the ephemera of domestic life.  But Beard makes a clear case that such an approach is necessary if we really want to engage with the problems and ideas that shaped the Roman consciousness over a millennium, and which continue, shadow-like, to inform our own problems and ideas today.  The class conflict between the Senate and the plebs, and later the optimates and populares, don't map neatly onto our own class conflicts, but man, are they recognizable.  So too the argument about citizenship--who gets to be a Roman, where, and why?--that preoccupied the ancients until universal citizenship was granted in the third century CE have their own echoes in our current political cycle.  The preemptive strike which utterly destroyed the city of Carthage in the Third Punic War looms large when we think about our own role as the world's mightiest military, and Beard carefully and consciously wants us to consider what it might have been like to be a Carthaginian.

But SPQR is also filled with those great, faintly familiar stories about power, intrigue, statecraft, and war which are the hallmarks of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  It's fun to read about Cicero railing against the traitor Catiline, even as Beard asks us to consider the hypothesis that Catiline was something of a popular reformer, rather than a venal turncoat.  And who doesn't love to hear about the bloody exploits of Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned and bungled the murder of his own mother, even as Beard points out that it's the murdered emperors, on whose perfidy their successors' legitimacy rested, seem to be the worst of the bunch?

SPQR hits a sweet spot for me--it reminds me of the history that I know already, and which fascinates, while prodding me to think in directions I might not have otherwise.  It's thoughtful in a way that a "popular history" probably doesn't have to be, and that's what makes it worth reading.