In a satire of his own imperial predecessors, the fourth-century Roman emperor Julian described the first, Augustus, as a “chameleon”. It was an apt metaphor. An emperor had no written job-description, and much of his success lay in his ability to adapt – or deceive. He had to present himself as both first among senators and divinely set apart for supremacy; both commander of the armies and one of the boys in the camp.
The matter is further complicated by the nature of our sources. Emperors were continually re-writing their own and each other’s histories, glorifying themselves with inscriptions and deifications, demonising their murdered predecessors by smashing their statues. Senators scuttled to reflect these narratives, satirists to subvert them, before what was left was recorded and re-worked by ancient historians with agendas of their own – when, that is, it was recorded at all.
Against this backdrop, Mary Beard has set herself the mammoth task of investigating nearly 300 years of one-man rule at Rome, from its establishment under Caesar and Augustus to the transformations brought about by the rise of Christianity and the fracturing of the empire in the mid-third-century AD. Bar a crash-course in the fall of the republic and the emergence of autocracy, her approach isn’t chronological: instead of meeting each individual ruler, we circle around the elusive figure of “The Emperor”. We encounter him at different points in his career (ascending to the throne, on campaign with his armies, becoming a god), and different moments in his day (dealing with correspondence, reclining at dinner, being examined by his doctor). We meet the people around him (freedman advisors, senatorial hangers-on, mistresses), and view him through the eyes of a range of observers (ancient historians, court poets, graffiti writers).
In each case, Beard draws on a rich spread of stories, tracing patterns in imperial behaviour and the rumours that followed it. These patterns reveal persistent Roman anxieties about the risks of one-man rule, and remind us that under such regimes, the individual is usually subsumed by the institution – even when that individual is the ruler himself. It’s no accident, Beard points out, that statues of entirely unrelated emperors often look suspiciously alike. In other hands, the volume and range of evidence at play here might have felt overwhelming. One paragraph sees no less than nine separate emperors meet increasingly grisly ends, from the stabbing of Caligula to Antonius Pius’s consumption of a deadly quantity of his favourite cheese.
What unfolds, however, is an extraordinary investigation into the gulf between the experience and the narrative of Roman autocracy. In one chapter, the imperial doctor prescribes suppositories to Marcus Aurelius; in another, a team of physicians pretend to assess the condition of a waxwork of an already deceased emperor. Without claiming insight into the psychology of any individual emperor, Beard reminds us that the ruler was human, puncturing old fantasies of philosopher kings, military geniuses and sex-mad sadists as she goes.
