Mary Beard (Much Wenlock, 1955) returns to Rome. The British historian, author of Pompeii or SPQR, publishes Emperor of Rome (Criticism), a new look at the Caesars, at those emperors about whom macabre and excessive stories have come down to us. Beard examines what it meant to be emperor, where they lived, who surrounded them, their travels, their banquets, and even their posthumous status as gods. Vespasian, dying, quipped: “Alas! “I think I am becoming a God.” A look in which she admits the difficulty of separating myth and reality, but, she points out, what is important is why certain stories are told. Some emperors who, despite basically being assassinated, have ended up as models: kaiser and tsar are derived from caesar.
“That they have continued to be models is due to two reasons. The Roman imperial system was very resilient, although the emperors were not. Roman autocracy remained. So they provided a model of resilience. And then they provided very clear profiles of different versions of good and bad uses of power that were very useful for thinking about,” Beard observes.
In the book he does not fail to note the gruesome stories attributed to Nero, Caligula or Elagabalus, which would leave any horror film in tatters, including a Domitian banquet in which the senators found that the dining room had been painted black, even the couches and the naked slaves who served them, and their seats were marked like tombstones with their names. The emperor only spoke of death. Despite everything, they returned home. Soon they knocked on the door and received a silver tombstone with their name and the slave who had served each as a gift. “It could also be read as a crazy costume party gone wrong,” she says, amused.
“The basic rule is that the reputation of an emperor is determined by the person who comes after him. Of Caligula, we may think that he was killed because he was evil, but it could be just as true that he became evil because he was murdered. After the assassination and with a new regime, your legitimacy depends on saying that he was a villain,” he reasons. “We cannot characterize them. What we can see through everyone, good and bad, is that the basic administration of the empire continues. Caligula may have been crazy, but the empire did not break. Perhaps because someone else is doing the job and therefore the emperor is not crucial. Or perhaps they work hard and despite the stories they tell each other, they sign the letters, address the legal issues... We are told that there are hypocrites like Tiberius, libertines like Nero, hard workers like Vespasian. In reality, they are probably very similar. “They come from the same class, they have the same job, they live in the same place.”
But he uses the word dystopia to talk about imperial autocracies. “The dark side of one-man rule in Rome is that it changes the way the world is, it undermines the very notion of what is true or whether you can believe your eyes. And he does it from the emperor down, implicating everyone in a set of distortions from which they cannot escape. If you think about the fascist dictators of the mid-20th century, there is something of that dystopia. Autocratic government undermines the way you look, tries to make real what is a myth and drags us into wondering if we believe it. Today it is not only in dictatorships that this sense of unreality exists. I'm tempted to say that Trump's America was like that. The truth had begun to not matter.”
