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, those emperors whose macabre and excessive stories have reached 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, joked: “Alas! I think I'm becoming a God." A view in which he admits the difficulty of separating myth and reality, but, he points out, the important thing is why certain stories are told. Some emperors who, although basically killed, have ended up as models: kaiser and tsar derive from caesar.
"The fact that they have remained models is due to two reasons. The Roman imperial system was very resilient, although the emperors were not. Roman autocracy continued. So they provided a model of resilience. And then, they provided very clear profiles of different versions of using power, of the good and bad use of power, very useful for reflection,” observes Beard.
In the book he does not fail to write down the truculent stories attributed to Nero, Caligula or Heliogabalus, which would leave any horror film in the lurch, including a Domitian banquet in which the invited senators found that the dining room it had been painted black, even the divans and the naked slaves who served them, and their seats were marked like tombstones with their names. The emperor only spoke of death. Still, 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 that went 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 might just as well be true that he became evil because he was killed. After the assassination and with a new regime, your legitimacy depends on saying he was an evil person", he reasons. "We cannot characterize them. What we can see through them all, good and bad, is that the basic administration of the empire continues. Caligula may have been mad, but the empire was not broken. Maybe because someone else is doing the work and therefore the emperor is not crucial. Or maybe they work hard and despite the stories that are told 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, have the same job, 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 own eyes. And it does it from the emperor downwards, involving everyone in a set of distortions from which they cannot escape. If you think of the fascist dictators of the mid-twentieth century, there is something of this dystopia. Autocratic government undermines the way you look, tries to make what is myth real, and drags us into wondering if we believe it. Today, this sense of unreality is not only found in dictatorships. I'm tempted to say Trump's USA was like that. The truth had started not to matter".
