Everyone dies, even emperors of Rome. And as Augustus’s health worsened in the summer of 14CE, the first emperor of Rome knew his time had come and he should make ready to join the gods on Mt Olympus.
The ancient writer Suetonius records that, after relaxing for a few days on the exclusive island of Capri and partying on board a boat in the Bay of Naples – the emperor and his entourage were the original 1% – the 75-year-old ruler of most of the known world retired to his deathbed at his father’s old home in Nola, now a suburb of modern Naples. Settling himself on a couch in the very room his paterfamilias had breathed his last, Augustus requested his hair be combed, his sagging jaw straightened and that some old friends join him in his last hours.
He had, it turned out, a question for them: had he, the mighty Augustus, imperator, caesar and ruler of the greatest empire the world had yet known, “played his part in the comedy of life properly”, he wondered, before adding two lines of verse in Greek: “since the play has gone down well, give us a clap / and send us away with applause”.
Whether his friends gave their dying caesar an ovation is not recorded, but that wasn’t really the point of the great man’s question.
As celebrated historian Mary Beard shrewdly observes in her magisterial survey Emperor of Rome, Augustus’s (almost) last words betrayed the question that lay at the heart of his 40-year rule, and of the reigns of the lesser fellows (and they were all fellows) who followed him: in the governing of Rome and its vast empire, what was fake, and what was real? What was image, and what was reality?
Although Suetonius, writing some 100 years after the event, had likely concocted this “wonderful” deathbed scene, Beard concludes “it tells us so much about Roman autocracy, that the founding father of the imperial system was said to have summed up his career as a piece of theatre, as an act”.
But what an act. Though it was a civilisation utterly unlike our own, it is partly because Ancient Rome, with its timeless imagery, art, gods, stories, gladiators and caesars, was such great theatre that it still has a hold on the modern mind.
But to begin with, there was no act at all, or at least there was a different one. Before the death of Julius Caesar in 44BCE, and for hundreds of years before that, Rome had been a slave society and a brutal coloniser, but it had been a republic, too, a “sort-of” democracy. In the wake of the civil war after Caesar’s death, what passed for representative government was killed off as well, and a new form of regime evolved, one only too familiar to us now: autocratic, one-man rule.
But at the beginning, “emperor of Rome” was a job without a job description. Fathoming what it came to be, how one did it and how much about it was real or just for show is the task Beard has set herself here. In place of the usual, typically chronological, examinations of the lives, deaths, accomplishments and crimes of the various emperors, she looks beyond individuals to the bigger picture of what Roman autocrats and autocracy stood for, and “in how similar these rulers were, not how different”.
How did an emperor get the job? Who were his staff (mostly slaves and ex-slaves), and who advised him (sometimes, and perversely, ditto)? What did he do when he was on the job – receive a lot of begging letters, apparently – and what did he do with his time off? Where did the money come from? Where did he travel in his Empire and why? Where were his homes, and what did they look like? Who did he dine with, and who did he sleep with? And why, for the love of the gods, did the Roman Senate almost always deify him after death even if he’d been a crook, a killer or a madman?
This is everyday life (and death) as a Roman caesar seen through opaque ancient sources, artworks, architecture, archaeology and, let’s be frank, quite a bit of educated guesswork on Beard’s part, something she makes no bones, ancient or otherwise, about.
Those keen on tales of the more bizarre exploits of individual caesars will not be disappointed. Indeed, Beard opens with one of the strangest: a lesser-known and extremely short-lived emperor called Elagabalus, a Syrian teenager and sadistic, cross-dressing party animal who, the sources claim, sacrificed children, frightened dinner guests by releasing lions, leopards and bears in his dining room (these were tame, but the revellers didn’t know it) and was said to have asked his doctors to give him “female private parts by means of an incision”. Well, maybe.
As entertaining, horrifying or eye-opening as they are, such cock-and-bull-and-bear-and-leopard yarns are not the story Beard is telling.
At its heart, Emperor of Rome is more a thoroughly entertaining detective story, with one of the Romans’ greatest biographers separating elusive fact from politically motivated fiction to get her man.
