Julius Caesar | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
The world of the Roman emperors has provided so many catchphrases by which, to this day, we get our meaning across about the exercise of autocratic power, and as cautionary example. Don’t be like Nero, who fiddled while Rome burnt. Beware the Ides of March, as Julius Caesar should have in 44 BCE four momentous years after becoming dictator of Rome, and transitioning the Roman world from Republic to Empire. Or just fathom what feats an emperor could accomplish, should he have set his mind to it — Julius Caesar, Mary Beard reminds us, was reputed to have “forced even the stars in the sky to obey him”, in fact an allusion to his reform of the Roman calendar, which also introduced the “leap year”, and with the month of July deriving its name from him. (In turn, the month of August gets his name from Augustus, his adopted son, successor and, more consequentially, the first emperor or Rome.)
A statue of Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar on the via dei Fori Imperiali. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
In Emperor of Rome, Beard, Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge University who has previously written copiously and rivetingly on Ancient Rome, sifts the fact from the fiction in the tall stories of excess, intrigue and outright terror that have rendered the names of so many Roman emperors adjectives in current usage. And crucially, as she bookends her inquiry from 44 BCE to 235 CE, Beard provides relief to the reader at the outset — there will be no need to keep up with specific details in the roll call of emperors in this period. There is, usefully, a chronological guide at the beginning to all the men who ruled these three centuries. What she asks us to consider instead is “what it meant to be a Roman emperor”. And the dates are significant, she emphasises: during this time, the size of empire remained more or less constant, and the administrative structure and political ethos of one-man rule too followed a similar pattern.
Ruins of the Roman Forum. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
A view of the Roman Forum. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Malevolent chaos
It is a study of the “malevolent chaos” that emperors, instinctively or deliberately, thrived on, a study in part of the culture of suspicion that enabled imperial authority but also kept the men in power (as Beard highlights, they were all men, no “empress” ruled) on edge. It is a book also about the ruled, as Beard teases out the clues to how “the emperor’s control worked in practice” — his administrators had a light footprint. In an empire that stretched from “Scotland to the Sahara, Portugal to Iraq”, covering a population 50 million outside of Italy itself, there was roughly one senior administrator per 330,000 inhabitants. The escapades, real and reputed (and reputation for arbitrariness and exaggeration was part of the “toolkit with which people... constructed an image of their rulers, judged them... and marked the distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’”), are chilling and entertaining. But so are the actual details of how it operated.
Vintage engraving of a scene showing Julius Caesar leading his army across the Rubicon. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
In a brilliant chapter, Beard writes about the enormous correspondence that kept the emperor busy, with petitions forwarded by imperial subjects far and wide for favour, justice and often just arbitration. Julius Caesar was said to have been driven to multitasking, dictating to two secretaries while on horseback during a military campaign. “It is perhaps no surprise,” sums up Beard, “that the humble stylus, or Roman metal pen, was one of the emperor’s trademark accessories. He was always imagined as having one to hand... This was Domitian’s weapon of choice in his nasty pastime of skewering flies.” You, moreover, never knew if the emperor actually wrote what he was said to have. It was all a matter of appearance.
‘Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar’. A painting by Lionel Royer in 1899. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Appearance and reality
In some cases, appearance was literally everything. For instance, the lack of the succession planning across the centuries — with the absence of primogeniture, or even most often biological transfer of power after the death of an emperor — yielded not just the inevitable uncertainty and conflict, as successors fought off other challengers and sought also to establish their legitimacy. It impacted how emperors were represented for later recall. For instance, have you ever been struck by how numerous statues of Roman emperors bear a similarity? There’s a good reason, explains Beard: “one way to establish the chosen heir as the one-and-only legitimate successor was to make him look like the man he was to succeed”. There were, however, times when differences in appearance were exaggerated, when a successor wanted to diminish any connection with his predecessor’s legacy.
Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World; Mary Beard, Profile Books, ₹1,599.
Not everything was what it appeared, especially in the court of the emperor. Consider this anecdote among countless (and more elaborate) examples of how the emperor stayed afloat. Augustus reportedly found out that a friend had been indiscreet and shared vital information. So when the friend came calling one day, and greeted him, “Good morning, Caesar,” he replied “Goodbye, Fulvius.” The reply, writes Beard, was not just an expression of Augustus’s wit, it was potent enough to drive his friend to take his own life.
The reviewer is a Delhi-based journalist and critic.
