Beard, Mary. Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World. New York: Liveright, 2023.
It is a tragedy that Cambridge classicist Mary Beard has yet to have any of her work reviewed here on Concerning History. Not long before the conversations that ultimately resulted in the blog you see here, I had the good fortune to receive SPQR, her magisterial history of the Roman Republic and early Empire, for Christmas, and rarely have I been so impressed with a single monograph. From seemingly-trivial but groundbreaking revelations like how the Roman world fundamentally misunderstood fertility to her incisive logic undercutting modern reverence for “good emperors”—they were brutal authoritarians, one and all—Beard dramatically vaulted into my shortlist of the finest historians working today. Indeed, after reading it on my recommendation, Francis called SPQR “the best book on Roman history [he’s] read as an adult.” So when I saw her new work apparently addressing one of my biggest outstanding questions of the Roman world, I simply had to have it.
For all I’ve read about ancient Rome over the years, I’ve noticed that I still find it hard to really craft a detailed picture of how one of the world’s foundational superstates was governed at the top. How, exactly, did the Emperor fill his coffers? Administer Rome and its provinces? Decide on the target of a campaign, issue orders, marshal and prepare the appropriate forces? Beard’s look into the public and private persona of these authoritarian rulers in Emperor of Rome seemed to be a direct answer to those questions, but actually turned out to be simultaneously less and much, much more. The broad strokes of Roman administration are indeed there (especially when it comes to highlighting all the massive support staff and bureaucracy of slaves and freedmen that enabled an emperor’s rule) and I know a bit more than I had previously, but details were still sadly lacking—and likely will remain so. It is evident through Beard’s skillful use of ancient sources both famous and little known that while we do have a vast number of writings from Ancient Rome, the sporadic nature of their preservation means we don’t really have any that can paint the sort of picture I’m in pursuit of.
So if it’s not an administrative history, what exactly does Emperor of Rome cover? In a series of thematically-organized chapters, Beard examines what our sources do tell us about the behavior, propaganda, motifs, philosophies, and general image of Roman emperors from the ascension of Augustus in AD 14 to the death of Alexander Severus and beginning of the Third Century Crisis in AD 235. This period is often known as the Principate (though Beard interestingly never uses this term explicitly), after the common use of the words princeps (first) and princeps inter pares (first among equals) to refer to the emperors of this period. During this time, the men Beard describes were unquestionably the sole absolute rulers of the lands under Rome’s control, but for reasons of decorum and personal survival played a delicate game balancing their own will with expressions of piety, respect for tradition, and equality among themselves and other members of the upper class. That upper class, in turn, is the origin of most of our extant literary sources on the Roman emperors, and so success at this balancing act, rather than any objective flaws or immorality, likely had a bigger influence on emperors’ subsequent portrayal as “good” or “bad.” Emperor of Rome is just as much historiography as history, then, and Beard is in her element when frankly reappraising elements of Imperial propaganda and pointing out the practical motives behind certain actions. It is a masterclass in primary sourcework, and one that should be used in Historical Methods classrooms to demonstrate all the ways one can interrogate not only historical documents but their provenance and wider socio-cultural context.
A recurring theme of Beard’s work is that of performance and unreality, of how Romans at all levels of society, including and especially the emperor himself, appear to have been sensitive to just how unnatural and inauthentic authoritarian rule inherently is. In reading about extravagant dinner parties, fantastic arena tableaus, even the seemingly-mundane process of ensuring the mass production of officially-sanctioned statuary, I couldn’t help but see similarities between the language and mechanisms of one-man rule in Rome and that in the present day. While Beard does not explicitly frame Emperor of Rome as a comment on authoritarianism in general, I wish that she had, and hope that perhaps a future volume comparing dictatorships in modern history with those of the ancient and medieval worlds is somewhere on the horizon. Especially when so many uncritically admire Rome and its emperors as some kind of eternal epitome of civilization, such efforts to translate its brutal realities for modern audiences are not just historically laudable but highly relevant for how we perceive our own politics and governance.