Book Review: "Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World"

In her forthcoming book, classicist and historian Mary Beard provides readers with a deep-dive into the most powerful figure of the Roman Empire.

Few classicists have done more to make the ancient world accessible to moderns than Mary Beard. Whether in print or on television or on social media, she has excelled at demonstrating the extent to which the world of ancient Rome continues to be an enduring source of fascination for those of us living in its shadow. This is why I was particularly excited to be given an advance copy of her forthcoming book The Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, which is due out later this year. Bitingly funny, deeply incisive and, more than anything else, truly pleasurable to read, this is popular history as it should be done. 

Beard is very upfront what her book is not. It is not, as so many other books about the subject have tended to be, a recitation of the biographies of the various Roman emperors from Augustus to Alexander Severus in chronological order, and thank goodness for that! No, Emperor of Rome is, instead, an examination of the institution of the emperor: how it worked, who made it work, and how we know so much about them when so much of antiquity has been lost to the ravages of time. 

To be sure, there are many biographical details scattered throughout the books chapters, such as the moment when, upon his death, Vespasian was said to exclaim that he was becoming a god, or the rumored sexual escapades of the young Elagabalus, who inherited the throne due in large part to the machinations of his mother and grandmother (Julia Sohaemias and Julia Maeasa, respectively). However, Beard digs beneath the surface of these biographical anecdotes to get at the deeper issue of what these particular vignettes suggested about the way that Romans viewed their leader.

And, while the book is primarily focused on the figure of the emperor himself, Beard is also adept at turning her discerning eye to those who were responsible for making him who he was. She shines a piercing light on the inner workings of power in the Roman Empire, wherein power was far less centralized than we might assume. When the emperor wasn’t leading the legions of battle, he was often in the palace, and he often relied on a group of freedmen and others to help respond to various issues that arose in his domains. Though he might not have been a pencil-pusher, Beard shows that he was far from the all-knowing and all-seeing despot he has been understood to be (and as some, like Domitian, wanted to be seen as). 

In addition to the various secretaries who undertook the work of helping administer the empire, Emperor of Rome also looks at the various other people who were in the emperor’s orbit. We meet the wide variety of people who often spent their entire life in the service of the imperial person, sometimes through several subsequent rulers. Though these figures might have been left out of the official record, Beard has a knack for looking beyond the usual suspects to discover information about the ancient world,   

Of course, Mary Beard doesn’t ignore the Roman women who were also a key part of the imperial mystique. After all, it’s hard to imagine the rule of Augustus without being aware of the influence of his wife Livia, who has become a byword for female imperial cunning (thanks in large part to the work of Robert Graves and his book I, Claudius, as well as to the current series, Domina). As Beard demonstrates, they often played a significant role in the iconography of the imperial cult, even as they also wielded significant influence behind the scenes as well. 

Though Beard does pay a great deal of attention to the people who made the emperor, she also does ask some pertinent questions about the man himself. Just how comfortable a position would it  be, if one was seated at the apex of the Roman world? True, there was a significant amount of power involved in this position but, as Beard rightly points out, it could also be something of a prison. Not only does great power come with great responsibility; it also comes with significant restrictions, particularly when one is in the public eye at all times and is subject to constant importuning from various constituencies.  

As one would expect from a responsible historian, Beard is honest about the things that we can never know for sure about the people of antiquity. Much of what we know about the Julio-Claudian Dynasty, for example, comes from the poison pen of Tacitus and the juicy palace gossip of Suetonius, the former of whom had something of an axe to grind against the institution of the emperor and the latter was more concerned with conveying salacious tales from the halls of power than in strict accuracy. Fortunately, Beard draws not just on written texts for her history but also on a wide range of material culture and, as she wryly points out, it was impossible for a resident of the Roman Empire to not be aware of the man who ruled, even if he was far away. In addition to statues, his face was on everything from coins to jewelry. 

One of the things I always appreciate the most about Beard’s work is how she clearly has a great passion for both the world of the Romans and for making such a world explicable to us. Strange as the Romans were in many ways–and she makes no secret of the fact that they were very odd indeed!--there is still much about them that feels so familiar. Part of this, I  think, comes from the fact that they are just so present, in the form of the ruins which dot the landscape and the many statues that survive to adorn museums (many of them of either Augustus or Antinous, the lover of Hadrian). In Emperor of Rome, we find out that the ancient autocrats who were so fascinating to the ancients were, after all, merely mortals, after all. It’s a lesson that, as Beard points out, modern autocrats would do well to heed.