Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Emperors & Scandals in Ancient Rome with Mary Beard

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

What happens at a Roman emperor's dinner party? Why would you be lucky to get out alive? And how are emperors even chosen?Joining Kate today is the one, the only Mary Beard, to take us back to Ancient Rome and help separate the facts from the myths.Mary's latest book, Emperor of Rome, is out now in paperback.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXT.You can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I'm here, you're here, the producers are here, the guest is here, but before we can go any further, I have to tell you that this is an adult podcast, broken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too.

I do sometimes wonder if people just wander into this podcast, children or people have a sensitive disposition, and then they hear me giving the fair do's warning and decide to just switch off, this isn't for them. I don't know if that's ever happened, but we will continue just in case it ever does. On with the show. Hangovers are pretty awful at the best of time.

Nobody's ever had an enjoyable hangover, that is just a fact. And everybody has got their own version of a hangover cure, whether that's curling up in a ball in a darkened room and just praying for the whole thing to be over, or eating scotch eggs and drinking Red Bull. But spare a thought for those who were on the piss with the romance, and Emperor Ella Gabelis, who would let his guests sleep off their hangover in a room, but then as a joke, would release wild animals into the room, like a lion.

Waking up in strange surroundings is a harrowing enough hangover experience, but waking up with a lion eating your feet, that's got to be up there with the worst of them. Needless to say, this didn't end well for any of the guests, although I guess if you've been by a lion that has actually got rid of your hangover. But that's not a cure I would be recommending to anybody. What other outrageous ways did these emperors live their lives? Well, I have got just the guest to help us find out. What do you look for a man?

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kaila Stur. By now, we should all know that the Romans were, what word we want to use, extra. Yeah, they were pretty extra.

You only need to listen to our previous episodes on Murder in the Roman world with the fabulous Emma Southern to hear about just some of the utterly insane ways that the Romans enjoyed themselves. It still haunts me, but it's captivating. We've also got episodes with Emma on Agrippina, the most powerful woman in Rome, and an episode on ancient Roman incest. So scroll back to have a listen to those and really remind yourself how awful these people were. And who set the tone for the Roman way of life? Well, the emperors, obviously.

Joining us today to enlighten us about Rome's most outrageous rulers is the one and only Mary Beard, author of the best-selling book, The Emperor of Rome, which is just out now in... paperback. Plus, so many other books on Rome and documentaries, this woman has just got Rome running through her like a sticker rock. What was it like to go to a Roman Emperor's dinner party? What was Palace Life really like? And what would happen to you if you fell out with the Emperor? Laurels at the ready, I am ready to find out if you are. And welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, it's Mary Beards. Your Majesty, how are you?

Hello, I'm very good, thank you, and I'm really pleased to be with you, Patrix the Sheets, actually. I'm so thrilled to have you here, honestly. I'm such a huge, huge fan. I don't even know where to start asking you questions, but I suppose I'll start with asking you, because your whole life's work has been the Roman Empire and telling the stories and making people understand them and look at them in different ways. but do you remember when you first became interested in the Romans? Was there a moment in school or somewhere along the way that you thought, these people are really interesting, I want to know more. Yeah, I mean, there's two moments. The first moment is when I thought the very distant past was interesting. And that was when I went to the British Museum with my mum when I was five.

And I hadn't been to London before. We lived in Shropshire. And I wanted to see the Egyptians. It started for me with the ancient Egyptians. And we went to look at the gallery that was concentrating on ancient Egyptian life. And my mum said, oh, look, there's a piece of ancient Egyptian cake. You know, it's three and a half thousand years old. But museums then were very, very unchild friendly.

And this cake was at the back of the case and I was five and I couldn't see it. And she tried to lift me up, but still. I couldn't see it. A guy came past, seemed very old to me, but I expect he was about 40, right, and said, was I trying to look at something? And I said, yeah, I want to see that piece of cake. And he got some keys out of his pocket. He opened the case.

He must have been the curator. He got the cake out of it and he held it right in front of my nose. Wow. It was wondrous. It was just amazing. Imagine being five and you're being eyeball to eyeball with a piece of Egyptian cake. And that's where I trace back my idea that the past is exciting, really exciting to that moment. But I didn't end up being an Egyptologist. And I might have been. But I got interested quite quickly after that or a few years later in the Romans. But that was partly, I think, because We lived in Shropshire and a big Roman town near us. You could go and visit. The local museum was stuffed full of Roman stuff. And I kind of managed to create that excitement that I felt with the cake.

Looking at all this Roman material, it was actually had come up from under our feet where I lived. And quite soon after that, I was allowed to go on excavation, do some markets. you know, some real archaeology. I was about 15, I suppose, by then. And that was back in the day you could do that. I don't think you could go and dig on an excavation if you were 15 now, but back in the day you could. And it was the same sort of excitement, really, you know, that you were there busy excavating and you were picking out of the ground stuff that was that no one had ever touched for 2,000 years. You know, the last time someone saw this, it was, It was a Roman.

You know, this used to be in a Roman's pocket and now I find it. Wow. And I think I've never lost. That sense of sheer wonderment, actually, that you can get so close to the Egyptians or the Romans or whatever. I love the fact that sort of your origin story is a piece of Egyptian cake in the British Museum. What I love about your work is it's, at least it seems to me, is you're always trying to push past a lot of the pomp and the glory and get into how, well, the nitty-gritty, like the cake of it. How did people live their lives?

What would their cake have looked like? Yeah. And I think that's what first entranced me about these people from the past. And I think I did spend when I was a student and a young academic, I probably did spend quite a lot of time not looking at cake at all, but looking at generals and battles and all that kind of stuff. But I suppose in retrospect, I'm not surprised that I came back to cake. and, you know, the lavatories

and where people really lived in what they wrote on walls, not on papyruses and things like that. So, you know, I did my time doing old-fashioned battles and generals and things. Some of it was very interesting. But I'm very, I feel at home with a cake, you know? Yes. Yeah, I do too because that's, for me, that's where the magic of history is,

is looking at that, well, what was different, how did people live their lives? And you do that so amazingly. with all of your work on the Romans. But your best-selling book, Emperor of Rome, is coming out in paperback in July. And you've done that again here. You've tried to push past the,

almost like the Bob, Bob, Roman Emperor and tried to get into, yeah, but what was going on behind the scenes? Why did you want to tell that kind of a story? Because I think that we'll never understand Roman emperors if we just think of them as, you know, posh white men in skirts, really. And we don't see what's going on around them and behind them and what they're doing all the time. And I think one of the misconceptions we have about Roman emperors is that they are single, powerful individuals who are ruling the Roman world.

Like Darth Vader. Yes, that's right. And they're often psychopaths as well, you know, in the traditional story. And we very rarely stop to think that the Roman emperor could not have been, or at least the Roman Empire could not have been governed by a series of psychopaths in the way that they're often written up to be. It wouldn't have survived if it was. So I wanted to say, so what's really going on here? Nobody rules alone. You can't rule the Roman Empire on your own.

That's impossible. So who is doing the work, who is actually making the decisions, who is writing the letters that the emperor signs, how does he know about what's going on in distant provinces? How does he know when, you know, sometimes it would take three months to get a message from Rome at the centre to one of the outside provinces? So I was interested in the sheer practicality of it. And that, of course, as soon as you're interested in that, you discover there are all other people involved. It's not just emperors, you know. And I was also interested in the way that the emperor actually, surprisingly,

gives us a view and in some ways a clearer view of the ordinary people in the Roman world and almost anything else. And that's one very simple reason for that. And it's a reason that I think people, professional academics like me, don't share enough. It's one of the best bits of the Roman Empire and we keep it to ourselves. One of the absolute founding principles of Roman imperial rule was that the emperor should be available to everybody. Oh, right. Now, whether that worked in practice, I'm very much doubt.

But it was a very important myth. And there's a lovely story of the Emperor Hadrian who's out in the countryside and he's riding along and a woman comes up to him and says, excuse me, Emperor, I've got a question to ask you. And he says, sorry, I'm really too busy, just too busy. And she said, if you're too busy for me, you're too busy to be Emperor. Oh, that's very clever. And actually that is a kind of something which lies at the very, very baseline of Roman imperial power.

And partly, I'm sure it's a myth, you know, that there's millions of people in the Roman Empire. and they certainly didn't all have access to the emperor. But in part it's true. And one of the things that we can see is that the emperor was the place you would go if you had a problem you couldn't get solved. And we still have the letters that people wrote to emperors saying, you know, excuse me, I've got a really difficult case because a slave of mine dropped his chamber pot on the head of somebody outside.

and the person died and I'm being accused of murder, you know, that kind of letter. And we've got quite a lot of the emperor's replies trying to sort this stuff out. And there's very much a sense that, okay, I expect you needed a bit of an inside track and a bit of advantage, but it's very much the sense that the emperor collects the problems of the ordinary people in the Roman Empire. So if we start to look as far as we can, you know, at what went into his story. in Trey in the Imperial Palace. We find those stories of ordinary people, you know, the woman who's lost her cow, she lent it to someone, and then it got killed in a war, you know, how was she

going to get the money back, etc. All those sort of real life problems get revealed through the emperor's eyes. I wonder who was replying to all those letters, because that can't have been the emperor himself sat there who's replying to battle commands, but all. to a woman whose slave has done something silly? No, he signs them off, you know, and it's like, I think people are, you know, very good at fudging that, aren't we? You know, if we write to the king, we will get a reply. Yeah.

But we know damn well that it wasn't written by the king. Yes. Right, might, if we're lucky, be signed by the king, might not be. If we write to the prime minister, it's not going to be the prime minister who's replying. but there is a kind of sense that he's the figure that oversees all this and that he has around him people who do find out what was going on, work out how you solve it, maybe says to the emperor, look, I think this is a bit of a tricky one.

You know, what I've made to suggest is we do this. And it's certain that we can't be naive and think that the emperor is literally doing all this himself, but he's spending a lot of time. He's spending more time doing his filing and doing his intro than he is having sex in the swimming pool. I bet you. You can see a kind of image of that

because emperors get criticised. Julius Caesar was, for example, proto emperor. He was criticised for going to the races and taking his intro with him and dealing with his letters while he was watching the race. And people said that was a kind of huge insult to the Roman people because he wasn't concentrating on popular entertainment. It is as if, you know, Prince William was found out at the cup final when actually he was texting his mates on his smartphone. So you can see that the idea of doing the paperwork, it's not quite as sexy as some of the other things that we imagine the Emperor got up to.

but it was probably took a lot more time. Can I ask you a really start a question for this? But where did the emperors come from? And how do they work within this system? Because they're not quite kings. And if anyone said, I want to be a king, they seem to have got really upset with them. But also they do seem to rule like kings.

So where did this like, who was the first? And why did everyone go, yeah, that's a great idea. Well, all those questions lie right at the heart of why the empire. And the system of government is so intriguing. You're right to say that emperors, certainly when they were in Rome, they were called a king. That was really bad news. The emperors, they were first citizens. They were emperors.

They were Caesar sometimes. They often called themselves Caesar. They were not kings. Now, that's true in Rome. If you go to the eastern part of the Roman Empire, they're called kings all the time. The Greek word for king is Basilius, and the Roman Empire is often called Basilius. But Rome itself was very, very opposed to that sense of the emperor being king. And it is puzzling how it arises, and it's puzzling in a way how it continues.

Because one thing I think it's important to get absolutely clear, but it's completely counterintuitive, is that there was a Roman empire in terms of geographical extent long before there was an emperor. The emperors didn't create the empire. Rome was a sort of democracy for years and years, centuries, five centuries, really. And it was in that period, for reasons we don't fully understand, that Rome acquired its vast land-based empire from Syria to Spain. And Roman emperors were nowhere near the scene then. It was a sort of democratic system. Now, in a way, it was the sheer size of the empire and the difficulties of governing it that created a system of one-man rule.

Because up to that point, Romans had had new officials every year, never staying in office for very long. And eventually it kind of looked as if you couldn't manage the empire with that kind of turnover. And so Julius Caesar is more or less the first to actually take over and to say, no, right, I am going to be the boss. And he called himself, I'm going to be dictator forever. He never called himself emperor, dictator forever. And what happens is he's killed. Eventually people say, we want liberty back. we don't want a dictator and he's killed.

However, what's pretty clear is that after that point, they all basically saw that you needed a command structure. And you needed a command structure basically. And somewhere with one man where the buck stopped. And that is what after a long period of civil war they got with the first emperor Augustus. The problem is that if you say, so where did the emperors then come from? Now, in most modern European monarchies, there's a very fixed idea of where the king comes from or the emperor. It is the eldest son or sometimes the eldest child of the current ruler.

And we know now, you know, I think King Charles isn't quite a Roman emperor, but we know that, you know, barring disaster, Prince William is going to be the next king. And there's a fixed line of succession and it stays within the family. Unless they sort of die out and then you go to a sort of a subsidiary branch of the family or you have a war. Now, Rome never had that system. It never had an automatic system of who comes next. Now, to some extent, there's huge disadvantages in that. At some extent, it means that you don't have to put up with someone who's absolutely hopeless.

but just happens to be the eldest son, right? So they are always looking, not just to their family, sometimes to that, they're looking to the wider family. And they're also, in a really interesting way, using adoption. They're looking at people who might be suitable, or the ruling emperor thinks is suitable to be his successor. So he chooses? Well, it's not that simple.

At some level. And the ruling emperor chooses or thinks he does. And let's say then you find somebody who's, you know, vaguely related to his great aunt thinks he would be good. He adopts him. Right. Yeah. And he sort of marks him out as his successor.

But when the emperor dies, it's still a bit up for grabs. And you can see every moment where power changes hands, The new emperor, the person designated is busy throwing money at the army to keep them on board, throwing money at the citizens of Rome, being extremely nice to the Roman elite, in order to establish himself. And it's always, always a problem that Romans never get sorted. But it's, I think, what really would strike us is how often these people don't come from the immediate family of the ruling emperor. They're brought into it by a system of adoption. You know, the emperor Hadrian calls himself the son of the emperor Trajan because he was adopted by

Trajan. He had no biological connection at all. And that is one of the things which helps widen the pool hugely, both in terms of different families, but also geographically. So by the second century with Trajan and Hadrian, those guys originated in Spain. They didn't originate in Italy. By the time you get to the third century, one of my favorite emperors, Ella Gabalas, he's from Syria. And it's really striking how diversity, including ethnic and geographic diversity, is built in to the Roman imperial system.

They aren't all, in fact, very few, are born in. in the Roman palisyn room. I'll be back with Mary and the emperors after this short break. It must have been terrifying, though. Like, I like the idea of like, theoretically, anyone could be emperor theoretically. But without that kind of system of succession, what you seem to get is this crazy bun fight whenever somebody dies of everyone like, right, I'm going to murder all of my opponents,

and I'm going to put you... I was reading your book Emperor of Rome, and it's no wonder half of them were completely bonkers. It must have been a terrifying. job. Like everyone is out to get you all the time. Yeah, it is. And, you know, it's true that the system that we have of biological succession does sometimes end up with completely hopeless people on the throne. The advantage is there's no fight. You know, we know what's going to happen. And you, you know, like it all on P. The Roman system gives you a wider choice and becomes, it becomes a

more diverse power structure, but the cost is that you're always fighting about it. And you're always looking over your shoulder. And even if the ruling emperor has said, you know, my second cousin twice removed, you are going to be my successor, that doesn't guarantee anything. And you'd be quite sensible to eliminate the opposition when the old emperor dies. You mentioned Alarabalas there and he is one of the more notorious emperors. And I'm wondering just what you're saying there about like, because it becomes this vicious fight for power,

is a lot of your work has been about raising the possibility that maybe what has been left for them was part of that mad grab for power. Because if you want to justify the fact that you've bumped off an emperor, a really good way of doing that is to make him sound like an absolute degenerate lunatic. Yeah. How's that happen with Alarabalas? And why is he your favourite? Oh, yes.

Well, he's quite near the top. I think that there is a basic principle which explains why some Roman emperors have such dreadful reputations. And it all comes down to that problematic succession that if, for example, you come to power after an emperor's been assassinated or even believed to have been assassinated,

It's hugely in your interests to completely rubbish him and to say he was deserving, he was a monster. You are so pleased to have me on the throne because he was violent, sadistic, he used to humiliate everybody. He thought he was a king. He thought he was a god. And you see that at those moments of succession, when one regime is ended and another regime starts, there's great temptation for everybody to get on board with the new regime and to say, oh, we never like the old guy anyway. You know, I was always terrified. Do you know, there was a time I went to dinner with him and I was so frightened. Now, I think those stories are very interesting because they do show us quite a lot about Romans' ways of conceptualising corruption and power and all the rest.

but they're very politically driven. You know, they are driven by the politics of the moment when what you want to do is to say, oh, I mean, with the new guy now. Yes. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff such as, you know, Europe saw in the Second World War of everybody saying, well, no, I didn't exactly kind of come out

and challenge the fascist regime or whatever, but underneath I was working. at, you know, I was keeping my head down, but I was doing my bit. So you've got this strange moment of readjustment. And things like Elagabalus and any of those other monsters, most monsters turn out to be assassinated. And of course, it's very easy to say, oh yeah, I know why they were assassinated. They were assassinated because they were monsters. And that might sometimes have been the case. That might have been the case. But it's equally likely that they were made. They were written up as monsters because they were assassinated. And that happens time and time and

time again. And of course, it makes it extremely difficult to reach the truth about any of these guys because it's history that's been written by their successors. It's a classic case of history written by the winners. And, you know, one of the things I wanted to do was to escape from the idea that we could look at this material now and we could work out which bits were true and which bits were. We can't do that. I mean, you know, I'm pretty certain that quite a lot of it is completely untrue. You know, one of Ella Gabblis's party tricks was he smothered his guests to death with rose petals. Yes, I've heard that. I do not believe that is possible. I don't know if we'd get the ethical clearance to test that theory, but I don't think that.

I think it's impossible. But I suppose when I was a student, I was always taught to say, right, okay, you have to decide whether it's true or false. And if it's false, you don't bother with it. And I thought, look, what is really interesting about these stories about Roman emperors is that they might well be false. Many of them are, but they're told and retold, and they're really important in the way that probably ordinary Romans actually imagined the crimes of their emperors.

I mean, we imagine celebrity lifestyle now. Now, Harry and Meghan, I bet, don't live much like we imagine they do. But all the same, the ordinary person's fantasy about how those people live is, I think, telling you something about our culture. And it's another way, you know, in my book, the way that, that ordinary people come back into the story, because we are imagining, the ordinary, are trying to imagine what it is like to be emperor or king or dictator or autocrat.

That tells us a lot about us. It does, doesn't it, the fact that it would even be believed some of these stories that are going around about the emperors. And what I find particularly fascinating is that so many of them have a sexual degeneracy element to it. And because it's Rome, we kind of look at it, now and go, well, yeah, that probably sounds about right. But like to just try and imagine Keir Stama standing up in the House of Commons and going, Rishi Sunat, yeah, but he is having

sex with his sister and then just sitting down. But that's what happened with Caligula. And it's, like, they seem to hone in on this. Well, his sex life is absolutely horrendous. So therefore, nobody should trust him. Yes. I mean, I think there's two sides to that. One is that even before the emperors, a lot of Roman political rhetoric, had been very strongly focused on the manhood of the political leader. Or often the transgressive manhood of the political leader. How do you know whether he's a good guy? It's because he's not sleeping with his sister.

And the sexualisation of Roman rhetoric is something that we would find really extraordinary. Julius Caesar is a bit on the cusp between the democracy and the empire. But people would look at him and say, you could tell he's not a real man, because look at the way he wears his toga, you know, not, you know, the kind of innuendos. Now, we to some extent, I think, have a tiny bit of that, but in minuscule compared with the Romans. But I think the other side of it is about a kind of slightly lustful fantasy.

You know, one question is, if I was the ruler of the Roman world, if I could have anybody in my bed I wanted, who would that be? What would it look like? You know, who do we think the Roman emperor desires? And, you know, there's, I kind of think, poor guys, they probably had a very boring sex life, really. It was probably nothing to write home about. But he was always written up as if it was larger than life. You know, he didn't just sleep with one woman, he slept with 25, that kind of stuff. I suppose, yeah, it's quite a potent fantasy, isn't it, in mind of the masses of like, it's almost as if this power corrupts and what would you do if you had nobody telling you that, no, you can't do that.

Yeah. I like to think we wouldn't have sex with our relatives, but it's kind of part of that, they're degenerate. Do you think there was anything in those accusations around Caligula, by the way, Or do you think that was all just smear campaign? Well, you know, I think the trouble is you can't know. I think it would be, you know, a bit of a downer to say none of that can be true. It was lovely. The rules for sexual engagement were different in the ancient world.

But it's now almost impossible to tell what was literally true from a projected fantasy of what was true. Now, I became more and more interested in the fantasy. You know, how do they imagine? I mean, you know, Nero, when he inadvertently killed his wife, Papaya, she was pregnant and he hit her in the stomach, in this real horrible domestic violence, if it's true. One thing he did was that he found a male slave. It is said, all of this is it is said.

He found a male slave who looked like her. He had him castrated and married him. Okay. Now, you see, is that truth? Is it an attempt to pin down the power, the awful power of the emperor, which he turns a man into his wife? And, you know, we don't know.

I'm afraid we don't know. Or rather I'm pleased to say we don't know, actually, I think, because it opens up the whole question of what is going on here. And they said similar things about Alagabalas, didn't they? Not that he castrated a slave, but that he wanted to be castrated. Yeah, he wanted to have a vagina made for himself. Now, you could say that particular operation would have led to death in the ancient world, you know, restart.

But the modern trans community have seen him as, in a sense, a kind of early example of transgender. You know, he also had pronoun issues. He wanted to be addressed as she. Oh, I didn't know that. So it's for me, I think, because I'm saying, because I'm saying, still going to be the old academic in the end who's going to say, well, we don't know where this is true or not. I think what these stories say to me is not that there was a trans community in ancient Rome. I don't know the answer to that. What they show, and again,

it's through the image of the emperor. They show that people have always been debating what the nature of manhood or womanhood is. What's the boundary between a man and a woman? Those stories. raise the question. I think it's in a mythic form, really, a fantasy mythic form. But they raise the question of what's the difference between a man and a woman? Can you create? Can you turn a man into a woman? And I think that the Roman Empire is pretty good for stopping us being quite so convinced that the problems that we have and the issues that we have, you know, we're the first to have them. No, we're not the first to have them. Issues about what masculinity is, you know, the difference between biological sex and gender.

There's something that people were discussing 2,000 years ago. Do you think they would have ever accepted a woman emperor? Because there was never a woman emperor, was there? But there were some very, very powerful women. But do you think that would have ever happened? Power in ancient Rome is always coded male. That is true. What you do find stories of, possibly true stories,

of women, often related to the emperor's wives or daughters, apparently claiming power at least behind the scenes. I mean, anybody who's seen the television program by Claudius, you know, knows that, you know, Olivia, aka Sean Phillips, was always getting her own way, usually manipulatively and often with poison added. Now, that may be true. I don't want to be so kind of dismissive of any possible female power that I'd say, no, not true. What is clear, however, is that when those stories are told, as they're told by modern novelists as much as they are by ancient ones,

in the ancient world, they're always told as bad things. Right, right. The powerful woman, they're not saying, isn't Livia great, the wife of Augustus? You know, she's really controlling stuff. It's always about women out of control, women usurping male roles. And you find that too when you look at, in the Roman imagination, foreign queens, people like Queen Budica in Britain or Queen Zinobia from the East, they are portrayed as powerful women. But it's always transgressive power. You know, Budica is not a wonderful monarch who is simply standing up to Rome.

You know, she is a murderous, violent, deceitful person to be avoided and put down. When I was reading your book, I was really struck by the role of slaves. And you've touched on that in a few documentaries that you've done as well, because I'm not going to try and make a case for slavery that it wasn't that bad. But one of the things that came out that did quite surprise me is that these people could actually hold quite a lot of power. And I wondered if it's because, if you're an emperor, the world around you must be terrifying.

Everybody is a potential enemy. There's danger everywhere. You know that all the people before you have been bumped off. Who are your friends? Like when you're not emperoring anymore and you just go back to your room and you want to, what friends do you have? And was that the slaves?

Well, to some extent, I think it is. And if we were to look at slavery right across the Roman Empire, 99.9% of slaves did not have power. They were exploited. They were working in the mines. They were working in the field, whatever. However, within the Roman palace, it is clear that slaves or slaves that the emperor has freed and made citizens, but ex-slaves. it's clear that they hold considerable day-to-day power. I didn't. I blow it's my mind. It is for the reason that you say, in a way, I think that, first of all, they're doing jobs like the filing, like the bookkeeping, like the detailed planning, the bits of research that, you know, an upmarket elite Roman senator wouldn't do.

But they're also, and I think this is, as you say, this is really the key. There is a sense that your slave is somebody that you can trust. That is partly the question of ownership. I don't think we ought to imagine that it's kind of pleasant, nice relationship of equals, but the slave is yours. And so, as you say, you can go back to your room, everybody's gone home, and there's someone you can talk to. because the difficulty, or one of the many difficulties about being a Roman emperor,

is that one thing you know is that no one's telling you the truth. God, it's no wonder they were mad. Yeah, we think about flattery. We say it was terrible in the Roman court. You know, it was a regime of flattery. And we tend to think about how awful it would be for the flatterer. But it's also awful for the person being flattered because the emperor knows nobody is speaking. truth to him. So in a sense, it is by looking to people who are outside that power structure

and who are in a sense owned by you, where you might find someone that you could talk to. You might find someone who would talk the truth to you. Now, it becomes hugely controversial amongst the Roman elite because they see, and we find it puzzling too, at some extent, they see the whole social order being upturned in that. They say, who's got the power in the Roman court? It's the slaves. We are living in a world in which the enslaved people have the power. And they go on and on and on about that without, I think, seeing what the basic structure of that is.

Nero, for example, sends one of his ex-slaves to investigate what was happening in Britain after the rebellion of Queen Boudicca. And the slave goes to Britain and Nero has sent him because he is the person who will tell Nero the truth of what's happening. One of our elite historians says, ha ha, the people in Britain just laughed because they thought this is a world in which slaves have power. They, he said, still knew what the virtues of liberty were.

So you find the whole kind of sort of mix up of people's values, people's kind of sense that the world has been turned upside down. One of the reasons you know the world's turned upside down is that it is not the senators have the power now. Do you know, it's the slaves. I think being an emperor sounds like a horrendous job. I know that it comes with a palace and loads of power, but would you want to do it, Mary? Like if somebody was like, do you want to be the emperor? No.

And I think that where I kind of saw that most was there's nowhere to hide, you know, that everybody is jostling for position. You can't believe anybody. And the palace, it is a lavish, extraordinary symbol of your power. It's also a prison. The emperor is actually imprisoned within the palace, basically. And if you say, look, where do most people say that emperors get killed? There's probably a lot more allegations of assassination than real assassinations.

I mean, an old teacher of mine always used to say in the ancient world, they could never tell a case of poisoning from a case of peritonitis. And if somebody died with a stomach upset, they assumed that it was poisoning. So it might not have been quite as grim. But they don't die in the open. You know, Julius Caesar's assassination, you know, in the open, in public, assassinated by the senators, that was rare. Mostly they die, they are bumped off at home by one of their bodyguard, by their personal trainer, by their wife. And it's the palace, which is their prison.

And there's a nicer story told about the emperor demission at the end of the first century CE. when he apparently said again, I don't know if it's true, he is said to have heard the walls, the corridors through which he walked, lined with shiny stone. Why? So he could see who was coming up behind him. Because in the palace was the place where the enemy might approach from behind. That's terrifying, isn't it?

All right, so my final question, although I could talk to you about this forever, ever and ever. You mentioned that Alagabalas was one of your favourite emperors. Do you have a favourite? Does it change all the time? Do you have a, that's my guy, him? I think if you say, do I have a favourite in the sense of who'd I fancy having dinner with, you know, if I fancy a nice long evening over a bottle of philernian wine, I think none of them, thank you very much. I think I'll keep away. Elagabalus is a favourite in the sense of he's completely intriguing. I mean, he's an emperor that most people haven't heard of.

It doesn't exactly have name recognition, you know, in the London street now, does he? But he has attracted anecdotes of such luridness that it makes Nero look like a kind of complete little pussycat. And so working through why those anecdotes are told, particularly interesting. in the case of other gabulus. I mean, so I think he's good. The others, do you know, I think to some extent, they're all much of a muchness. They all look the same as well,

all of their statues. They're all kind of merge into one. They do. And, you know, we have invested in the kind of idea of their personal idiosyncrasies, that, you know, Tiberius is hypocritical, colligular is bonkers, Claudius is an old-fashioned scholar.

I know, Nero is... committed to luxury and performance. And to some extent, the Romans have given us those images. But actually, I think Marcus Aurelius was the guy who looked back at his predecessors and said, basically, you look at them. And it's same play, different cast. You know, they're much more similar than they are different. Just like, I think, you know, recent British monarchs. I mean, we know that, you know, George the Sixth was a much more family. man than Edward the 7th. But, you know, all the same, they share many more things than divide them, you know, they're much more similar. Mary, you have been so good to talk to you. Thank you so much

for coming to talk to me. You haven't changed my mind at all that being a Roman emperor is a terrible thing to be. I would not want to be one of them. Good. If people know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Well, I think that read the book, Emperor of Rome, which is just about to come out and paperback. And keep a look on Google because I do quite a lot of events around the country and I try to advertise them on Twitter, but they're also just online. And, you know, one of the things that's great fun about writing any book now is that, you know, you do get a chance to meet people who've read it or might think about reading it. And they ask questions, they challenge you. You can answer. And, you know, it's really great meeting readers.

Thank you so much, Mary. You've been wonderful. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Mary for joining me. And if you like what you heard, then possibly get therapy because those people were horrible. But if you like the podcast in general, then don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you like ancient history, be sure to check out our sister podcast, The Ancients, which explores the beauty and gore of the ancient world in as much detail as your little hearts can handle. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just want to be, to say hello, then please email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything

from the history of redheads to the history of bearded ladies, all come in your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.