Dan Snow's History Hit - Roman Emperors with Mary Beard

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

What did it take to become a Roman emperor? Pliny the Elder wrote that a ruler should be generous, victorious in battle and a father to his people. But how many emperors were able to live up to these expectations? And were these really traits that the typical Roman cared about?Dan is joined by the acclaimed scholar of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard, author of Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World. Mary explains how the system of one-man rule was established, the skills it required, and why the Roman people put up with it.Produced by James Hickmann and Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi there everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In Speech of Praise, Pliny, the Roman writer, outlined what he thought were the criteria for the ideal emperor. They should be generous. They should provide shows and spectacles. They should be martial. He praises emperors whose successes are built on battlefields piled high with corpses and seas stained with blood. He must have a disdain for fakery and false claims. He must be a father to his people. The question is, how many emperors actually lived up to Pliny's high standards? Well, I'd like to know, and I'm going to the best in the business. Professor Dame Mary Beard, She's a legend. TV presenter, historian, academic, writer, commentator. One of the nicest people you'll ever meet. She's just written a new book

called The Emperor of Rome. And in it, she points out that there was a pretty established system of one man rule in Rome since Augustus in the mid first century, and not much change for the following 250 years. So she says that you could have gone to sleep, for example, in 1 BC and woken up 200 years later and still recognize the world around you. So she is taking that period and writing about the office, what it required, what skills the men needed to gain it and hold on to it, and whether the Roman people tolerated it, liked it, or hated it. We're still talking about this group of men, these Roman emperors, and I suppose work like Mary's is one of the reasons why. It's just so engaging. Enjoy! God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Mary Beard, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. It's great to be here, Dan. Good to see you. Good to see you. Now, Mary, you identify this period of around 30 emperors when you say there's quite a lot of consistency in how they were viewed and the kind of lives they were. Some were killed, obviously. Some campaigned on the frontiers. But there's a consistency there. I guess I want to start by saying, how important was Is that important? Is that different to, say, kings and Mughal emperors and Chinese emperors in different periods and different places? I think in a way it is. When the system of one-man rule is established at Rome,

you know, a bit of a prequel under Julius Caesar, but then particularly by Augustus, it's established as a very delicate balancing act. I mean, it's kind of a little bit ambiguous from the very beginning. You know, what actually is the emperor? Is he a king? Well, no, he's not a king. Is he one of us when he claims to be one of us? But he isn't really.

So there's always a debate, I think, about what actually the emperor is doing. And in some ways that makes it for a historian, I think, more interesting because they never stop trying to negotiate the boundary between one sort of ruler and another. And emperors are always in power improvising. So it's an empire of improvisation in some ways against a historical background. But you still think there's consistency across the holders of the office that means that we can make some broad observations about how they rule, how they live? Yes, I do. I mean, I think they're both all different and all the same. Yes, yeah, I do. I mean, I think they're both all different and all the same. And I think the tradition for talking about emperors has been very much to individualize them.

And there's a distinguished biographical tradition, you know, in which emperors are deemed good or bad, their virtues or their vices are laid out in lurid detail, both in the ancient world and in the modern. As if somehow they were really very, very different one from another. Now, I think, you know, in part, that's true. Every system of rule, monarchy, whatever, has its diligent George VI and its libertine Edward VII. So, of course, there's some difference. They're not identical. But as the system gets established, and Augustus has 40 years to establish it, he's bloody lucky, actually, you find that, in a sense, for all the improvisations, these guys are doing, and they are all guys, much the same job in terms of, quote, ruling the Roman world

throughout that period of the first almost 300 years of empire. And I think what's interesting is that I found an unlikely support for this view in the person of Marcus Aurelius, you know, best-selling author of the meditation, second century CE emperor. And he looks back at his predecessors and he says, you know, basically, same play, different cast. So I thought what it would be interesting to do is for all the ambiguities and ambivalences and differences for all the hardworking guys and the libertines, just try to see what emperors were as a group. What was this play, which was the same over 300 years? That's the key though. Did they rule the Roman world? What is the nature of power in this empire? It stretches at its peak from Carlisle to the Euphrates. How can one man rule over this world?

Well, yeah, part of the book actually is to say, well, look, it's not just one man in the end. There is usually one man at the top as the figurehead and believed to be the source of power, influence and control. Quite often, although forget it, there's two emperors ruling together you know Marcus Aurelius ruled with Lucius Verus as a two emperor rule but also I mean one of the basic rules of monarchy and autocracy you know if it's in any context larger than a village is that no emperor no king rules by himself so you've got an enormous infrastructure of palace servants, enslaved people, provincial governors, soldiers, etc. Now, in many ways, Rome is a rather lean empire in that respect, that in terms of administrators on the ground in the distant parts of the empire. There's rather few. And in some

ways, you'd say, look, this empire is being run sort of on a shoestring with a lot of razzmatazz symbolically, with an absolutely ruthless army which can move where it needs. But otherwise, for all its history, really, Rome had been pretty happy if there was no trouble. Rome's kind of major priority is no trouble. And the way they guarantee no trouble under one man rule is by collaborating with the existing local elite who, in some ways, do their dirty work for them, including raising the taxes and that kind of stuff. So you've got a huge presence of the image of the emperor, and yet actually, well, how can you have a hands-on control when you're three months away from the people on the margins?

You can't get an instruction there and back. So it's wonderfully complicated in that way. And I guess there's a suggestion there that that means that there's a great ability within the system to deal with the bad and the mad in the Gibbon-esque tradition we love to think about and talk about, is that you can have a kind of total meltdown at the centre

and be doing all sorts of awful things because of this devolved power structure that you've talked about. Yeah, in some case, I think that's true. I think we tend to overestimate the bad and the mad. I think even the rather limited sense of hands-on rule that you find with the Roman emperors, I mean, it makes no sense to think that you've got 300 years of one psychopath after the next at the centre. I don't think that's how the Roman world is being run. And I think a lot of the stories about madness and badness are not necessarily concocted, but they are given a lot of airtime after the emperor has ruled. You have to see the Roman Empire as, in some ways,

absolutely not as we often think about it. We kind of think, right, the emperor decides to do this. There's a policy for that or whatever. I think there's very little policy and there's very little big decision-making in the Roman Empire, particularly by the Empire. There's a few things. When the Emperor Caracalla in 212 decides to give Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire, and that looks like it's a big one-off imperial decision, but those kinds of things are rare. Yes. We're so used to an activist state today, aren't we? I mean, it's big, big top-down policy-making stuff. And it's setting policy for the future. Now, quite what any individual Roman thought the future was,

or how you might determine it, or how you might change the way Rome was going to go, that basic level, that's one of the issues, frankly. What about the economy? Well, Rome doesn't have a word of the issues, frankly. What about the economy? Well, Rome doesn't have a word for the economy, actually. And if you look as hard as you can through Roman writings for people weighing up pros and cons of different kinds of action, again, that's very thin on the ground. I mean, the most sophisticated, and it's not very sophisticated, the most sophisticated consideration of different policy actions on the big scale comes when a Greco-Roman geographer, Strabo, writing in the first century CE, wonders whether it would cost more than it was worth to conquer Britain.

Would it cost, in the end, more to hold Britain than the revenue you get out of it? And he decides that it would cost more than it was worth. Now, for all kinds of reasons, that didn't stop Claudius invading it and sort of conquering it, with the emphasis on the sort of. But it looks very clear that Strabo was right. Britain was always a kind of a loss maker for Rome. But if you think about that, that's about as sophisticated as you get. What about geographical location? I mean, there's that lovely Henry the Fourth of France quote, I think, I rule with my arse in my saddle

and my sword in my hand. Is that true of Roman emperors? First of all, did they have to have their arse in the saddle? And secondly, did they have to be warriors? They had to look as if they were warriors. And again, it's another of those points of ambivalent improvisation. Augustus, first proper emperor, after suffering a terrible defeat in Germany, thinks that everything's got a bit too thinly spread. And he says, we shouldn't expand the empire anymore. That's the end of expansion. And he's supposed to have left that as a kind of instruction for his successor. Now,

the problem was that Rome, from way back, had seen the biggest form of glory that any Roman could acquire in terms of military conquest. So they were caught there. They couldn't. They'd been told not to. They could see it was dangerous to expand. And yet they also needed to look like conquering heroes. Now, partly they do that by what people have called little vanity conquests. Now, vanity conquests, it's perhaps a bit misleading because a hell of a lot of people got killed in those vanity conquests.

But you're picking off small areas to claim a great victory. a great victory. I think also, we're very used to seeing hundreds of statues of Roman emperors all dressed up in armour, looking as if they're heroic leaders of their troops. And some of them were, but I came to think that in some ways, those military images were almost a substitute for military activity, not a record of it. That's nice. So let's get the emperor out of bed in the morning. He may, like Hadrian obviously moves around a lot, as you point out, some moves a bit less, but wherever he is, is there a discernible kind of routine? Is there a rhythm to his day? What's he doing? If he's not making big policy with his clever think tank buddies. Presumably he's responding to incoming information, is he? Yeah.

I mean, one way of seeing the Roman emperor, and I think it has certainly in recent academic literature been a bit too overemphasised, is actually to see him really as someone who receives letters, letters, begging letters, petitions. That what the Roman emperor, in one view, and I think it's not entirely wrong, governs by responding. It's a government of correspondence.

So the idea is that, in a sense, the emperor is, at least ideologically, it cannot possibly be true factually, is available to all the subjects of the empire, right? That anybody, in theory, can send him a letter and send him a petition or ask for him to look at their legal cases, right down to sort of apparently trivial things like lost cows or someone who's inadvertently killed by a falling chamber pot in a city in what is now Turkey, right? And we see emperors judging those kind of things. And one of the ways of kind of thinking about them and branding them, I think, is to think of them as pen pushers as much as libertines.

And that's much less glamorous for us. But, you know, I think that so often when Roman writers write about emperors, they imagine them pen stylists in hand. It comes out very clearly in one of the most appalling anecdotes, actually, about Hadrian, who is in the middle of his correspondence. A slave annoys him. So he stabs the slave's eye with his pen, blinding the slave in that eye. Sometime later, Hadrian feels terribly guilty and says, what can I give you back? What can I give you in recompense? And the slave, chillingly, I think, says, you could give me my

eye back, please. That is a kind of an awful story about the disempowerment of the slave, but it's also a really interesting story of what Hadrian's weapon is. It's a pen. So I think that although it seems a bit less glamorous than Sex in the Swimming Pool, other kind of bits of Liorit's story like that, we have to imagine the emperor at his correspondence. Much of it would have been written by somebody else. Much of it, he might just have put a tick at the bottom. Much of it might have got sent out under his name and he never saw it. Just like when we get a letter from the prime minister, we don't actually think the prime minister wrote it, do we? We don't actually think the prime minister wrote it, do we?

So there's all sorts of help and infrastructure. And yet the emperor is seen to be the guy that you can go to and that will respond. It's said that Vespasian, for example, in the later first century, see on his deathbed, he's getting up and he's actually meeting people who sent delegations to him. It's a responding mode in large part, not entirely, but in large part. Dame Mary Beard, I like that little insight into your life there, getting letters from the Prime Minister. No, I do not know what it's like to get a letter from the Prime Minister, I must say, but obviously some of us are very familiar with that. Dream on, Dan. I don't think I've ever had one either so actually come back

to that Hadrian story this issue of megalomaniacal are you able as a classist are you able to get close to these people can you observe the impact of supreme power on these people often who have themselves damaged traumatized people themselves can you get close i think in writing this book i've got closer than i ever have before but i think they're always at that final moment when you think you're looking them in the eye they tend to be a little bit elusive i mean we know these emperors in some ways very intimately we know for example that we have a doctor's report about Marcus Aurelius, and we know that when he had a nasty stomach upset, he was prescribed a kind of early version of an anal suppository. You know, we're looking into their bodily crevices. We're

looking down Commodus' throat to see his tonsillitis, this kind of thing. So you get, in a funny way, very close up. But in the end, what it was like to be that ordinary bloke who found himself or wanted to be or are plotted to be, quotes, however limited it was, the ruler of the Roman world, I think it is always just outside your grasp. You know, let's try sometimes seeing this from his point of view. We're so used to telling the stories of megalomania, you know, when Commodus, for example, goes up to the senators on the front row of the Colosseum, having just decapitated an ostrich, and he waves the ostrich's head at the senators. And we have an eyewitness account of this from a senator who says, well, we had to try not to giggle, you know, because actually it looks so

funny. And one of them actually says, I had to bite very hard on a laurel leaf from my wreath, so that I didn't actually burst into laughter. And I do try to say from time to time, look, that's the way we are always seeing them. But just imagine what it was like to be Commodus. How does it feel to be there in the Coliseum, 50,000 people looking at you and you find yourself waving an ostrich head at a load of senators who are about to giggle at you. Now, maybe you say, oh, he's so self-obsessed, narcissistic and megalomaniac, he doesn't notice. I bet he does notice. And I kind of feel, although some of these emperors were horrible in the system, in some ways,

the system of power and violence that underpins it is, to me, extremely distasteful. I kind of found I just got personally a tiny bit more sympathetic to those individuals who ended up ruling the Roman world, whatever that means. You know, I thought it wasn't a great job, you know, and some people turned it down wisely. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, talking about emperors of Rome. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. There are accounts, and many in your book, of the fun. They did have some opportunities to let their hair down, didn't they? Whether it's

Hadrian's gigantic pleasure palace at Tivoli or Nero's various schemes and Caligula's yacht. Have biographers, you mentioned the South Compton, you think some biographies have sort of exaggerated that to criticise them. But also you said there was some razzmatazz that was important. So maintaining a court, an extravagant court and consumption, I think that matters, does it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how are you emperor? You're emperor because you're seen to be emperor. Now there's a very, very dangerous dividing line between seeming to be a tyrant and seeming to be emperor, but you have to make a splash. I mean, when Augustus basically lays down a manifesto for one man rule you know one of the things you have to do is you have to give people money not just shows

and spectacles and free wheat you have to give people money and in a way some of the stories that we are used to of kind of very bad emperors. What you find when you look harder at those stories is that they're not just kind of examples of capricious madness. They're just getting some of the basic principles of imperial rule wrong. So Augustus is very clear that you give a lot of cash. What does Caligula do? He goes on the roof of a building in the Roman Forum, and he literally throws cash at the people beneath. Now, that is pushing it

too far, but it's in a sense, obeying in a slightly exaggerated way, one of the templates of imperial rule. I do think that a lot of these shock horror anecdotes that usually fill biographies and make us think, my goodness, aren't they awful? A lot of them are underneath the surface. They're actually talking rather more complicatedly about getting imperial rule just wrong. So Elagabalus in the third century, not a very well-known emperor. He's generous too. So generous that he smothers, literally smothers his guests with rose petals falling from the ceiling so they suffocate. Now, in a sense, that's a kind of question of what is imperial generosity?

When the emperor's generous, watch it, folks, because he can kill you. So I think there's complicated things going on here. Who is the emperor most keen to be generous to, to shore up his power? Is it the people of Rome? Is it this kind of demos? Is it provincial elites? You know, it strikes me that when you look at Queen Elizabeth Tudor here in England, there is a constituency that she cares about, but that constituency might be very different from one state to another. Who does the emperor have to keep sweet? Most of all the soldiers. By the late second, early third century, the numbers in the army are closer to half a million than a quarter of a million. And that is the one place where Rome doesn't stint

on manpower. It might have few administrators in the sense per head of the population. It's got a lot of soldiers. And the one thing that the emperor is worried about is that they turn on him. So absolutely, fundamentally, he has to keep them sweet. And he does it by visiting them. He does it by mucking in, by being one of the lads, by saying we can all eat the same food. I do like this camp made bread that you're serving me. Because if they turn on him, and they do twice in the period I'm talking about, then he's finished. And it's a hugely expensive. I mean, what Augustus did in a sense at the very beginning, he's got a master stroke of the beginning of empire, was to nationalise the army and to try to bring the army

under the control of the state rather than the individual general. And he does that by having fixed terms of service, fixed pay, and a really healthy retirement bonus, basically a pension. And that single manoeuvre costs half the revenue of the Roman Empire. So he buys the acquiescence of the soldiers, but at a very high price. And sometimes we know that they must have had problems with the pension pot because we have stories of people visiting army bases and discovering elderly soldiers with no teeth and very grey hair who've been kept on after their standard term. And, you know, we all know now that if governments are short of money, one of the things they do is they defer the pension age because you don't have to pay so much. And the likelihood is that some of them will die before they claim it. Well, ancient Roman emperors already got that trick

and were deferring the pension age quite often, I think. Speaking of longevity, we're talking about a pretty successful imperial entity here, not including, of course, the Republic or the years that followed, just the bit that you cover in this period. I'm afraid this is a big question here, Mary, what was the reason for that sort of relative success? Was it geography and lack of competitors and sort of a bit of luck? Or was it something to do with these men, the institution that created? What's your sense of why you get this reasonably stable period of 300 years that's allowed you to make this comparative study? Luck has something to do with it.

And I think actually one of the greatest strokes of luck was that Augustus as the first emperor ruled for 40 years. If Augustus had died five years in, I think the story of the Roman Empire would be very different. five years in, I think the story of the Roman Empire would be very different. I think that if you wanted to see a kind of something more underlying it, it's that enough people have a reason to be invested in the system, not to want to overthrow it. I mean, there is no known proposal to go back to quasi-democratic Republican rule after the early 40s. You know, when in the first century CE, when Caligula is assassinated, not for political reasons, but actually because of an internal dispute in the corridors of power, one guy does get up in the Senate and say, time to call it a day with one man rule. We're going back to the Republic. It was too little too late. Claudius

had already been proclaimed emperor anyway. But then the other senators saw that this apparent freedom fighter was wearing a ring which had Caligula's head on it. And that's undermined. It undermined the whole point. And I think there is a way in which particularly the elite, both in the provinces and in Rome itself, find it more convenient to buy into the system than not to. That goes against the grain of what we're often told, because we have a sort of slightly heroic version of noble dissidents under the empire who are really wanting to outlaw the kind of corruption, the cruelty, and the abuse of power that comes with one-man rule. There's probably not very

many of them. A lot of people claim to have been a dissident when the emperor's dead. And, you know, there's something very, very similar about opposition to Roman imperial rule. You know, it's what we've seen in Europe in the mid-20th century. You know, there were actually rather few members of the resistance, but a hell of a lot of people afterwards who claimed they had been. And you see that in Rome. As soon as Domitian is assassinated, all the guys who've been going along with him, holding office, having dinner with him, etc., etc., they readjust and turn and go behind the next man. And they say he was a complete monster. He was an absolute monster. I mean, I was almost on the death list myself. Dot, dot, dot. We could all write that story. On that, the next man, succession. There aren't that many successful father-son dynasties that endure, are there? So what's going on with that? Is this some kind of brutal form of meritocracy? And does that actually kind

of benefit the institution? Well, they like to claim that eventually. I mean, I think the real problem is, I mean, I've just said that Augustus got lucky and he lived for 40 years. He actually got unlucky because he didn't have an obvious successor. He was married for the second time to Livia. It was her second marriage. Each of them had had a child before or children before, but they had no children together. And so for most of Augustus's reign, he picks out somebody in the slightly more extended family, the partners or the children of his daughter, Julia, or the relations on Livia's side of the family. He picks those out, formally adopts them, and in a sense implies by that that he's making them his heir. He gets very unlucky because they

all die, right? Which gives rise to the idea that Livia's been quietly poisoning them because the one who finally comes to the throne is Livia's son Tiberius by her first marriage. Whether she did kill off all the other ones, we just don't know. But you see that where Augustus, in a sense, puts down quite a lot of very clear markers about conquest, about generosity, etc., for his successors, the succession itself, it's a bit of a botched job and it continues to be that within a culture that doesn't have an automatic rule of primogeniture of the succession of the firstborn natural child, usually son, as we do. So succession is always a question of jockeying for position, allegations of foul play, who's in favour, who's not, who's been adopted by the ruling emperor. And it isn't actually until

100 years of one-man rule that a natural son succeeds his biological father. That's when Titus succeeds Vespasian. Otherwise, it's been a system of fudging and adoption. And eventually, in the second century CE, they turn adoption almost into a principle and claim a degree of meritocracy about it. It's better that the emperor should adopt his heir from a wide circle, not just his son, because that way you can get a better emperor and you can reward talent, etc., etc. Now, it was nothing like meritocracy. 99.9% of the Roman imperial population had no chance of being spotted as a great future emperor. But through the second century, you find emperors succeeding by a kind of recognised system of adoption. Nerva adopts

Trajan, Trajan adopts Hadrian, and so on. And that works reasonably well. You get some good emperors that way. Well, that's what Gibbon thought. What does Baird think? What does Baird think? Well, Gibbon thought it was brilliant. It was the best time to be alive in the whole history of the world, which I think Gibbon sometimes could be as narrow as he is inspirational. I think there is a problem because there's one basic rule that is obeyed throughout this period, from Augustus right up to the third century, that if you come to power through the influence of your father or your uncle, whatever, it is absolutely in your interests to make sure he gets a good press. So in the second century, when you have these guys adopting their successors,

there's a very strong push, there's a real strong drive for the next emperor on the throne to glorify his adoptive father who gave him the position of emperor. Now, that doesn't mean that they were nasty, not nice. I think it's very hard to tell which emperors were really nasty and which were really nice. But it does add to the kind of rosy glow that you get through the second century of one good bloke after another. What you get is one loyal successor after another, in a sense, following the logic that you want the person who gave you the throne to be legitimate and good. So I think that we have to just be a bit careful. The Roman Empire throughout is an absolutely classic case of history being written by the

winners, or rather it's history being written by the successors. So if the guy before you is assassinated, you dump on him. If he gives you the throne, you don't. I love it. Well, that's a great place to end. Thank you very much, Mary Bidd. What is your wonderful new book called? It's called Emperor of Rome. That's really original. It does what it says in the tin. I think go with it. Go with it. It's really original. It does what it says in the tin. I think, go with it, go with it. It does what it says in the tin. And actually, you mustn't worry

that all those wonderful anecdotes that we know about Roman emperors are there, about their weird habits and odd dietary requirements, et cetera. They're all there. I just tried to do something different with them. I'm glad to hear it. Something for it.

You can have your cake and eat it if you're listening to this. Mary Beard, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, Dan.