Dan Snow's History Hit - Twelve Caesars with Mary Beard

Episode Date: May 12, 2024

The title of Caesar has echoed down the ages as the pinnacle of absolute power and perhaps even tyranny. A single man at the head of a nation or empire with untouchable power. But how powerful were they really and why are they seen as an example to follow when many of the men who became Caesar met a bloody end? Dan is joined by the legendary classicist Mary Beard to explore the history of the first twelve Caesars. They discuss how these autocratic rulers have been portrayed throughout history, how the Roman Empire was really ruled and how their legacy still lives with us today.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The 12 Caesars, 12 of the most famous, the most written about, talked about, portrayed, recognisable characters in Western history. The 12 of them, one of them not an emperor, starting out with Julius Caesar, and then the emperors Augustus, Tiberius Caligula, Claudius Nero, now we get the next bit right, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, all in the same year, and then Titus and Domitian. The twelve of them are known about because of the canonical work by Suetonius, who wrote a history, a biography of all of those men under the emperor Hadrian in the

second century AD. It's racy, it's naughty, it's blood-drenched, it's full of hubris and ambition. It's racy, it's naughty, it's blood-drenched, it's full of hubris and ambition It's a fascinating tale And it's taken on by the legend, the national treasure, Dame Mary Beard She used to be Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge She is a broadcaster, she is a writer, she's a historian, she is brilliant And she's back on the podcast now, talking about the 12 Caesars This originally episode that I recorded with her in her garden during lockdown. We drank red wine. We hung out. We had a great time.

One of the greatest pleasures of my life is going to Mary's house in Cambridge, drinking wine in the garden and chatting and recording some of it, some of it for the podcast. And so here, friends, is a conversation that we want to repeat on the Caesars, these Roman emperors. How autocratic were they? Did they really run the whole empire? Were they a figurehead? And why are they still so remembered today? Why do we care about them? Here's Mary Beard. Enjoy. Minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. 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. Well, Mary-Britt, it's great to be in your garden. That's nice to see you, Dan, face-to-face. Well, last time I saw you, you fed me lots of red wine in that room over there. This time I'm being a bit more healthy and wholesome in your garden. That's right. Very nice.

Mary Bidd, if you had to, which statue of a Roman emperor would you have in your living room? I actually have a statue of a Roman emperor in my living room, and it's a plaster cast of a famous statue of the Emperor Vitellius. Right. Who would you go for a jug of wine with? I think I'd go for a jug of wine with Caligula, just to find out what he was really like.

Way of Oddiama. What about whose imperial court would have been the most fun for a night of carousing? I don't think any imperial court would have been fun. Everything you know about the imperial court is you're always looking behind you to see if there's not someone trying to do you in. So I think I'll pass on the night at the imperial court, whoever it is.

What's the best totally made-up story about a Roman emperor? I think almost every story we read about Roman emperors are in some way an urban myth. I have to say that I think the most risque one, which I have some affection for, is the idea of what Tiberius did in the swimming pool with little boys on Capri but I won't repeat it and people can go and look it up for themselves Tiberius swimming pool and Capri we'll bring it up on Google no one ever forgets that one

which empress would have made a better Caesar than her husband that's a loaded question probably most of them yeah well I think most women would have made better Caesars. Though it's very hard to see through to the, you know, if it's hard to see to the real emperor, it's even harder to see to the real empress. You're so famous for talking about objects on your television programs. What's one

object you'd love? If you could only have one object to describe the Roman Empire song, what would you bring? What would I bring to describe the Roman Empire? To sum it up,? What would I bring to describe the Roman Empire? To sum it up, I think I'd bring... I'd have one of the Vindolanda writing tablets from near Hadrian's Wall, because, you know, the picture of those squaddies

writing back home from Hadrian's Wall, asking for a new pair of socks, that's the Roman Empire, isn't it? Very good. If you could go to ancient Rome for the day, where's the first place you could have a look at? If I could go to ancient Rome for the day, I'd first of all make sure I had a return ticket because I wouldn't want to get stranded there. With my return ticket in my pocket, I want to go to the Roman baths because I want to see what really went on there.

You know, I think I'm too squeamish for the Colosseum. I'll go to the baths. Very good. Which emperor would you like to interview? I find it very hard to know which emperor to interview. I think that I'd go for someone like Titus because I always think that the emperors that people haven't heard of, or fewer people have heard of, and he's a short-lived emperor between Vespasian and Domitian, they're often the guys who've probably thought about it and have got something to share.

Who was the most evil? I don't think any Roman emperor was the most evil. I think it would be impossible to rank them. And I think the problem is that some of the ones that we think we like are just actually as bad as the ones we think we hate. Which emperor would you make prime minister today? I would have no Roman emperor as prime minister today. I have quite a lot of problems with modern prime ministers, but they're all of them better than any Roman emperor. If you could be a fly on the wall for one moment of Roman history, what would it be?

Not the great fly killing. The great fly killing. I've been very interested in Roman emperors, but I've also, part of me says, they're not really important. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to be a fly on the wall while the slaves are doing the clearing up after an imperial banquet. You're famous as a classical historian. Which piece of history would you least like to visit in your time machine?

You found the most boring or least appealing? I have to confess that although I find Parthian civilisation extremely interesting, I think Roman wars with Parthia are some of the most deadening, literally and metaphorically, areas of ancient history and I'm not going to revisit the Parthian wars. Poor Crassus, forgotten again, overlooked again. If you wouldn't become a historian, what job would you do? I'd like to have been a prison governor. You'd be a very good one. When I was a kid, I thought that I would be able to reform the judicial system by being a prison governor. Now, little did I know that one's freedom of manoeuvre as a prison governor was rather less than I imagined it was. But that's what I fantasised about, being a reforming prison governor.

So is my wife. Interesting. Really? We're here to talk about the Caesars. You point out in your book that these are probably the most famous people in the world before the era of mass media. Apart from Jesus. Apart from Jesus. In the Western world.

In the Western world, sorry, that's exactly quite right. Why is that? Well, that's what I suppose I wanted to find out during the book really, because you can't go anywhere. You can't go to any museum. You know, you can't look at cartoons in newspapers without seeing Roman emperors. You know, they're on pop signs, there's Nero fiddling while Rome burns, you know, and whether he's Trump or G.W. Bush or Gordon Brown or whatever, they're there everywhere. And you go to a museum and they line up, you go to stately homes, there they all are. And mostly, me included, we walk past them.

You kind of don't quite know who they are. If you do know who they are, you think, oh, God, another load of Roman emperors. And what I wanted to do was to kind of try to put together the fact that they are everywhere and that people have spent lifetimes recreating them, reimagining them, with our sort of sense of just taking them for granted and not being too bothered by them. And I suppose the one aim of the book really is that when people now go

to a museum and they see a line-up of Roman emperors, they'll say, oh, that's interesting, some Roman emperors. And I hope that what I do is give people a few kind of lines with which to process them and understand them and think they're interesting. So I don't know if I've solved the question of why are they so important? I could have a go at that. But I can show us, I think, why we should take them seriously as being important. Well, what you point out is that every generation has taken to that task in a very different way and if you go back to the kind of enlightened period, the obsession with Rome you see here in the UK, constantly in conversation with the present,

their presence, thinking about empire, thinking about republicanism, thinking about power. How has the Roman emperor changed over the course of your career? When you started becoming a classist, what were they doing then? That's quite a tricky one because I think they've changed differently in film and popular culture and in academic writing. And actually, I'm not trying to divide those into kind of the posh and the not posh. I think that I'm into popular culture as much as I'm into academic writing, but they take different paths, I think. And academic writing, no. But in most cases, it's been less concerned with individual emperors than it used to be. Still a bit. but what people are interested in in universities and in research is about

power, about the presentation of power, how the emperor works as a structure and how the imperial system is an institution and they're not that much bothered about Pachydillos of Domitian amusing himself by killing flies. Combing back over Suetonius. Finding all those anecdotes, of course, that we really love. You know, what does Domitian do in his spare time? Skewer flies with his pen nib, you know, this kind of stuff. Now, the Academy has rather kind of taken a dim view of that and wanted to push it on one side.

Now, I think in some ways I'm involved with that and I can speak that talk. But I'm more interested in seeing how these emperors have constantly been reimagined as individuals. Nero has just killed his mother. What does he look like? Is he feeling guilty or isn't he? And I think in that sense, there are changes, but they're very much symbols who were used in the same way. They're used in the same kinds of debates over and over again. And in some ways, that's what's really exciting for me. You go back to somebody in the 16th century. There's all kinds of things I couldn't talk to them about, but I could discuss whether Vitellius was a good bloke or not.

It's like maths. It's like sort of physics. We could talk to alien species about number patterns and things. We could talk to people from the 16th century about which emperors we liked. Yes, yes. And I think that there is a kind of nice connection. There's a nice recognisability. And I think, you know, when I pick up little things from junk shops, 19th century little models of Caligula, say, I kind of think, right, there's a connection here. And some people were thinking, not always the same way as me,

but we were investing this little model with the same sorts of questions. Was he good? Was he bad? Why was he like? What did he look like? How do we know what these guys look like? Well, we think we do. We may partly be right, but not entirely. How many emperors do you deal with in this book? I basically deal with 12. That's because I don't keep every single other one out of the picture if they're useful, but the key text for the Renaissance and for us in thinking about

emperors in many ways is Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars and he starts from Julius Caesar, who wasn't really an emperor but he kind of faces both ways. He's an old republican and a new imperial figure. And it goes on through the first dynasty, civil war, three very short-lived emperors, followed by the new Flavian dynasty up to Domitian, who is then assassinated. So we go from, well, let's say the 40s BC to 96 AD. They've always been the kind of centre of what people have thought about. They're not the only famous ones. You know, people...

People have heard of Hadrian. They've heard of Hadrian because of the war that got them across Britain. They've heard of Marcus Aurelius because he was the philosopher who wrote his rather, I think, clichéd thoughts about things. But the first 12 emperors have been very much the nucleus. And when artists came along and wanted to do sets, because emperors always come in sets, you know, we're interested in individuals, but we're also interested dynastically. I want to do a set. What do they do? They'll make you a set.

What were you like, sir? Oh, I was going to be set from Julius Caesar to Domitian and so I concentrated on those I think there's an intellectual and academic reason for concentrating on those I also think actually they're quite enough to be dealing with so they're my nucleus and we look outside occasionally so where is the new scholarship coming from to go back to look at them kind of biographically or even politically and how the office changes under them, have we discovered new sources, written sources, or are we analysing ones we've already got, or the sections you're looking at, archaeology and stuff,

are there new areas that are bringing light onto these areas? The truth is that most modern ancient history is done by people like me. Most of it is looking afresh at stuff we've known for a long time. And I don't feel very apologetic about that because actually we transform our view of the past by looking at it again. You know, we re-analyse how the economy of the Roman Empire worked for a start, re-anysed the very nature of what Romans thought of as an empire. So there's plenty to do. I'd be very happy, let's say, being an ancient historian, if nothing new was ever found. I've got plenty to do. It would take you a lifetime to read everything written in the Roman Empire. So there's plenty to work on. So that's fine.

But of course, it's interestingly enlivened by new discoveries, which come up just often enough so that when maybe one's excitement is flagging, you get something new. In the last 20 years, one new portrait, which is claimed to be Julius Caesar, was discovered in the River Rhone. Archaeologists were thinking, what's on the bed of the River Rhone? This guy comes up and someone shouts out, I'm going to make this a bit more polite than it is in the original, my God, that's Julius Caesar. So you have those, my God, that's Julius Caesar moments. But there are all sorts of surprising discoveries about these emperors, often coming up in things like inscribed texts. The Romans were mad inscribers of documents.

They didn't just write them down on a piece of paper. They scrawled it onto stone or bronze and put it up. And those kind of documents continue to come up. You know, they've been reused as somebody's doorstep and builders come along, they turn it over and they discover underneath what they can recognise is Latin, but they don't know what it says. It turns out to be an important document.

And there, for example, you find, again, quite recently, And there, for example, you find, again, quite recently, there was the absolute, apparently, verbatim account of a trial in the Senate that took place under Tiberius for the murder of his adopted son, Germanicus, who supposedly died in terribly painful circumstances while was he poisoned who knows was he poisoned who did it you know who was going to take the rap and the senate's discussion of that and their basic forcing into suicide of the guy who was the most convenient guy to take the rap that's newly discovered and it takes you right into the rap, that's newly discovered and it takes you right into a discussion of the Senate. And I think ancient historians are sometimes quite bad at selling themselves, you know, because they let this view get abroad that it's all Julius Caesar kind of conquering Gaul. But it's not that.

We've got what these guys said. There's Germanicus, the unfortunate murder victim actually it's up a bit against the rules in Egypt one day doing a bit of a sightseeing trip to Egypt Romans are dead keen on sightseeing in Egypt and we've got a copy on Papyrus of the speech he gave when he got to Alexandria and there's cheers and they're writing cheers you know and Germanicus is going out just please listen please listen and then he starts off saying, I've come a very long way. And I have to say, I do miss my granny. And who he means by his granny is the fierce, poisoning old Empress Livia.

And you think, gosh, these documents, they give you a different side of things. You know, we're not even talking about ordinary people here. We're talking about the imperial family. There's more to see of things. You know, we're not even talking about ordinary people here, we're talking about the imperial family, there's more to see of them. So it's very exciting, but the baseline is always re-looking at some familiar stuff. You can never read too much of Tacitus. Well what is the reason that we've inherited a kind of fascination with their foibles, their peccadillos, killing the Nero, etc., when actually the Georgians in Britain were off the pitch. What is it about that? It's really interesting, isn't it?

Because if you say George III, let's say, even in the UK, you won't get the same flicker of recognition if you say Nero. Now, I think partly they are at a safe space, they are at a safe distance. I'm not sure that it felt like that in the 16th century and that might be one difference but for us we can talk about the wickedness of these guys whether it's in terms of gossip or whether we really want to kind of analyse the nature of tyrannical power, it's sufficiently distanced from us that we're safe, we can argue about it. So I think that's a help to us. I think also that there's something about being famous for being famous, that Nero and how he is described by Suetonius has been kind of written into our version of what royal power is for hundreds of years.

And it's provided us with the building bricks of transgression. How do you think about a teenager? Because that's what Nero is. How do we think about a teenager on the throne? What about a teenager who murders his mum? And we see that not just through Roman literary texts, because there's loads of people in the world who, for very good reasons, have never opened a copy of Suetonius or Tacitus. They still recognise Nero, and they do it for all kinds of reasons,

because there's Victorian paintings, there's the kind of cartoons that you find in newspapers that they've become as it were more than good and bad emperors. They've become symbols of power but idiosyncratic and vivid and larger than life symbols of power that we can use to talk about ourselves. And also, I think, monarchs. If you say, so why do these monarchs in early modern Europe, why do they shove all these pictures of these emperors up? Because they must know that they're extremely bad examples. You know, most of them end up not dead peacefully in their bed.

Most of them are decried as tyrants. Of the first 12, the only one that there is no known allegations that he was murdered is Vespasian. So why do dynastic powers think, let's put a set of these up? Well, partly, I think, because they're also quite interested I've gained a certain sympathy for monarchs while I've been doing this book because I think there's nowhere lonelier in the world to be than a palace the middle of a palace and these guys are trying desperately to think about how they should think about themselves. They know that they're an ordinary human being. And their question is, so how is it that I'm a king? And I think that a lot of that projection and questioning

at the very top of the tree, not the likes of me, but the very top of the tree, is projected onto Roman emperors. You go to Hampton Court, that really, really extravagantly baroque staircase leading up to the king's apartments in Hampton Court, done by Verrio. And you look at what it is. If we can get over how awful it looks, you look at what it is,

and it's a whole series of Roman emperors. And the asshole, they will look a bit strange and it's been discussed for a very long time it was only really in the 30s that an art historian cracked it and saw that it was based on a satiric essay by a late Roman Emperor Emperor, who was writing a satire on his predecessors. And the whole point of this satire was that he wanted to say, let's imagine that the old gods, the proper gods, are going to consider inviting these emperors, the dead emperors, to dinner. Would they let them in? And the joke of the satire is they go through these emperors one by one and the proper gods, Jupiter and Juno,

they say, God, I'm not having him. Nero, no, no way. Julius Caesar, oh, absolute monster. They think maybe they'll have Marcus Aurelius, but they're not sure. And so what you have on the staircase for every monarch to walk past is a picture of these emperors being rejected by the proper gods. Now, either nobody ever thought about it,

they also thought, bloody hell, this is a bit Baroque, right? Or they're engaging with this. So I think there is idiosyncrasy. There's larger than lifeness. There are also some big questions about tyrannical power. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Talking to Mary Beard about the Twelve Caesars. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga.

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. Well, let's talk about the Tranquil Parents a sec, but I guess the other thing is they are the first and most powerful set of sort of named heads of state in Western Europe, aren't they? I mean, they are seen as almost a founding dynasty

to these successor states that had successors. And these guys in medieval and later Europe, they did try this sort of mad scheme, which they managed to convince themselves was true that somehow there was a direct inheritance from Roman dynastic power to the Holy Roman Empire and so there was a legitimacy there and you can say look individually these guys might all have come to a sticky end but it was a dynastic system that continued for hundreds of years. So either you can say the Romans got it terribly wrong,

who wants to be like Caligula? Or you can say there was a system here that transcended those individual idiosyncrasies and somehow the system survives. I've asked this before, that is the thing I find so fascinating, particularly because when you're raised as I was on a diet of those idiosyncrasies, we talk about their sexual and their behavioural shortcomings or however you want to describe it, and yet the Empire, first, second centuries, in the engine room somewhere, someone is doing something right. Yes, and that is of of course, a very tricky point, which exercises more scholarly versions of Roman history.

Because one solution would be to say, look, however much these accounts we have of these emperors are wildly exaggerated, let's say they are, what is clear is that the empire trogs along. Nothing much happens. Caligula's on the throne, apparently a complete psychopath. The loss of Germany, catastrophe, has actually got nothing to do with Augustus' personal life at all, right? These emperors are written up cruelly, actually. I mean, in terms of modern issues about ableism and neurodivergence,

these guys are treated as if they are mad, in the old-fashioned traditional sense of the word mad. So the obvious explanation, and it might or might not be true, is that somebody else is doing the work. You can say, if they're anything like we're told, they can't be running the empire, therefore someone else must be running it. Let's see. And one thing you can do is you can, and it's what I don't do in this book, what I'm looking at at the moment, is so who are the staff? Can you find the staff in the Imperial Palace? Well, you can.

You can find the Empress Livia's handbag carrier and you can find a lot of domestic staff. You can find the food tasters for the imperial banquets and all that. And we learn a little bit about the civil service, the people who were often ex-slaves, freed slaves, who were presumably in charge of the secretariat, the accounts department. You can see a bit of that and so you can populate the palace with the cooks and the napkin holders and the the greek secretaries and the romans all

that you can do that you can't see where the decisions are made so i mean i think it is very interesting to start to kind of put back the people on whom this system obviously depends. But you still don't see where the strategic decision about anything is being made. Do they sit around after dinner under Augustus and say, well, do you think we should invade Parthia? and say, well, do you think we should invade Parthia? And as soon as you start posing that question, you start sounding like a Second World War movie. Right.

You know, as if you're there and you've got the salt cellar. And if that happens, which it may have done, we have absolutely no evidence for it at all. But presumably this is our modern White House situation room and our Cobra meetings. If Rome was an empire of provinces, of super powerful local elites like you described to me before, it's quite difficult for us to recognise that, but it would have had a huge robustness. The robustness is because they're basically operating hands off. In our terms, Romans are very thin on the ground, apart from the army. And British India looks pretty thin

on the ground of British administrators. The Romans, it's trivial. There's tiny numbers. So they operate clearly by collaboration with the existing elites. They have to do that. Somebody once joked, and I can't remember what exact date he was referring to, but when the Romans left Britain, the armies had gone, how many Romans actually left? Probably about five. So you've got this very thin veneer of actual guys doing any work apart from the army and force.

One of the ways of describing it is an empire of force. This is a military state. Occasionally a big sledgehammer gets it's this is a big sledgehammer gets occasionally a big sledgehammer but mostly you operate through the local elites going on much as they did before and what the job of the romans to do is not actually to bother about anybody who's not in the local elite but to to make sure that the local elites are on side and to, as far as possible, incorporate them into a kind of set of Roman structures.

That has to be how it's done. It's an empire of collaboration. But Mary Peart, you're hurting my brain now because if we're going to talk about tyranny and we're going to think about Roman emperors and the effect of wielding absolute power on individuals, if they don't have such power power then why are they tyrants? I know that is exactly the big issue you know there's a great novel by Christoph Ransmeier called Otherworlds. This novel ends up being a sort of exploration

of a real world that's like of its metamorphosis. Everything's changing shape everywhere. But the beginning of the novel, we eventually meet Augustus. And Augustus is on his own in a room in the palace. And he's looking through the window, as I remember it, looking at his pet crocodile. And you think that, so there isn't a centre to this. When there's not a centre, then you can still use the figure of the emperor as your explanatory device, if you're a Roman historian. And it still then comes down to the morality of the emperor. You can still say,

cruel, hypocritical, generous, one of us, etc. So it's a huge kind of Chinese box effect of people using the emperor to explain things that they don't otherwise understand. And if you kind of go through this and you take all the boxes out and you come to the middle, there's this awful sense that there might be nothing there. there's this awful sense that there might be nothing there so this kind of tyranny which is so

vividly summed up by Roman writers and modern writers might all be smoke and mirrors and yet it seems that they themselves believed it, the emperors do you think I think we haven't got the foggiest

clue we have some of their own words so we know a little bit themselves believed it, the emperors, do you think? I think we haven't got the foggiest clue. We have some of their own words, so we know a little bit. Really, that comes down, leaving Julius Caesar aside, where you have his military diaries, really. Augustus gives you a sort of autobiography, but it's an institutional autobiography. It's a template for how the world should be with an emperor. And this is know, this is what I did. I fought this and I fought that and I gave this and I gave that and I built this and I built that. You then go to Marcus Aurelius, I guess.

You know, I find Marcus Aurelius about the most puzzling of these emperors. And in the book, I rather steer clear of him, although there's a very famous ancient statue of him on the capital in Rome you know still it's one of the very very few ancient Roman statues that have been on display forever since they were made and quite sort of humbling but I mean why most people now know Marcus Aurelius is because of his pense, his thoughts, his meditations, right? And they have an extraordinary popularity. I mean, you try Amazon rankings, Marcus Aurelius is doing damn well, you know? Occasionally, when I get a little jealousy. Well, I go into, sometimes I go and look at the Amazon rankings in Roman history.

And I'm quite happy when Tom Holland's up there at the top. I really like it when I beat Marcus Aurelius. And it doesn't happen that often. By and large, Marcus Aurelius is up there. And again, it's another thing that I never quite understood. Because when I sit down and read these meditations they seem to me utter cliches they fit my image that you can't get to the center of imperial power because it's full of things like overall it's better to try to do good than try to do bad and lots of other profundities again I think it fits in with some of the things that you've

been wondering about about why we're still interested in these characters. I think there is something very powerful for people, even if it's cliche, and perhaps even better if it is cliche, to have cliche written 2,000 years ago. You know, there's something which it makes it sort of part of culture with a capital C, in a way that if I were to sit down and write it's generally better to try to be good than try to be bad people. People would not buy it I can tell you. There's hope for all of us. Just write something that will last for 2000 years. You get these glimpses into these guys. You get the glimpses into their jokes sometimes. They're quite good jokesters. But if you say, right, do you find the tyrant? Can you find

the tyrant? I you find the tyrant? I think it's a bit like, for me, and maybe I shouldn't mention this, but it's a bit like what happens in the Downing Street flat. And we now live in a rather Roman way, actually, with a blame-the-woman culture. We want to explain why Boris Johnson has done something. We'll take this imaginative leap in our mind's eye to their Downing Street flat.

And whose idea was it? It was Carrie's. Now, I don't know whether it was or wasn't. I've got absolutely no idea. But I know that that's a standard line about power forever. You know, it's not just the male tyrant. It's the manipulating woman. And you find plenty of manipulating women.

Empress Livia. How many did she suppose to have poisoned? Well, almost everybody. Nero's mum. Nero's mum. God, it's his poor old wife. I mean, come on. I mean, everybody is. And poisoning is, it's a very interesting topic, actually, in the ancient world because it's a nasty, perverted cookery, isn't it? Poisoning is somehow cookery turned upside down, and that's why women do it. Because women don't come up and stab you. Women feed you bad things.

Nurturing turned nasty. I suppose you could say. We're not beholden to those stories, but we're still the inheritors of them. 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. I was going to mention this earlier, but I wonder whether, because it's more difficult to understand what makes the world the way it is. Well, it's very difficult to understand.

For the last 30 years of my life, it's been about climate change. It's been about China. It's been about technology. It's been about rising inequality in the West. But putting names and allowing us to sort of remember, oh, this guy was followed by that guy, he's followed by that guy. You can put that on a ruler and a poster and a... It's a way of ordering.

I mean, I think that... You're very young, Dan, actually. I mean, because I could go back and I could say, just before all those things you mentioned, it was the nuclear bomb was going to kill us all and population explosion was going to kill us all. Everybody was talking about... David Attentenbury's talk about population explosion. But anyway, yeah, so we've got these big unthinkable things.

Here's something that we can bring it down to names and dates and biographies. And I think that that is important. And I think it's important for, in some ways, for the popularity of these figures, their continuing use and resonance. They're very good organising devices, and partly for history. I know that Augustus comes before Tiberius, who comes before Caligula, and I've got this sort of, like a map, Roman history. But also that sort of sense of organisation gets extended.

So you look at the famous Cotton Library, which was the Renaissance Library, which eventually became the nucleus of the British Library. And you go to the British Library now and you want to order up some of the manuscripts that were in the Cotton Library. that were in the Cotton Library. And what you have to fill out or type in on your request form is still names of Roman emperors. If you want to get Beowulf manuscript, I think you have to write Vitellius 423, right? And that was because Robert Cotton had organised his library

by shells, book stacks, with the bust of a Roman emperor on top. And so if you wanted to get in Cotton's library a particular manuscript, you would say, oh, I want Nero 4-6, please. And that's an organizing principle. An organizing principle, absolutely, literally. But what I think is quite touching is that it's still taken over in the modern catalogue. These days are probably numbered, aren't they? But it's still taken over as a way of organising that bit of the library in a modern library. Well, I remember when I was younger, when I was learning history, it was very inconvenient that something would happen, Britain would get conquered, would happen on the watch of

emperors that we thought were famously useless. Ha-ha, you know, we know who this was. But it was a dissonance there, isn't it, which encouraged me to think that maybe these guys aren't actually pulling strings. It might be liberating. You might say, hey, look, all these big things happen, and these hopeless emperors were sort of in charge when that happened. They can't have been, you know, Claudius could not possibly have masterminded the invasion of Britain. And these hopeless emperors were sort of in charge when that happened.

They can't have been, you know, Claudius could not possibly have masterminded the invasion of Britain, etc., etc. And if you go down that route, it is quite liberating because you say, so they don't matter then, do they? So part of what you get with a Roman emperor is you get a way of taking power down to size. Because who is Domitian? Well, when it comes to it, he's the guy who spends his spare time scaring flies with his pen nib. And if you can bring power down to those kind of trivialities, in a way you might say you've mastered it. Now, other people, and certainly when you look at the few portrayals

that there are of Domitian with his pen nib, it makes it look as if it is the most nastiest encapsulation of tyranny that you can imagine. What does a tyrant do with his spare time? I'll tell you, tortures flies. So it goes both ways, doesn't it? It goes both ways, doesn't it? After looking at Rome, as you've done for decades, do you find yourself veering around on whether the medievalists always talk about the various dynasties, the fortunes of England and France rise or fall often on the sanity and the fecundity of various Plantagenet and other Valois kings.

Where are you now on the Roman Empire? I've always been. I don't like it much. The reason I study it is not because I like it. It's because I find its longevity, its structures, and its pull on us in all different ways fantastically interesting. I'm always on the awkward squad. Wherever the squad is, I'm the awkward squad. And it's very easy to think about the Roman Empire

as if it's full of paid-up, jingoistic Romans. Well, there's, I'm sure, plenty of those. But the literature that really matters to us and that survived is often deeply critical. So you look at Tacitus. matters to us and that survived is often deeply critical. So you look at Tacitus, second century AD, the best denunciation of imperial expansion that there has ever been in a single sentence, right? From the mouth of a Scottish chief. From the mouth of a Scottish chief, certainly didn't say it, saying, what do the Romans do? They make a desert and call it peace. Now, I'm going to have

that on my tombstone because there is no age ever after that has not been in need of Tacitus' critique of imperialism. And go right back to the Roman Empire, the writers that we have are not sitting there saying, oh great, let's conquer some more guys. They're saying, look, we started to go downhill the moment we got an empire. There is a moral vacuum at the heart of our empire. Now, we tend to forget that when we think about the Romans, because our image of the Romans is always the poor old squad is marching across Gaul, following Julius Caesar, who is a genocidal maniac. But actually, people who live under empires are often the best critics of them. They know what they're talking about. And I think that gives Rome a lot of staying power for me. And you can see that in the 19th century very clearly, because again, we tend to think,

because this is the standard view, isn't it? That when we, the Br brits went and conquered the world this is all in inverted commas remember what was our model what was our kind of load stuff we were modeling ourselves on the roman empire and guys went out whether with ill or good intentions to do stuff which always turned bad we always think oh but in the back of their mind it's the Pax Romana and in part that's true but I started to look at the careers of largely but not entirely Oxford classicists what they did in the late 19th century and some of them did go off and run the empire all those others went off and wrote for the Manchester Guardian and critiqued it. Classics has never been something which gives you a single sided view of the world. That's why I like it. Then in terms of your work on emperors,

is there a, whereas the short-lived Macedonian empire of Alexander has a problem when Alexander himself dies, right? The fate of that empire is tied to the fate of the body, the health of the leader. Is that true of Rome across the period that you're talking about in this book called the first century? Or has it become detached, like you might say in 19th century Britain, George IV on the throne, absolutely hopeless man, actually no discernible impact on Britain's natural trajectory? I think there's many different things kind of come together here. And I think that it's easy to kind of think about Roman history as a kind of glorious republic, a kind of quasi-democracy, rudely interrupted by Julius Caesar, who, with certain kind of further disruptions, is taken, despite his assassination, as the founder of this dynasty, which lasts until the 15th century in the East.

And it's easy to be very nostalgic and romantic about the Republic. In some ways, the Romans were right that their traditional system was ruined by expansion. They did not have any way of running the empire that their military success, probably a lot of it quite good luck, rather than brilliant strategy, they couldn't manage the empire that their success brought them. So you've got an absolute impossible polity,

which in the end has been going towards some version of one-man rule from the late second century BC. Now, the difficulty is it's easier to see the power of those one men, those late Republican big men who were kind of almost emperors. It's easier to see their power than it is to see how the power of Caligula or Tiberius works. But you come to a point where, and it's very hard for us to think this, because monarchy doesn't have a good reputation, right? You know, one man rule doesn't have many supporters in the modern Western world. There are places where it does. There are all kinds of ways where we mask it.

But if you get up and say, you know what I think, it's all kinds of ways where we mask it, but if you get up and say, you know what, I think it's a democracy, one man rule for me, please, you would not get in most of the West much cheering. By the time you get into the 30s or the 40s AD, one of the successes in a way of Augustus is that there didn't seem to be any other way to do it any longer and I think that there's a wonderful moment when Caligula dies mid-first century he's assassinated and that's the last moment when the senate in Rome look as if they've got any kind of glimmer that there might be another way of doing things. One guy does get up in the Senate

and says, I think we ought to restore the Republic. Now, why does that fail? Two reasons. One is the Praetorian Guard, meanwhile, have found Claudius behind it. They've got a new emperor. Done deal. When this guy, I think he drops his ring,

the guy who is advocating the return of the Republic, and it is a signet ring, and the signet ring has on it the head of Caligula. So even the guy who's getting up to say, let's restore the quasi-democratic Republic, he's carrying around the image of the emperor. And that, I think, is meant to show us that you've got to a point where they can't think outside this box, or don't want to,

or actually, for most people, it doesn't matter. We're very much the inheritors of a tradition of a metropolitan elite. I think it's pretty clear that in the wilds of Norfolk, you didn't know who the emperor was. You might eventually, you might spot something on a coin. There's a funny late antique source, which is a joke, but it says, do you know, some people in my province here think Agamemnon's still king.

You know, we have such a sort of metropolitan view of what mattered to people. Lastly, you completed this book in some fairly turbulent times. We had COVID, then we had a building with a Roman name, stormed by a crowd demanding election overturned in America. Has the present, whether it's climate, whether it's disease, whether it is creeping authoritarianism, the rise of strongmen, has that changed your thinking? Has that changed the way you're interacting with your studies?

It's bound to have, isn't it? And one's probably not in a very good position to say how, because one's the least able of anybody to show that. I think that I have been very struck by how these figures don't just continue in things like cartoons. I think to some extent I sometimes give the impression, and I certainly thought this was going to be my conclusion, that actually this idea of Roman imperial power still mattering really came to an end at the end of the 19th century and it has a kind of afterlife in comic books like Asterix or cartoons a sort of trivial afterlife but with no power and I think that's not right I mean I think it would be clearly wrong to say that the impact and influence of Roman imperial power in our thinking was now as great as it was in the 17th century. No, it wasn't. Happily, we've got more things to think about. We've got more different cultural traditions to play with and there's more to think about than there was in 16th, 17th century Mantua, say.

than there was in 16th, 17th century Mantua, say. But when you look at modern artists, they're still, I mean, Anson Kiefer is still, in trying to think about tyranny in the 20th century, is still going back to thinking about Nero, Nero as an artist, Nero as an artist, Nero as an artist and king as tyrant and putting that centre stage in painting and he's not the only one and the more you kind of excavate this the more you see people are playing with the idea of a kind of bodily collapse. Vitellius is a very interesting case.

Very short-lived emperor who held the throne for a few months in 69 in the civil wars between Nero and the next dynasty. Surprisingly, and I think one of the things that my book looks at, surprisingly influential in the visual arts because one statue only that was found in the Renaissance and was believed to be Vitellius probably isn't but that's another story but Vitellius is a man of colossal overeating he's a glutton sad sadist, etc. This statue is extremely jowly, the famous statue that somehow fixed his image on Western culture. And he gets now used, he gets returned to,

that physiognomy gets returned to as a kind of sense of bodily uncontrolledness. What is it when the body splodges everywhere? How can you control and bound a body? And Vitellius is a very powerful symbol and continues to be in images. There's a great early 20th century now, but fantastic Medardo Rosso portrait of Vitellius in gilded bronze in the V&A. I mean, just, you know, saying, how should people look? How should people be? And, of course, emperors are symbols for that too. The construction in the end of the first century BC of Augustus'

perfect image, still an image that we have of what a ruler looks like, and it was an image in which we dressed up, sometimes quite literally, all our Georges, and they're all sitting there, poor buggers, dressed in rather fancy Roman costume, pretending to be Augustus. Because that was how you could imagine what monarchy was.

So don't get rid of it. Thank you very much, Mary Beers. you