The Ancients - Roman Emperors with Mary Beard

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

When examining the role of the Emperor within the Roman Empire, it is often easier to focus on the individual rather than the role itself. With contrasting personalities such as Marcus Aurelius and Caligula occupying the position, it becomes challenging to identify commonalities among Roman emperors. But when you examine the role itself and the responsibilities involved - it might be easier to find commonalities between the individuals than first believed.In this episode, Tristan welcomes Professor Dame Mary Beard to the podcast to delve into the enthralling world, and immense responsibilities of the Roman Emperor. By exploring those at the pinnacle of Roman society, they unveil the realities of life for those at the top and how intricate dynamics influenced everything from the Senate to the justice system and dinner parties. Investigating the expectations of everyday citizens regarding the Emperor, and looking at whether this relationship was genuinely beneficial for both parties - what can we learn about the Roman Emperors, and are they more similar than history leads us to believe?You can order Mary's book HERE.The Ancients has been nominated in the History category at the Signal Awards! Help us win Gold by casting your vote here!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 ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, well, it's quite a big episode. We've not only got a massive topic in Roman emperors, but we've also got a pretty well-known guest, none other than Professor Dame Mary Beard. Now, a few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to head up to Cambridge to interview Mary in person. We also filmed the interview that will be going on the History Hit YouTube channel in due course.

And in our chat, Mary discusses the role of a Roman emperor. So not focusing on a particular emperor, but exploring the emperor as a category. What was expected of a Roman emperor? What was life like for these figures at the top of this ancient civilisation? Well Mary explains so much in this wonderful chat. We cover topics from a Roman emperor's relationship with the elite, for instance with the senate, but we also explore other areas such as the emperor at dinner, this idea of power dining and also what was expected of a Roman emperor by those everyday people living in this empire. This was a fascinating chat and a great privilege to interview Mary all about it.

I really do hope you enjoy. And here's Mary. Mary, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Great to be on it. Very kind indeed. Well, your newest book, all about focusing the Roman emperor, not a particular emperor, but the Roman emperor as a category, as a whole system. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm taking my cue from a famous Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, author of The Meditations, still a bestseller, who said at one point in The Meditations,

when he was looking back over his predecessors, same play, different cast. And I thought, actually, what he's hitting on is the idea that, of course, there's differences, you know, but essentially, the structure of one-man rule at Rome remained for several hundred years basically the same. And that we invest terribly strongly in the idea of the mad Caligula, the luxurious Nero. We're very individualising. And there's some good work being done there. I'm not knocking it. And there's some good work being done there. I'm not knocking it.

But that actually what Marcus Aurelius is suggesting is that these emperors were more similar than they were different. Of course they were different. But they were more, the job they did the same. The job description's the same. What they had to do each day was the same. Where they lived was the same. And that sometimes you can gain by putting them all together, or at least putting a good group of them, rather than becoming preoccupied with

individuals and individual psychopathology and the mad guys on the throne. You see that, I think, very clearly if you look at some of those distinctive anecdotes. Because actually, they're very idiosyncratic when you tell them about one emperor. But don't forget, they're told about several same anecdotes. And is it also really important using that lens when looking at the perception of ordinary people in the Roman Empire, when they look at the role, the importance, the place of the emperor. That's right. I think that's absolutely right. And there are some people, you know, those close to the centre of power, for whom the individual emperor and his own particular characteristics

were hugely important. You know, if you were on the emperor's dinner list, it mattered, I'm sure, whether it was a domitian or an Oeuvre. But most people outside Rome, they do know something about the changing of emperors. They see it on the coinage, they see new statues. But what you find them referring to is the emperor. It's the emperor. And I think it's worth exploring it from that way. And, you know, you're seeing it more how the Roman emperor appears to those who are not eating with him every other night and I think people can feel a bit anxious because they think blimey I don't know my Roman emperors really and you know I can take one but she's

going to be dealing with almost 30. Well I think the point is most Romans didn't know their Didius Julianus from their Pertinax either. And there's a wonderful papyrus, very beautifully written, clearly compiled by some nerd in Roman Egypt in the 3rd century. And he's writing down the names and the lengths of the reigns of emperors from Augustus onwards. And he gets them wrong. Right? I mean, phew, that's great, you know. So if you kind of worry that you don't know your Marcus Aurelius is from your Antoninus Pius's, don't worry, because many Romans didn't either. Well, I'd love to delve into that, particularly that perception of the emperors and what their role was, particularly for the ordinary people in the empire. I think, first of all, I need to ask about maybe a bit of a background to this all,

in the origins of this autocracy, the basics of one-man rule almost. Do we know how this idea of the emperor, how it starts to emerge in ancient Rome? Well, that's a $64,000 question, isn't it? And the Romans were not the first to invent one-man rule. And in fact, in their mythology, their early rulers had been kings. But what you've got, I mean, I think the basic way of seeing it, and I try to lay it out as unnerdishly as possible in the book, is that for 400-odd years after they'd chucked out their mythical line of kings, like almost every ancient city does,

they were governed by not a democracy, I call it a sort of democracy, that there were elections in which all male citizens could vote. They didn't all have quite equal weight in their voting, but everybody could vote. And they elected a series of officials to run the state on two basic principles. One is that no one held office for more than a year at a time, and no one held office on their own.

So, you know, we think, what the top officials, the consuls, always two of them. And it was during that period of this power-sharing democracy, I suppose you'd say, that Rome conquered its empire. Now, one counterintuitive thing about Roman history is that the empire, in the end, and I'll explain how, produced the emperors, the emperors didn't gain the empire. So this power-sharing democracy, very competitive, notionally equal, but really kind of the elite, particularly competing for glory with one another in these very short time spans of power they had, it was during that regime that they conquered most of the empire that

they had, from Spain over to Turkey, what was modern Turkey in the east. And it's extraordinary, it's very puzzling. No one's really been able to understand why they did it or how they did it. Some people say, oh, the Romans were just more militaristic and nasty than anybody else. That's not true. They were all, you know, all ancient cultures are militaristic and nasty. But what happened was that system created a territorial expanse of empire that the traditional political system couldn't manage. Right. It kind of imploded. So you've got one year in office. Well, by the time you get to the late 2nd century BCE,

it would take you three months to get to one side of the Roman Empire and back again another three months. So they've got huge problems, huge distances to be travelled, but a political system of government that is still city-state size. And during the first century BCE in particular, there are all kinds of what I call prequels to autocracy. You know, there's Sulla who holds power on his own for a few years, not very long. There's Pompey who's given vast, vast resources

on his own to clear the Mediterranean of pirates. And then the final prequel to autocracy is Julius Caesar who by that stage is quarrelling with Pompey and he is either the first emperor, which is how Suetonius in his 12 Caesars takes him, or he's the last gasp of these prequels to autocracy. He becomes dictator for life and then he's assassinated. So what you have is a system which kind of basically destroyed itself because the republic was so successful the democratic republic was so successful in gaining territory it produced territory it could not govern with its existing institutions hence the beginning tentative beginnings of one-man rule really embedded by Julius Caesar then after his assassination a period of civil war a decade of civil war

and on comes Augustus. And at that stage, he's still called Octavian. He changes his name later. But by then, there is no doubt that Rome is going to be ruled by one man. And as it dawns on them that this new autocratic kind of one-man rule is starting to emerge, these Republican, I guess, Democratic institutions... They would have hated the word democracy. No Roman ever liked the word democracy. That's what you're going to hear.

Sort of. These age-old institutions, let's say the Senate, are they therefore remodeled almost to fit into this new world where the system of the emperor has now emerged? Yeah, in a way you could put it like that. I mean, I think that I would say that one of the secrets of the success of Augustus is that he constructs one-man rule using the rhetoric and the institutions of the old sort of democracy. So the institutions have

changed dramatically, but they're still using the buzzwords, the slogans, and the institutions don't get abolished. So all the old political offices that were once fought for in popular elections fiercely, those remain, but elections get transferred to the Senate. And the Senate remains, but it doesn't have the power and authority as it used to have, or at least they're always kind of nudging their way round the power and the authority of the emperor. So you can say, and it used often to be said, that the whole of the imperial schema as devised by Augustus was built on bad faith. You know, he pretended to be restoring the republic, but actually he was establishing one-man rule. I don't think he was pretending to do anything, really. I mean, you know, the Roman elite were

not stupid. They didn't think, oh, God, maybe the republic is still survived, we got an emperor hey come on what he was doing was he was casting a very new form of political life in the words and the slogans and the ideas of the old dramatically changed but still sort of familiar and everybody still wanted to be consul. Now, the fact that it was effectively chosen by the emperor, even if voted on in the Senate, there was awkwardness about that. But those kind of ambitions remained. In a sense, it's brilliant. In a sense, it's brilliant. And in that regard, although, let's say, the emperor, he has total power, therefore, over the choice of who gets what position in the Senate and so on. But how was an emperor still expected to interact with the Senate?

What was expected in his job description? Well, I think I'd stop you on the first bit. I think I don't think the emperor does have total power. I mean, formally, maybe you might say that's not right. Formally, maybe you might say that's not right, but I think that the monarch always, to some extent, has to rule by consensus. Otherwise, they get killed. So it might look like total power, but it's always hedged around with respect to the Senate, not upsetting the apple cart, because in the end, monarchs can't rule on their own. No monarch can rule a vast empire on his own.

So the emperor needs the Senate, because the Senate are some of the people, and there are others, who are going to provide high-level expertise, they're going to be governing provinces, etc., etc., so they have to come to a collaborative position. Again it's always so complicated the buzzword is kivilitas behaving like a citizen well I think in terms of the senate and the traditional Roman elite it's behaving like one of us being one of one of us that's what he is and that is hugely important and the phrase kivilitas is bandied around. I think, however, it's also terribly vulnerable. And that's brought out in one of the stories about Augustus himself, which is that every time he goes into the Senate, because emperors attend the Senate

and they argue in the Senate, every time he goes into the Senate, he apparently stopped and shook the hand and greeted by name every senator. And when he went out, he did the same. Now, I don't know if that's true, but you can see this on the one hand as Kivilitas. This is the emperor behaving and knowing people and saying, hello, my dear, how nice to see you, etc., etc. On the other hand, it's a display of autocracy. No other senator does that. They don't all go around.

So some of the kind of biggest signs and symbols of Kivilitas end up not being, because nobody else does behave like that. And another side of that is seen in the story about Tiberius not long after, when the Senate as often is acting as a law court. And Tiberius is there and he's been one of the Senate, you know, he's being one of us. Until one of the senators says, Tiberius, I hope, would you please vote first? Because I don't want to find that I have inadvertently voted the wrong way. Puncturing the whole kind of carapace of Kivilitas at a stroke. Now, interestingly, the guy gets off. The guy, and maybe that was the point, you know,

Tiberius was being positioned to have to vote for acquittal. But you see that those kinds of slogans are always vulnerable. It's like displaying your modesty. Augustus displays his modesty, but it's a display, is it? But how do you boast of your modesty? Well, that's the issue at the heart of some of these encounters. It's really interesting, isn't it, from the sources, seeing those examples of the cooperation of senators with the emperor. And I know you also mentioned about the potentials. When do you see cooperation?

Sometimes when it's collaborations, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two. It's always terribly difficult, isn't it? I mean, I think that modern historians are a bit kind of naive, putting it too nicely i think and we like the opposition right now actually most modern historians are collaborators with whatever you know we get on keep our heads down we occasionally say why do i really approve of that but you know in our daily lives most of us cooperate we call it

cooperate you might call it collaborate. All the same, they're also romantic things, historians, and so they love the opposition, even though they themselves would never put their head above the parapet, or only very rarely, they love those that do. So it gives you the impression, because they write up these guys, like ancient historians themselves back in antiquity wrote these up. You think that the Senate is full of the awkward squad. Now, there are some of them, that's certainly true, but it's much more likely.

You know, it's more full of cooperators or collaborators. And they're cooperators and collaborators who, when the emperor dies and somebody else takes his place always has an excuse well i was just keeping my head down but i was fighting the system from within i had heard that i was next on the hit let's just like you know all those guys in occupied europe who discovered they had a minor resistance career after the fall of the Nazis. I know that actually I was, I looked as if I was working with Vichy France, but really, I was, you know, and that's how power gets exchanged. And that's how, that's how people

reinvent themselves. They reinvent themselves and there's a new regime. And it's true that, you know, Rome wasn't a nice place to be and Roman emperors weren't nice. And Rome was a place, like many other pre-modern societies, you solved your problems by violence. And we would find the corridors of power very unpleasantly bloodstained. But we would have found all corridors, wherever in the ancient world, unpleasantly bloodstained

and most of people are like you know one of my favorite senators clearly the younger the letter writer you know he's getting on with the job you didn't know another system because he's a really interesting source when looking at that dynamic isn't it between the emperor and the elite and a senator or someone just an official in the empire? He gives a good insight into how that relationship could have been. Yes, you know, there he is, you know, and he's more complicated. Every time you kind of push at any of his evidence, you see it's more complicated. And there's one very famous speech of his that he gave to thank the emperor, a speech of thanksgiving, a speech of praise, when the emperor effectively had given him a consulship.

And he gets up in the Senate and he preserved this speech, fulsomely, hyperbolically, to thank the Roman emperor who was trading. And people have been disgusted by this speech, right? They've said, you know, how could he? One of the worst collaborators, how could he, one of the worst collaborators that we know, how could he ask like this? It is, you know, it makes even some of the emperor's cruelties look minor compared with this kind of false praise. And yet you look at this speech again, and you think more is going on here. And I think we are very, in the 21st century, we're quite bad at understanding the dynamics of praise.

You know, we tend to think flattery is awful. And you know, in some senses, it is. But some of the most effective ways of guiding the behaviour of the monarch or the dictator or the boss or whatever, you know, it can be office politics if you like, is to praise him not for the characteristics he has but for the characteristics you want him to show. Trajan, you are brilliant. Your respect for the Senate makes everybody your friend. Now, that is both loathsome flattery. It's also a way of nudging Trajan in the right direction. Everyone's your friend because you respect the Senate. Right? Got it?

And so here you find you can't quite know where any of this complicated language sits. Pliny's, you know, in some ways he is one of the worst and he did quite well under what he calls in the speech of praise, the tyrant Domitian. He did jolly well. And afterwards he goes around saying, oh, there was a letter on his desk when he died showing that I would have been the next to be threatened with death or exile I don't know but he like Tacitus another kind of great opponent of Domitian they prospered under Domitian but what you're seeing is you're seeing what most senators were up to, probably, which is reinventing themselves. And that's one of the ways that Domitian has a terrible reputation

because they're all sitting there saying, oh, wasn't he terrible? Trajan, you know, Nerva was the immediate successor, but Trajan was the long-term successor. You know, how we put up with it, I really don't know. It's a bit like prime ministers, isn't it? It is, and also is, is I guess how the reputation of a particular emperor, of the emperor, it very much depends on the succession of what happens next.

Yes, much. Now one's got to be a bit careful because there is a sort of awful tendency amongst kind of subversive ancient historians to say, oh he wasn't a nasty guy, he wasn't a monster, he was a goody, really, look at all this, you know, and just to kind of overturn the bad reputation and make it good. And, you know, in the end, it's very hard to know. But what is absolutely certain is that there is one thing more than anything else that determines the reputation of an emperor which is what happens after him. So Vespasian, great goody. Why is he great goody? Well he might have been a decent guy but really whether he was or wasn't he was the first emperor to be succeeded by his natural son Titus and it was overwhelmingly in Titus's interests to big up the reputation of Vespasian from whom he owed his position on the throne.

Likewise there is a tendency to say oh he was so awful that they assassinated him. Turn that on its head and And you say, look, as soon as an emperor is assassinated, it's in the interests of the guy who replaces him to say that assassination was legitimate. Now, he may also be nasty. And I think that's the kind of big black hole that, you know, you can see that point, but you can't just flip it and say, oh, so he was nice then. But you see that it's what comes after, as you say, that makes a difference. And, you know, let's remember, good rulers get assassinated and bad rulers get assassinated. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week, every week, as we look at the

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from History Hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts so let's move into the palace you mentioned the corridors earlier so the emperor at dinner this is an interesting place from the surviving sources where you can get an idea, more of an idea of the emperor and the sister. Yeah. And I big up dinner because partly it's because it is something we're sort of familiar with. We've seen the movies where they're lying down and quaffing falernian wine and saying pass the dormouse or whatever. And that's not entirely wrong. So you can move out from an image that's familiar to us to one that's likely less familiar. And part of the reason I chose to put quite a lot of stress on it is you can still find these dining rooms.

We know we can still go to a place where we know Nero, Ed. Now, many of the rooms in the palace, we are very uncertain about what their function was. Dining rooms, you can almost always spot because of the way the couches have been laid out. And you can still see the marks on the floor, even if they're not permanent. And so I think it is quite exciting to think, OK, here we can actually place the emperor doing something that we, whose rules we basically know. And dinner is of course, is a great example to choose because, you know, everybody now knows that formal and informal dining is full of hierarchies.

You know, it's where hierarchies are subverted because we're all eating together, but it's where hierarchies are reinforced because I'm at the bottom of the table and you're sitting next to the host. And so you can see those kind of power dynamics in the descriptions of dining with the emperor. And you know, they run from the probably fantastic you know elegabalus in the third century you know serving he wasn't the first actually serving the lower order guests fake food when the upper order guests got real food right you know so they sit there with wax apples looking at everybody else enjoying themselves and so you can see how the distinctions

and the humiliation is introduced. It's like when Domitian is supposed to have invited a load of Roman toffs to dinner, and they come in and everybody's wearing black. And they discover that all the servants are dressed in black. All the couches on which they lie are modelled on tombstones, all the food is funeral food, and Domitian spends a whole evening talking about death. They think, oh blimey, last hour has come everybody, they go home, knock on the door,

and what comes in is some of the expensive silverware that they've been eating off right now it's told as if it was toying humiliation of the elite nobody gets hurt everybody gets a nice presence but you've spent an evening thinking that it was your last hour and those kind of humiliations really concentrate at the picture of dinner. And it's also that you kind of get people described in there with the emperor. So you get eyewitness accounts from all kinds of points of view. And you start to get this sense that it's a bit like

the country house in an English crime novel. You know, if you're in a country house, someone's going to get this sense that it's a bit like the country house in an English crime novel. You know, if you're in a country house, someone's going to get murdered. But at dinner, there's always the thought that this crime is on the agenda. And you see that in all kinds of ways, but it's signalled to you by the food tasters. You know, if you have people tasting the food to see if it had been poisoned, that both makes everybody safe, but it also reminds everybody that poison might be in the food. So it's luxury, it's pleasure.

You're very flattered to be invited, but it's also dangerous, fearful, a site of crime. And so it's a very, very good place for seeing those tensions between the emperor and those who surround him. But the thing that also partly interests me a lot is the idea that we know quite a lot about the servants as well. So it's not just those guys who were guzzling down the food. We know a lot about who was making it, who was doing the washing up, who was kind of handing out napkins. And you start to see the whole infrastructure behind the imperial dinner party and hierarchized itself.

And there's a hierarchy at the top and there's a hierarchy at the bottom. There's some wonderful tombstones where people who work in the imperial kitchens make it very clear where on the hierarchy they live. And there's a great one who says, I'm not just a cook, I wasn't just a cook, I was an archimagieros, I was a chef de cuisine, right?

And so you see these kind of competitive hierarchies going right through. Going right through. And that's amazing. It's a display of power and authority, whether it's for generosity of an emperor or humiliation in one way or another. That's right. In regards to the average Roman or the average person in the empire, In regards to the average Roman or the average person in the empire, was an emperor ever expected on a special occasion or whatever to be at a dinner or a great dinner or something like that

where he would be eating alongside the people, I guess, who were his subjects in the Roman Empire? There are... In some ways, everybody's his subject. So when he's inviting the senators, they're his subjects. He is sometimes the host of vast dinner events, not always in dining rooms. One of the most famous is in the reign of Domitian at the end of the first century CE. And Domitian hosts a sort of picnic, actually, in the Colosseum.

So there were about 50,000 people. Colosseum. So there were about 50,000 people. There were, in our view, I think rather tasteless displays going on, not gladiatorial displays, but sort of spoof battles between women and dwarfs. I mean, you know, it's almost as distasteful as what normally happened there. But Domitian is kind of conjuring up this kind of generosity on a massive scale. And poet Statius is very active in the period, describes it. And he's sometimes quite funny. He's also a frightful flatterer, but he's sometimes quite witty. And it starts by all kinds of things raining down on the guests. He says it was great, sometimes it was a bit painful because the fruit wasn't always very ripe so you got

bashed on the head by an apple falling from on high and there was lots of wine and it can't have been lie down because they were in the Colosseum, it must have been a sit-down picnic. And so you get that kind of thing and you get people trying to wangle invitations to dinner you know you get so you get stories of a provincial who tried to pay money we know about this don't we you know people tried to pay money to to have dinner with the ruler of the world well that certainly happened well therefore let's focus more on these people in the empire that they view the emperor they wouldn't be as interested you know isn't the actual name of the emperor but the position of the emperor, they wouldn't be as interested in what isn't the actual name of the emperor, but the position of the emperor. What would these people, what would they expect of an

emperor? What would they see in an emperor? In theory, and how far this can be in practice, difficult. In theory, they expect him to listen to them when they want. They expect him to be accessible. There's a story told about the Emperor Hadrian. It's also told about other earlier rulers, so you can see that it's a bit of a cliché. But when it's told about the Emperor Hadrian, it's the story of him being out in the country. A woman comes up to him and says,

excuse me, Emperor, you know, and he says, I'm terribly sorry, I haven't got time. And she says, if you've not got time for me, not got time to be emperor. And he stops and listens to her. So you've got that sense that in theory, the emperor is approachable. Now, in practice, this cannot have been quite like that.

But I think it's a very powerful myth about the emperor that he should listen to you. That's where the buck stops. And ultimately, he's the guy who can solve your problems, even if they're quite, in our terms, trivial. And I think that explains quite a lot of the image making and the stories, which kind of focus often on individual people trying to bend the emperor's ear there's a lovely story about augustus which i think is revealing in all kinds of ways a guy has gone to one of his greetings his salutations and he wants to give a petition to augustus and he's not used to it and so he keeps going like this but bringing his hand in and out you know um we're not quite sure how to do it and Augustus says you're looking as if you're trying to give a penny

to an elephant and it's told because it's great wit on the part of Augustus actually it is a little bit funny but it also helps you capture that idea that it's jolly frightening. You're supposed to be able to go and get Augustus to listen to you, but you don't quite know how to do it. You probably don't even know where the front door of the palace is. Neither do we, really. It's that reputation, isn't it? It can be incredibly frightening. And I guess you could do that lens into the ordinary person.

But you mentioned in theory there were this, the buck stops with the emperor, and obviously there's this walking court of appeal. I know you use that phrase as well. But realistically, how probable was it that, let's say, someone who's got a problem in his local city, state or town, let's say in Asia Minor or somewhere, the emperor is going nearby? I mean, how realistic was it that an ordinary person would be able to approach a Roman emperor? Good question. You know, that's the theory.

And I think probably if he was passing through on his travels, that might have been the easiest time. You come into your town and you shove a piece of paper in his hand and you get an answer because you do, it goes into the system and you get an answer and it gets posted up. So if you can get to him, it kind of works. But I think that my hunch is that that happens. I'm quite sure that happens.

We have plenty of documentary evidence that we have some of the answers. And so we know that it happens. But I think quite a lot of it, there's something more to it that meets the eye. The people who managed from some little village out in Bulgaria, who managed to get their position to the emperor. They've often gotten in somehow. They've got, and what I'm thinking about is a really long complaint by a group of people from a completely tiny little town called Scaptopara.

And they're wanting to complain that Roman officials passing through have been trashing the place, right? They're very long complaints, you know, they're perfectly innocent little people trying to live their own life, and these Romans turn up and, you know, demand that they can just take over the baths or whatever, and you think, gosh, this is really long, complicated, short reply underneath. Then you look again and you see the person who actually gave this petition to the emperor was a man whose home was in Sceptrepara, but was serving in the imperial guard. So there was a guy who, you know, it was a real petition, but there was a guy who could be intermediary.

My hunch is that not all, but when you're thinking about the big metropolitan ones, not all but most people know somebody who knows somebody in the palace and they're getting in or there is something so important to them about this that they'll really try to get a chance. But it's kind of difficult. And even if you're quite posh, I mean, there's a big troubles in Alexandria during the reign of Caligula between the Jewish population and the others. And rival delegations come to try to put their case to Caligula. And these guys guys are these are rich guys these are not sort of ordinary peasants with problems with their cows and tracking the emperor down is quite difficult

and so eventually he says I'll come to my kind of suburban property and you can we can listen to you there but actually he's wandering around the property trying to kind of redesign bits of it and order some new paintings and they meanwhile are traipsing behind him saying excuse me I think it's time for me to put my case now and they come away according to the Jewish source that we have deeply humiliated well I think I could ask so many different questions and I was wrestling in my mind what I was going to ask next but I know we've got limited time so I feel I need to to ask one of the big questions to end it all. They're always the difficult ones. Well, you know, exactly. So preparing for this one, in regards to the world of the Roman emperor, how can we look at the world

of the Roman emperor as a category when viewing our world today? I mean, what does it tell us about us? I don't think there are direct lessons. And I think that it always used to be the case, particularly under Donald Trump, that every American and British journalist wanted to say, which Roman emperor is Donald Trump most like? And it doesn't fit. But I think it helps you think about power. It's not the same as ours.

But I think that one of the things that the Romans worry about is truth telling and whether power is an act, whether it's fake, whether you're the closer you get to the centre of power, the more you're living in a kind of nightmare dystopian universe. And I think to some extent extent I think that helps us think about our own structures of power a bit you know who's telling the truth big question well Mary this has been absolutely fantastic last but not least your new book is called Emperor of Rome and it's out on September the 28th in the UK from Profile Books and about a month later in the US from Liveright. Fantastic. Well, it just goes me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the

podcast today. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Professor Dame Mary Beard talking all things Roman emperors. I hope you enjoyed the episode. as Mary mentioned she has written a new book called Emperor of Rome which is going to be released in September but you can pre-order the book now just go to Waterstones or go to Amazon you can find it there and I highly recommend it because it is a brilliant read. Now last things from me you know what I'm going to say but if you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you do want to things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have been enjoying The Ancients recently and you do want to help us out, well, you know what you can do.

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