In the preface to his magisterial work, The Emperor in the Roman World, Fergus Millar (in)famously asserted that ‘the emperor was what the emperor did.’ For him, it was sufficient for the historical study of social and political institutions to analyse the ‘specific patterns of actions’ which can be observed within those institutions. Accordingly, what he found with this approach was that the role played by the emperor in the Roman Empire was essentially a passive and reactive one: Roman emperors had been largely preoccupied with responding to the various correspondence, demands, and requests raised by their contemporaries. First published in 1977, Millar’s study represents, as his former student Mary Beard recognises, the earliest ‘systematic account’ of the Roman emperor and in fact ‘one of the most influential books of ancient history of the twentieth century.’
According to Beard, who is herself one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of ancient Rome, the methodological debates which Millar’s book sparked ‘made a more lasting mark on me and my generation of historians than any of his conclusions’ (not least because Millar’s argument about the reactive nature of imperial rule could be applied to many other early monarchies). For critics such as Keith Hopkins, Millar’s ‘empiricist definition of the emperor’ failed to consider not only what ‘the Roman emperors themselves must have thought important’ but also ‘what people thought about the emperor.’ Indeed, Beard insists that it is ‘misleading’ to dismiss, as Millar often did, ancient ‘stories of imperial decadence and depravity,’ since it is these stories which reveal ‘something about what the Roman emperor was,’ even if they are untrue. In her view, ‘the emperor was also how he was thought to be, how he was written or dreamt about, how he was deplored or praised.’
Beard’s latest work, Emperor of Rome, is hence written with the intention of providing a revised account of the Roman emperor which considers also the ways in which he was perceived and expected to behave. Drawing from a wide range of ancient sources including works of literature, medical reports, sculptures and other pieces of artwork, as well as inscriptions and coinage, Beard offers a fascinating exploration of assumptions about how the emperors of Rome from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus acceded to the throne, ruled over an empire, dined and lived with those closest to them, travelled across continents, were represented in art and literature, and even became gods. For instance, in telling the story of how the father of Vitellius was thought to have attempted to flatter Claudius by carrying around, and occasionally kissing, the shoe of the latter’s wife, Beard demonstrates that ancient writers were effectively ‘convicting themselves of fawning subservience at the same time as showing up the emperor as a tyrant.’ In Beard’s reading, stories such as these reveal as much about Roman elites, women, and slaves, and the way in which the imperial system operated, as they do the emperor himself.
In Emperor of Rome, Beard’s concern is not to narrate the rise and fall of individual emperors but to explain ‘what it meant to be a Roman emperor.’ She thus follows Millar in attempting to define the emperor of Rome as such. Yet, as Olivier Hekster recently highlights, ‘The perception and description of an emperor could differ radically in different sources, in different contexts or among different groups.’ He therefore argues that ‘there was no such thing as the Roman emperor.’ To her credit, Beard is attentive to the ways in which the same set of actions by different emperors could be interpreted as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on the context: as a basic rule, ‘emperors who were followed onto the throne by their own chosen candidate ended up with a broadly favourable reputation,’ while those who were succeeded by ‘anyone who owed their place on the throne to open conflict, coup or conspiracy’ were likely to be ‘made into monsters.’ Nevertheless, it remains the case that Beard’s preoccupation is with determining a general ‘job description’ of the emperor per se.
Central to Beard’s account is how ancient writers presented the incongruence between the fact of autocracy and the fiction that the emperor remained ‘one of us’ in formal terms, a feature of the Roman Empire which stemmed from the seemingly paradoxical way in which Augustus established one-man rule by resolutely rejecting it and proclaiming instead the restoration of the Republican constitution. Despite appearances to the contrary, Cassius Dio was convinced that ‘the whole power of people and senate passed to Augustus and from this time there existed what was really a monarchy.’ Similarly, Tacitus observed wryly in the early second century that ‘[f]rom the very beginning Rome has been ruled by kings’, thus implying that they continued to rule imperial Rome—a damning indictment given that the overthrowing of kingly power was fundamental to the founding narratives of the Roman Republic. Beard suggests provocatively at the end of her book that this awareness of ‘the emperor as a fake or distorter of truth and one-man rule itself as pretence and performance’ not only allows us to better appreciate the political culture of imperial Rome, but also ‘the politics of the modern world.’ To be sure, Beard insists that there are few direct lessons which ancient Rome can offer us; yet she maintains that ‘exploring their world does help us to see our own differently.’ Beard hence insinuates—but does not elaborate the point—that the ancient Roman view of imperial rule as an ‘unsettling dystopia built on deception and fakery’ could equally be adapted to criticise aspects of modern politics.
Still, although Roman imperial rule was to a large extent founded on the manipulation of truth, its scope was not limitless since the language of republicanism and political expectations about the role of the emperor served as effective constraints. As Hekster observes, ‘Contemporary leaders, much like ancient Roman ones, have to live up to expectations and formulate changes in language and images that can be understood by a variety of audiences.’ While Augustus may have established a de facto monarchy in which politics became court intrigue, he was unable to declare one-man rule overtly and had to claim that he remained within the Republican constitutional framework. Indeed, Augustus explicitly affirmed the authority of the Senate and stated that he would not ‘accept any office inconsistent with the custom of our ancestors.’ Augustus consequently failed to define the terms of imperial succession, and this represented, in Beard’s view, ‘the single, most glaring weak spot of the Augustan system’ as ‘the transition of power was almost always debated, fraught and sometimes killed for’ over the next two centuries. Ultimately, the breakdown of ‘succession planning’ contributed to the civil wars that led to a system of power sharing in the third century—a development which, according to Beard, marked a new phase in the history of the Roman Empire.
Despite these limitations, however, Augustus and his heirs did successfully transform Roman politics. As Beard wrote in an earlier book, ‘With the advent of the rule of Augustus, the locus of power shifted decisively from public to private spaces.’ Here, she explains that the Augustan regime was established not so much by any single decision or action as through ‘the gradual readjustment of political expectations among both the elite and the people, and by the gradual redefinition of the very idea of government and politics.’ Contra Millar, then, the emperor was not so much what the emperor did as what he was thought to be, and he—along with those around him—very much played an active part in shaping his role. And with this conclusion, Beard has herself redefined what it meant to be an emperor of Rome.