Emperor of Rome, page 2
The magnifying lens of these stories helps us to see clearly the anxieties that surrounded imperial rule at Rome. It was more than the capacity to kill. The power of the emperor stopped at nothing. It warped the senses, and it thrived in malevolent chaos.
A history of emperors
I shall be returning to Elagabalus from time to time in the pages that follow, not least to explain how a teenager from Syria came to occupy the imperial throne (one Roman answer, predictably enough, focused on the machinations of his mother and grandmother). And I shall also be returning to the fantasies (dystopian and other) that surrounded the ancient Roman court, scrutinising more tall stories that Romans told about their emperors. How Roman rulers appeared in risqué jokes and in satirical skits, as well as in such far-fetched anecdotes as clustered around Elagabalus, will come under my spotlight. We shall even find emperors appearing in various guises in their subjects’ dreams (not always a good sign: ‘to dream of being an emperor foretells death to anyone who is sick’, as one dream-interpreter warned in the second century CE).
But these will only be a part of the book. Alongside the ‘emperors of the imagination’, I shall be exploring down-to-earth questions about the everyday life of these Roman rulers, about the sharp edge of politics, the demands of military security, and the routine, humdrum business of governing a vast empire, which often gets overshadowed in the glare of all those vivid anecdotes of cruelty and luxury. I shall be thinking about the paper-pushing and the admin, the balancing of the books, the hiring and firing. How far was the emperor himself involved in all this? Who were his staff and support network, from wives and heirs, secretaries and accountants, to cooks and clowns? And what if he was only fourteen years old?
We shall find another powerful, but very different, stereotype of imperial behaviour: the Roman emperor not so much as a dangerous libertine, but as a hard-working bureaucrat. Both will star in Emperor of Rome.
A working life
Elagabalus was the twenty-sixth Roman emperor, more or less (his exact place in the numerical order depends on which unsuccessful usurpers you decide to count). Emperors came and went, and many have been forgotten. Some have left a distinctive mark on Western culture. Caligula (on the throne 37–41 CE) has become unforgettable for proposing to give one top political office to his favourite horse; and Hadrian (ruling 117–38) for building his ‘Wall’ across northern England. But not many people now have heard of Vitellius (a notorious overeater who ruled for a few months in 69), or the disciplinarian Pertinax (with a similarly brief reign in 193), or even Elagabalus. Not all were long remembered.
These men (all men: no ‘empress’ ever occupied the throne) ruled a vast territory stretching, at its furthest extent, from Scotland to the Sahara, Portugal to Iraq, with an estimated population, outside Italy itself, in the order of 50 million. Emperors made laws, waged wars, imposed taxes, adjudicated disputes, sponsored buildings and entertainments and flooded the Roman world with their portraits, much as the faces of modern dictators are plastered onto billboards by the thousand. They personally owned and exploited large tracts of the empire, from commercial farms to papyrus marshes and silver mines, and some of them travelled widely to explore and admire it, not only in search of military glory and profits of war. Tourists now gather outside the town of Luxor on the river Nile to stare at a pair of colossal ancient Egyptian statues (dating back to 1350 BCE). They are standing in exactly the same spot as Hadrian and his entourage stood in 130 CE, also on a sightseeing trip. The emperor’s party left their own appreciative reactions (in specially composed poetry) carved into the legs of one of the statues: ‘I was here’ elite Roman style (fig. 64).
Exactly how an emperor’s control worked in practice is a puzzle. Apart from army units stationed in some ‘hot spots’, there was only a skeleton staff of senior administrators, spread very thinly across the empire as a whole (counting no more than senior staff, it was roughly one for every 330,000 or so inhabitants). So, for the most part, in comparison with some modern empires, the control must have been fairly light touch. And the vast distances involved, as well as the time – sometimes several months – that it would have taken for basic information or instructions to get from the centre to some of the more remote parts of the Roman world (and vice versa), would also have made day-to-day micro-management of the imperial territories impossible. That said, the closer we get to the Roman emperor himself, the busier we often find him to be.
Ancient writers refer to rulers apparently swamped in what we would call ‘paperwork’ (in their terms, wax tablets and papyrus jottings). Julius Caesar, dealing with his correspondence while watching the races, was said to have annoyed the rest of the audience, who took it as an insult to popular entertainments. Vespasian, one of those lucky emperors to die in his bed, in 79 CE, rose before dawn to read his letters and official reports. Elagabalus’s successor, Alexander Severus, was apparently so wedded to the job that he kept a set of military records in his private apartments in order to ‘go over the budgets and the troop deployments when he was on his own’. But the paperwork was only part of it. Emperors were expected to be accessible to their subjects, in person as well as on paper. That idea is summed up in a story of Hadrian, who was out on a journey when he was intercepted by a woman trying to ask for a favour. When he replied that he didn’t have time, she sharply retorted, ‘Stop being emperor, then’ – and he let her speak.
We have to treat these stories with care. Some emperors must obviously have worked harder than others. All systems of one-man rule have their diligent George VIs (the father of Elizabeth II, and a dutiful, self-effacing family man) as well as their flamboyant Edward VIIs (with his string of mistresses and neglected obligations). But we should never assume that the tales of unglamorous administration are more trustworthy than the stories of glamorous excess. They too have a strongly ideological side in constructing an image of a perfect emperor. The story about Hadrian and the woman who stopped him is, in fact, told almost identically about some earlier rulers from the Greek world, suggesting that it reflected an ancient cliché of the ‘good monarch’. Nevertheless, some of the most extraordinary documents to survive from ancient Rome back up that general picture. These are the records of decisions made by emperors in answer to requests, petitions and cries for help from their ordinary subjects, or from ordinary town councils, across the empire – sometimes inscribed on stone (presumably by a successful petitioner to celebrate a happy outcome), sometimes copied onto papyrus, or gathered together in austere ancient compendia of legal rulings. What is striking is how local or how trivial (though not, of course, to the parties concerned) so many of the problems that the emperor was expected to solve actually were.
‘The case of the falling chamber pot’ is just one example. In 6 BCE the emperor Augustus was asked to adjudicate a messy dispute in the town of Knidos, on the coast of modern Turkey. During a feud between two local families, one of the protagonists had ended up dead. Taking part in a nasty affray outside the house of his rivals, he had been hit on the head by a chamber pot, dropped from the upper floor by a slave (who may, or may not, have intended only to pour out the contents). The local authorities were minded to prosecute the slave’s owners for unlawful homicide, but, according to the surviving text of his judgement, Augustus was of the opposite opinion: that, accident or not, the killing was legitimate self-defence. Almost exactly three hundred years later, the emperor of the day, travelling in the Danube region, was confronted with hundreds of personal dilemmas and disputes to resolve: from the case of a woman who wanted compensation for a cow she had leased out, but which had then been killed in an ‘enemy invasion’, to a tricky dispute involving financial liability after the collision of two river boats; and the complaint of a man who was suing for non-payment of the fee he was charging for prostituting his wife (happily, he got short shrift). Whether the emperor himself struggled with these legal niceties we do not know. Sometimes, he probably did; sometimes, he would merely have signed off on the judgements devised by his staff (I can’t imagine the young Elagabalus doing more). But the point is that, whoever did the work, it was the emperor who was seen to be the arbiter.
These cases are a useful antidote to the nightmare vision of imperial power. They are a reminder that, while some may have seen emperors as the orchestrators of a dystopian and terrifying world, others looked to them as a solution to their problems – right down to their lost cow. They are also a reassurance that a book which focuses on the figure of the emperor will not just be about men in the uppermost echelons of the elite. Far from it. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is through the eyes of the emperor and his dealings with his subjects that we see with the clearest focus and in the richest detail the ordinary people of Rome and its empire, who so often remain invisible. Emperor of Rome is about rulers and ruled.
Imperial texts and traces
The records of emperors’ decisions, and the striking view they offer of ordinary life in the Roman empire (and its difficulties), are just a few of the ancient texts and documents that I intend to set free from the lecture room and the research seminar. Of course, some of the best-known classics of ancient literature will guide our exploration too: above all, Tacitus, whose account of the rulers of the first century CE in his Annals and Histories, written soon after in the second century, has never been bettered as a cynical dissection of the corruption of autocracy; and, from roughly the same time, Suetonius, the palace insider (he was employed in the imperial archives and secretariat, under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian), whose colourful biographies of the first ‘Twelve Caesars’, from Julius Caesar to the fly-skewering emperor Domitian, have been a handbook to the period for historians over the last five hundred years. But I shall also be bringing into the limelight more curious and surprising works that are much less well known, and celebrating the richness of the literary material that has come down to us. The perilous process of copying and recopying, careful curation and, eventually, printing that has brought the words of ancient Roman writers from stylus and scroll onto the modern page or screen, has preserved a much wider range of material than we often imagine.
Some of this was intended to raise a laugh. We have a mini-collection of imperial jokes – Augustus, for example, teased his daughter Julia for picking out her grey hairs – and satires of various types. These include a skit on his predecessors by the fourth-century emperor Julian (in which Elagabalus has a walk-on part as ‘the little lad from Emesa’); and a hilarious lampoon, written by Nero’s tutor Seneca, ridiculing the whole idea that the emperor Claudius should be made a god after his death in 54 CE (we follow the slightly befuddled old emperor struggling up Mount Olympus to the home of the ‘real’ gods, only to be roundly sent packing when he gets there).
Some of it takes us behind the scenes, in unexpected ways. A handbook written by a Greek teacher of rhetoric gives advice on how best to address an emperor, should you need to. There are observations on life at court (including a chilling reference to soldiers working as undercover agents) from the philosopher Epictetus, who had once been the slave of Nero’s secretary, while imperial doctors from the palace have left us descriptions not just of their celebrity patients’ sore throats but of their tummy troubles and drug regimens too – two thousand years later we can still examine the case notes. And we can still read an edited collection of second-century CE reports sent back to the emperor in Rome from Pliny, an official posted hundreds of miles away on the Black Sea coast, explaining his problems with everything from some troublesome Christians to dilapidated bath buildings and a worrying overspend on a jerry-built theatre.
Other surviving writing is almost stranger than we could ever predict. The Life of Elagabalus, for example, with its wonderfully revealing fantasies and exaggerations about the lifestyle of the ‘little lad’, is one of a set of more than fifty biographies of emperors, including usurpers, heirs and other claimants, which run from Hadrian in 117 CE to a bloodthirsty nonentity who died in 285. Though many of these individual ‘Lives’ are very short (in our terms, these are ‘profiles’ rather than ‘biographies’), together they stretch to several hundred modern pages and go under the title Imperial History (or Historia Augusta). This bills itself as a collaborative work penned at the very end of the third century by six different, rather grandly named authors: Trebellius Pollio, Flavius Vopiscus of Syracuse, and so on. Careful analysis of its language and style has shown that it was nothing of the sort: it was written by just one person (unknown), about a hundred years later than it claims. As such, it is one of the great mysteries of ancient literature. Why would anyone pull such a trick? Was it a forgery? A rather lengthy joke or satire? Or a radical experiment in pseudo-historical narrative? Whatever the answer, it pointedly straddles the boundary between history and fiction.
2. Part of the bronze text found in Lyon in the sixteenth century, recording Claudius’s speech to the senate, urging enhanced political rights for the Gauls. The unusually clear script makes the words quite easy to make out. The first line of this extract starts ‘TEMPUS EST’, ‘now’s the time’. See pp. 239–40.
Thousands of original documents add to the richness and the variety of stories of the Roman emperors. Some were inscribed on stone and bronze for public display, others scrawled on papyrus, preserved in the sand of Egypt and dug out over the last century by modern archaeologists in huge quantities (many still unread). We have, for example, the text on bronze of a speech given in 48 CE by the emperor Claudius, arguing in favour of granting a bigger political role to men from Gaul, and treating his audience to a potted history of Rome at the same time. And we can still read on papyrus a transcript of the words of Germanicus, an imperial prince and father of the emperor Caligula, addressing the crowds in Alexandria, and saying among other things that he was missing his ‘granny’ (better known as Livia, the wife of Augustus, and with a more fearsome reputation than the word ‘granny’ would suggest). We are also offered glimpses of what went on behind the scenes: from the surviving epitaphs of a hundred or so of Livia’s staff (including a masseuse, some dressers, a painter, even a window cleaner), to the disgruntled correspondence of an official in Egypt, who was having dreadful difficulties getting all the provisions together for an impending imperial visit.
We can enter the material world of the emperors too. It is still possible to walk around their palaces, not just on the Palatine Hill in central Rome (the origin of the word ‘palace’), but also their suburban pleasure gardens and out-of-town residences. One of those, the villa of the emperor Hadrian, at Tivoli, about 20 miles from Rome – with its parkland, accommodation blocks, multiple dining rooms and libraries – covered almost twice the area of ancient Pompeii. ‘Villa’ is a glaring understatement. It is more like a private town. And we can also look their portraits in the eye. Those that survive amount to just a fraction of what there once was (one reasonable guess is that across the Roman world there were originally between 25,000 and 50,000 statues of the emperor Augustus alone). But thousands of them still line our museum shelves. They come in all sorts, shapes and sizes. Some inhabitants of the Roman empire even ate cookies decorated with figures of emperors (or that, at least, is what some surviving pastry moulds suggest). Around 200 CE, one Roman lady went one better: she had the head of the emperor Septimius Severus, one of Elagabalus’s immediate predecessors, cast into her gold earrings.
3. & 4. Two surprising places to find an image of the emperor. On the left, a modern replica of an ancient pastry mould (possibly for making the cookies distributed at religious festivals), showing an emperor standing in a chariot on his triumphal parade (pp. 46–7), being crowned by the goddess Victory. See also fig. 12. On the right, the emperor on an earring (the hook no doubt originally angled so that the head did not hang upside down).
There is, of course, a range of questions about the world of the emperors that we cannot answer for lack of evidence (what that world looked like to a woman, for example, or how in detail their finances worked). But I hope that, overall, readers will go away from this book not frustrated by how little we know about these rulers of two thousand years ago, but amazed by how much.
Which emperors?
Many emperors followed Elagabalus. In fact, if we concentrate on the eastern part of the empire, with its capital eventually established in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in the fourth century CE, there was an unbroken succession of Roman rulers down to 1453, when the city fell to the Ottomans. We think of those later rulers as Byzantine. They thought of themselves as Roman. But, in this book, I shall not be looking much later than Elagabalus’s cousin, adopted son and successor: Alexander Severus, the one who reputedly worked overtime on his military records and troop deployments. He was another boy emperor, coming to the throne at the age of thirteen or fourteen and ruling between 222 and 235. Starting the book with the architects of one-man rule at Rome (Julius Caesar, assassinated in 44 BCE, and his great-nephew Augustus who became the first emperor), I shall be dealing with a period of just under three hundred years, from the mid first century BCE to the mid third century CE, and just under thirty emperors.
All such chronological limits are to some extent arbitrary, and I shall occasionally cross the lines I have set (indeed I already have: those cases of the lost cow and prostituted wife date to the later third century CE). But there are powerful arguments for stopping where I do. Things changed dramatically after Alexander Severus. Over the rest of the century, emperors came and went rapidly, in a series of military coups and civil wars. Many of them now hailed from far outside the upper echelons of the Roman aristocracy, and the geopolitics were so changed that a good number never even visited the city of Rome during their short reigns. They were short. Plus or minus a few unsuccessful usurpers, as many men were emperor in the fifty years after the death of Alexander Severus as in the almost three hundred years before. The change of style and character is captured in a story told of Alexander’s successor, Maximinus Thrax (‘the Thracian’). It was said that he was the first emperor who could not read and write. This may well be a tendentious slur rather than an accurate observation. True or not, it points to a new world.
