The historian Michael Arnheim reviews Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, which has just been published as a paperback.
“What was it really like to rule and be ruled in the Ancient Roman world?” That is how Professor Mary Beard describes her book. In fact, it is a not particularly subtle attack on the Roman Empire and the emperors of the first three hundred years. The ‘bad, mad, sad’ emperors receive top billing – above all, Elagabalus.
Elagabalus was a 14-year-old boy whose supposedly wild reign of debauchery and excesses lasted less than four years. So why his prominence in Beard’s book? Elagabalus’s ‘whoopee cushion‘ alone earns three mentions in the book.
It all seems to be part of an intention on Mary Beard’s part to have fun at the expense of what she regards as an alien system inferior to modern western ‘democracy’.
The book contains some amusing anecdotes illustrating backstairs activities in the imperial court, including the role of slaves and freedmen (ex-slaves). But more could have been made of the growth of an imperial civil service begun under Claudius.
There is much on imperial assassinations, including that of the emperor Pertinax. But an opportunity was missed to mention the significant fact that he was the son of a freed slave, which did not prevent him from attaining a highly distinguished senatorial career before his brief reign as emperor.
Beard relates the joke that on his deathbed the Emperor Vespasian remarked: “Gracious, I think I am becoming a god.” Mary Beard is much taken with this quip and does it to death (no pun intended) in the book. Vespasian was of course making light of the ‘imperial cult’, but neither he nor most other emperors persecuted Christians for refusing to sacrifice to a divine deceased emperor.
“Christians to the lions” is a well-worn cliché to which Mary Beard gives credence, but it is a slogan more likely to be howled by a crowd of extras on a Hollywood set than in the Roman Colosseum in Roman times.
Professor Candida Moss, while at Notre Dame University, revealed that “official persecution of Christians by order of the Roman Emperor lasted for at most 12 years of the first 300 of the Church’s history.” (The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.)
Not only does Beard make no reference to this important research, but there is equally no indication in her book of the ferocious persecution of pagans, Jews and ‘heretics’ that was to come under the Christian emperors – and that would last for over a millennium.
To her credit, though, Beard cites the well-known anecdote about the petitioner who approaches the Emperor Hadrian on his travels in the East, only to be rebuffed. Nothing daunted, the woman retorts (in Greek), “Then don’t be emperor (literally, king).” Hadrian then relents and lets the woman have her say.
Beard rightly recognizes this as an indication that “emperors were expected to be accessible to their subjects”. But she fails to recognize just how much more accessible a Roman emperor was than the head of state or government of a vaunted modern democracy.
Justice in the Roman Empire did not depend on intercepting the emperor on his travels. Rome had a highly developed system of law, which still today forms the basis of the legal systems of the majority of jurisdictions around the world.
More than a third of the Roman Digest of Laws was compiled during the reign of Caracalla by Ulpian, who went on to serve as praetorian prefect and chief adviser to Alexander Severus. Yet neither Ulpian nor the Digest – nor Roman law itself — rates a mention in Beard’s book.
Beard remarks fleetingly on the “increasing geographic – and sometimes ethnic — diversity among the emperors.” Caracalla is also correctly credited with extending Roman citizenship to all free (male) inhabitants of the Empire.
But Beard fails to recognize the significance of these facts. It is this social mobility coupled with the emperor’s bond with the lower orders that accounts for Rome’s success and stability over such a long period. (See my Why Rome Fell: Decline & Fall, or Drift & Change?)
Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard was published in paperback on 4 July, 2024.
Dr Michael Arnheim is a former fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, barrister at law, and author of 24 books to date.
Why Rome Fell: Decline and Fall, or Drift and Change? by Michael Arnheim was published on 28 February, 2022.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arnheim
You may also be interested in:
How (not) to become a Roman Emperor, Sex in Ancient Rome and Gladiator sweat and leech hair dye; how to survive in Ancient Rome by LJ Trafford
Vanity project or lasting legacy – was Hadrian’s Wall worth all the effort? by Douglas Jackson
On the trail of an emperor, a rebel, and a lion (also about Hadrian) by Lindsay Powell, who has also reviewed the Legion: life in the Roman army exhibition at the British Museum.
Domitian, an unlikely emperor and Agricola’s victories in Britain by Simon Turney
Why the Roman Empire grew so big and The dark legacy of Rome by Harry Sidebottom
Images:
- Detail from the cover of Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard
- Marble bust of Emperor Elagabalus, cAD221, Capitoline Museums, Rome: Carole Raddato for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Bust of Emperor Hadrian, AD117–138, British Museum: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
