“Emperor of Rome” is a colourful tour of 30 emperors spanning over 250 years
documentaries, has become a British national treasure partly for her defiant donnishness, including grey locks and an ancient bicycle, but mostly for her unabashed delight in unearthing the “real” Rome from the pieces left behind: tombstones, scraps of papyrus and the odd arresting sentence buried deep in administrative reports.
Professor Beard’s first source is a familiar and obvious one: Roman writers, and especially Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, who worked in the secretariats of both Hadrian and Trajan. She cautions rightly that the chronicler of one emperor was likely to trash the reputation of the one who had gone before, and the titillating or horrifying tales should be taken with a large pinch of salt. But they are much too good to overlook.
Equally, no part of Roman life was too trifling to escape an imperial decree. If emperors appeared at a morningor at the races, dozens of parchment requests would be stuffed into their hands. Small wonder that took his paperwork to gladiator shows, though this was thought bad form. They had secretaries, of course, but most of them worked fairly hard themselves. And, being Roman emperors, they could not resist weaponising their pens. Hadrian stabbed a slave with his.
Dazzle came from sheer display: visitors to Nero’s Golden House found so many sumptuous rooms stuffed with treasure that they were disoriented even before dinner. Dread came from imperial caprice in matters of life and death: Caligula’s dinner-table quip, for example, that he could cut the consuls’ necks any time he chose. Emperors were seldom physically handsome , but they carried the allure of being “Caesar”, the exhaustion of solo triumph-parades and the potential glory of being gods.
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