Profile (2023) h/b 512pp £30 (ISBN 9781800818781)
This excellent book shows Dame Mary at the top of her form. Her readers (and viewers) know what to expect – seriously interesting information presented with clarity and wit – and they will get it here in spades. As always, the treatment is thematic and deliberately unpredictable: each chapter’s new angle is justified by the unexpected insights it offers, and the absence of sequential narrative is amply compensated by the very effective paratexts listing the main characters, explaining their confusing multiple names and setting them chronologically alongside the literary figures from whose works the insights are drawn. I’ve often wondered whether the young Mary Beard was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s line ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant’. Not that she would ever claim to be giving her readers the truth. She knows (none better) that the truth of the ancient world is gone for ever; her question is always how close we can get to seeing what it must have been like. But telling it slant is how she does it.
The technique works better in this book than it did in SPQR (2015), where the time-line was nearly a thousand years long (753 BC-AD 212) and coherence of treatment that much harder to achieve. This time it’s much less (49 BC-AD 235), and ‘the system of one-man rule’ meant that ‘not much changed on a grand scale for over 250 years’. Hence the book’s title, ‘Emperor of Rome’ as a sort of Platonic concept with its own inner coherence, regardless of the wildly different characteristics of the individuals who successively embodied it. Hence too the author’s brilliant use of the documentation generated by the ‘system’, the papyri and inscriptions that she ‘set[s] free from the lecture room and the research seminar’ to illuminate the realities of life in the Roman empire. With 45 pages of wonderfully detailed and helpful ‘further reading and places to visit’, Dame Mary has shown yet again her mastery of that elusive art, the writing of serious history for non-specialist readers.
Her fellow-professionals, I imagine, will view the book with envy and admiration, and of course they’ll have their own reservations and disagreements. Let me come clean with three of my own, two of which are pretty trivial. First, ‘What I Did’ as the title of one of the key texts, Augustus’ list of his own achievements, translates the meaning of res gestae but not its tonal register. He wasn’t as chummy as that! Second, the repeated use of ‘on the throne’ and ‘come to the throne’ (even at one point ‘occupied the Roman throne’, as if there was one) seems to me a misleading assimilation of the emperor’s authority to that of a king, very surprising in an author who is so attentive to the use of language. Contrast, for instance, her careful comment in the chapter on the emperor’s paperwork: ‘The shorthands I have used—“office”, “desk” —conceal the fact that we have no idea where and how the emperor got down to his correspondence.’
Those are petty quibbles, but relevant to a third and more substantial issue, the inclusion of Julius Caesar and Augustus within the period when ‘not much changed on a grand scale’. It’s interesting that the author regards Augustus as ‘one of Roman history’s biggest puzzles’ (in SPQR she had a seven-page section on ‘the riddle of Augustus’), and that she dismisses as ‘weasel words’ the self-defining first sentence of his res gestae: ‘At the age of nineteen I raised an army on my own initiative and at my own expense, and I used it to free the republic from the domination of an oligarchy.’ That was an echo of Julius Caesar’s similar policy statement in 49 BC, the very year this book’s ‘not much change’ period begins. I think that by ignoring the ideological content of late-republican politics the author misses something fundamental about Caesar and Augustus: they were the champions of the Roman people against ‘the powerful few’.
The age of emperors surely began in AD 14, when Augustus’ unique personal authority had to be defined and transmitted to a successor. That was where Tacitus began, and perhaps Dame Mary should have done so too. But if she had, we’d have missed ‘the case of the falling chamber pot’, and that would have been a pity. The book is full of such good things, and I thoroughly recommend it.
Peter Wiseman