Any sensible person might think twice before accepting an invitation to dinner from Elagabalus, who briefly ruled over Rome in the third century AD. The emperor loved planting whoopee cushions under his guests, not for the farting noise so much as the fact that it meant they gradually sank lower and lower over the course of the evening.
Other fun gambits included releasing so many rose petals from the ceiling that diners were literally smothered to death. Elagabalus would also let drunk guests sleep off their hangovers in a room into which he slyly released tamed wild animals. When the fuddle-heads woke up it was to find a lion peering at them, whereupon they immediately expired from terror.
Diverting though these stories are, can they ever tell us anything substantive about palace life in imperial Rome? For a long time Mary Beard would have said “no”. The Cambridge classicist was sceptical about the fallibility of such partisan and hyperbolic accounts written by historians with several axes to grind. (Even the po-faced ones such as Pliny and Cassius Dio weren’t above putting the boot in.)
Now, though, Beard softens her approach, or perhaps it would be truer to say that she sharpens it to a steely point. While she still maintains that we’ll never know what Elagabalus was “like”, she nonetheless suggests the wild anecdotes that circulated about him – and the 30 other emperors who are the subjects of this enthralling book – provide us with an entry point into “the thought world of the Romans”.
In the case of Elagabalus the stories about his awfulness give us clues as to what ancient historians and readers (an elite group, admittedly) thought a good emperor should be. More specifically, they illustrate the crucial role that dining played in Roman government. The fact that guests didn’t feel able to walk away from their appointment with certain humiliation and possible death tells you everything about the brutal power dynamics underpinning the whole horrible performance.
Meanwhile, the topsy-turvy symbolism of tame wild animals and raining rose petals nodded to the emperor’s ability to turn nature inside out and upside down, as if he were a god.
The fact that Elagabalus was only 14 when he came to the throne in 218 probably explains the whoopee cushions. But his highly precarious tenure, which lasted just four years until his inevitable assassination, also takes us into another of Beard’s key concerns, which is how imperial Rome managed the whole business of succession.
The quick answer is not very well. Since primogeniture was not customary, it meant that each time an emperor died it was virtual civil war until a successor emerged. In the case of Elagabalus, he was simply a useful pawn for the army who wanted to get rid of the incumbent who was showing worrying signs of cutting pay and pensions. When the boy-emperor was no longer useful to the military men, he was tipped into the Tiber.
Once a new ruler was installed it became crucial to disguise any discontinuities. This explains why, says Beard in a brilliant chapter, all Roman emperors started to look alike and, to our weary museum-visiting eyes, still do. While each living, breathing ruler had his own physical quirks – Augustus had spots, Caligula had spindly legs and Galba grappled with a hernia – once they were transformed into marble they were smoothed over into a universal ideal of manliness, heroic if somewhat bland.
This generic “emperor” was then transported to stand in market squares all over the empire. For the inhabitants of Britannia or Dacia it hardly mattered that their previous ruler was dead and another had taken his place, since there was no discernible visual difference. In some cases, statues were simply repurposed, a new head added to the old body. “Indistinguishability,” suggests Beard, “could be a useful weapon.”
Still, the nearer you were to Rome, the more important it became to understand that there was a real presence behind each stone facsimile. Caracalla is supposed to have had people put to death for urinating in places where imperial statues stood, as if they were peeing against the leg of the emperor himself.
Beard admits that this story may not be literally true, but nor is it likely to be a capricious fantasy. She reads it rather as a telling account of the uncertainty of the distinction between the real emperor and his marble alter ego in the city where he might actually appear in the flesh at any moment. Either that, or it was a neat way of foreshadowing Caracalla’s own death in 217 when he was assassinated while on a bathroom break.
By the end of this thrilling book we are no nearer to looking the emperor in the eye. But we are much closer to understanding what he was for. Leaning into all the wild stories rather than disregarding them as so much distasteful waste, Beard does a wonderful job of taking us into the maelstrom of fantasy, desire and projection that swirled around the rulers of ancient Rome.
• Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard is published by Profile (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
