Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World

A man who commands thirty legions always knows best’, was his apt reply.

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.

It is also captured in the story of Hadrian who - when asked to adjudicate whether a baby born eleven months after the death of its 'father' could be considered legitimate - went off to do his own research in the medical textbooks. He came up with the answer 'yes', which was bizarrely wrong even by ancient scientific standards.

Autocracy, it suggests, upturns the ‘natural’ order of things and replaces reality with sham, undermining your trust in what you think you see.

As often in history, xenophobia and cultural prejudice at Rome went hand in hand with ethnic diversity and an openness to the outside world. But one thing’s for sure: these rulers in the flesh were far more diverse, and increasingly so, than you would imagine from all those line-ups of lookalike, white marble imperial busts that we now see on museum shelves.

But the unsettling logic was that he turned fact and fiction upside down, creating a topsy-turvy world in which no one could know who (or what) was play-acting. A corrupt autocracy was all smoke and distorting mirrors. Or, as his Roman biographer summed up, Elagabalus had ‘a fake life’. 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.

We read of Augustus’s benefactions to the people on a massive scale (or bribery, as some might have seen it), in the form of entertainments as well as wine, grain and cash handouts to hundreds of thousands of citizens,

For Pliny, ‘all citizens’ meant ‘all citizens like me’. But his point is clear: biological heredity is an unsatisfactory way of selecting a man to rule the Roman world.

From as far back as we can trace, adoption at Rome had a different function from most adoptions today. It was a means of ensuring the continuity of property and family name when there were no surviving sons by birth (this was a world in which half the children born did not live to reach the age of ten). The majority of those adopted were not babies or young children but adult men, often with their birth parents still living.

The basic rule is that the flimsier the claims to power, the more insistent and extravagant the signs and portents had to be. Vespasian, who became emperor in 69 CE in the civil war after the death of Nero, an outsider with no direct links to earlier rulers, was even credited with performing miracles in almost biblical style. In Egypt, on his way to Rome to take up the throne, he is said to have restored sight to a blind man with his spit, and to have made a lame man walk with his touch. It was one way of compensating for a lack of imperial connections.

Augustus himself is reported to have boasted that he found Rome a ‘city of brick’ and left (some of) it ‘a city of marble’. But these architectural developments were often part of a more significant project, to reconfigure the cityscape around the idea of the emperor, to make his presence seem inevitable, even ‘natural’.

My suspicion is that little more than a lick of paint can have been required, but it was certainly part of a post-civil war, ‘Make Rome Great Again’ campaign.

Beyond the superficially dreary roster of facts and figures in What I Did, three particular requirements for an emperor stand out, as they do in Pliny’s Speech of Praise: he should conquer, he should be a benefactor, and he should sponsor new buildings or restore those that have fallen into disrepair.

As Tacitus darkly observed in the second century CE, in the first words of his Annals, a history of the early emperors, ‘From the very beginning Rome has been ruled by kings’.

A Roman ‘emperor’ was much less likely to refer to himself as imperator than as princeps, the origin of our word ‘prince’, though in Latin it meant not much more than ‘leader’.

Emperor of Rome is about rulers and ruled.

The power of the emperor stopped at nothing. It warped the senses, and it thrived in malevolent chaos.

Serious history, however, is about more than the bare facts.

I am more interested in how those stories of madness arose, in how the business of empire was really conducted, and in Roman fears that the rule of the emperors was not so much bloodstained (they expected that), but was a strange and unsettling dystopia built on deception and fakery.

In Pliny’s vote of thanks, he explicitly praised the way in which Trajan – Nerva’s choice of son and the first in this series of ‘adoptive’ emperors, as they are now sometimes called – had come to the throne. He presented it as a matter of pride that ‘the man who is going to rule over all citizens should be chosen out of all of them’. Choice is a better guarantee of a good emperor than mere accident of birth or, as he put it, than whatever a wife produces.

Trenchantly, if not entirely accurately, one Roman historian in the fourth century CE claimed that after the death of Domitian in 96, ‘all emperors were foreigners’.

As Pliny comes close to acknowledging, there is no better way of influencing a man’s behaviour than praising him for the qualities that you want him to have, whether he has them or not.

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).