The truth of Ancient Rome hides under its myth of decadence

We’ve inherited the history of Ancient Rome through movies, ruins, and shallow stories. The truth is far messier, says classicist Mary Beard. The hidden side of Roman life that screens rarely capture is chaotic; crowded streets teeming with Romans whose everyday lives were shaped by social hierarchies and  familial obligations. 

Mary Beard unpacks what archaeology, literature, and even shoes tell us about the Romans’ daily lives. From the role of slaves in dressing elites to the rowdy crowds at chariot races, she shows how we’ve underestimated their complexity.

MARY BEARD: Sometimes, you find that just rethinking things about Roman culture that you’ve known about for ages but never really interrogated makes a huge difference. Everyone’s image of that is in some way based on modern movies. In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. I think the main function of the triumph is for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman, but it has another side to it, which is, it puts fear into the enemy. There are Romans whose image and whose achievements for good or bad are so written up that we think of them as people without whom the world would not now be like it is. I think there are all kinds of emphases that translators come in and help us see some of the difficulties in a new way. You cannot translate “The Odyssey” without interpreting “The Odyssey,” and without, in some way, having a modern conversation with it. I’m Mary Beard, and I’ve worked on the Ancient Romans for 50 years, and I’ve written quite a lot of books about them. I’ve just started a new podcast called “Instant Classics,” which is about Greece and Rome.

– Chapter 1: You’re picturing Ancient Rome all wrong

– It’s hard to picture ancient Rome now, because we see it inevitably through film and through television where it’s very grand, it’s very white, its architecture is white, its art is white, and its people are white. One thing we know about Ancient Rome is that it was a multicultural, cosmopolitan society. You only have to read a bit of Roman literature to discover that the city is a home to people from everywhere in the western world and from Africa too. We tend to picture ancient Romans as being a bit like rather formal Brits from the 1950s; shaking hands and being a bit pompous. I’m sure some of them were, but I remember being very surprised when I discovered that the normal form of greeting between two Roman men was to kiss each other, not to clasp a hand. And in fact, on one occasion in the 1st century CE, the emperor had to ban the practice because there was a very nasty bout of infectious herpes going around, and he wanted to stop it. There’s a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone’s image of that is in some way based on modern movies on “Gladiator I,” “Gladiator II.” In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying “Kill him,” or “Save him,” or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it’s worn when you are doing something official, you don’t wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, “losing control” going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match. If you want to see the Romans going wild, you know, in very, very large numbers, then what you should be doing is thinking about the chariot racing, not the gladiatorial combat. Now in Rome, the biggest, most famous, most elaborate stadium for chariot racing was the so-called Circus Maximus, the biggest circus. Now that held probably, we have to estimate this, we can’t be certain, it held something like quarter of a million people, 250,000. Now, compare that to the Colosseum, Colosseum’s relatively small at 50,000 maximum capacity. Now if you go to 250,000, there isn’t a stadium in the modern world that is that big. The biggest football stadium is something like pushing 150,000, so it’s really vast. And there, we do get a sense that it was much less well-behaved, that, for a start, the crowd was mixed, women and men seemed to have sat together, there was loads of betting going on, we have no evidence at all really of any betting in the Colosseum, but you sure bet on the races in the Circus Maximus. And it was a place where you really did let your hair down, unlike the much more sedate, actually, atmosphere of the Colosseum. Now, the trouble is, the Colosseum survives and has very much fixed our view of, you know, the iconic building of Rome. Sadly, the Circus Maximus, which was much more lavish originally that was looted for building material, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m afraid if you go to visit it now, it isn’t exactly impressive, you have to do a lot of work with the imagination. But that is where the real Roman excitement of sport happened. Sometimes you find that just rethinking things about Roman culture that you’ve known about for ages but never really interrogated makes a huge difference to how you think about the Romans. The toga, the official dress of the Roman male citizen, is one of those things. One thing that people have really begun to see the significance of is that the toga is vast, it’s a vast piece of cloth which is wrapped around you to make it an outer garment. Now, it is absolutely impossible to put a toga on yourself, you need someone to help you. Well, fine, but I think that leads on to other conclusions. It’s a reminder at the very least of the role of service and servitude in Roman society. This was a culture in which you needed slaves to help you get dressed. That’s what being a slave society really means. You can see when you look, for example, at women’s hairdressing, that something very similar about the dependence on slavery comes across, and the statues that we see of Roman elite women now with their elaborate top knots, they’re almost impossible to imagine recreating them with just braids and some pins. And what’s clear I think if you try to do it is that those are hairstyles which are literally stitched onto you. Now that’s another case of where you see the absolute dependence of the Roman elite on slavery and slaves, just doing your hair. If we want the best insight we can possibly get into Roman life, then we go to Pompeii and Herculaneum towns destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Now, I think we have to be a bit careful about imagining, as people often claim that Pompeii and Herculaneum are towns that were somehow frozen in time. They weren’t frozen in time, the population of both cities had quite a lot of notice that something nasty was going to happen, they packed up a bit, and, people, they just escaped. All the same, there are some vignettes you get from those towns that are just irrecoverable elsewhere. My favorite I think is relatively recently discovered workshop, well, it’s a house really which is undergoing redecoration. And the foolish or the over-optimistic painters were obviously still working there on the morning of the eruption. You can see their little pots, you can see how they’ve organized their buckets, you can see how the scaffolding was working. You can imagine that at a certain point they ran for it, and I’m afraid, I don’t think if they’d left it that long, they were going to get out alive. You can find all kinds of insights into real Roman life outside Italy. And one of the best places recently for producing kind of new look at how the ancient world worked is the site of Vindolanda, It’s an army base near Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain. And there, not only have you got the archeology, but you’ve also got, because of the conditions of the site which is preserved, basically letters and documents that were originally written on wax on wood. And there, you see everything from the quartermaster, the guy who’s in charge of the stores, trying to work out and keep records of what they’ve got in the store rooms. You see a list of sick notes really of all the soldiers who are off, because they’ve got very nasty eye infections, and so, weren’t allowed out on active service. But you also see the social life that went on on the base. One of the most famous and touching documents that has been discovered there is a birthday party invitation where the wife of the commandant is writing to another woman who’s based on another army base, not far away, saying, “Do come to my birthday.” It may have on it the earliest signature of a woman from the Roman world that we have bit debated, but I think that’s probably true. Sometimes, apparently insignificant tiny discoveries really change your view about life in the Roman world. And because of the wet conditions, ’cause it has always been wet in northern Britain, because of the wet conditions, a lot of shoes have been discovered, Roman leather shoes on army bases. And one thing that is completely eyeopening is that many of those shoes are children’s shoes, there’s quite a few women’s shoes alongside the shoes of the soldiers. Now, that has kickstarted a whole new way of thinking about a Roman army base, thinking about soldiers having families, thinking about it being a mixed community, not just, you know, a bunch of squaddies and no women inside. There’s absolutely no way that ancient Roman women were privileged, none of them had the vote for a start. In many ways, Roman women had a much better deal than almost any other women in the ancient world. If you go to fifth century BCE Athens, you find women are pretty enclosed, really no rights, they don’t mix socially if they’re members of the elite with the men of their family. Now, go to Rome, and women probably have more rights than any time up to the 19th century in Europe. They can inherit property, they can go to court, and they have a great privilege of having dinner with their men folk. We’ve inherited a very minimalist white version of both Greece and Rome. The statues that survive have mostly survived without any decoration, without any paint on them. And so, our picture is very much something white, shiny marble. And, in fact, we’ve known this for more than a hundred years. It’s totally now recognized that Greek and Roman statues were regularly painted. Now I think there is a bit of a debate about how garishly they were painted. We can get traces of some of the pigments that we can now pick up from the statues. But quite how lurid the colors were, I think it’s still a bit up for grabs. I think whatever though, just to start to put that sort of color back into the picture, to imagine that when you were a rich Roman commissioning a statue of your wife or your father or whatever, you wouldn’t have been commissioning this very kind of austere, pure white marble object, you’d be commissioning something that was full of color that you were injecting life into, that you were seeing the red of their lips and the pupils in their eyes. And there is something much more immediate about the Romans and the Greeks when you see them in that context. You know, they’re there with images of people that are radiant. Now, I think, for some of us, that radiance is a bit over the top. I’m sure there are some people who probably would prefer the shiny white marble to the very lurid reds and blues that are sometimes suggested, but you’ve gotta get your head around color of some sort. Greek and Roman culture were deeply intertwined, and you can’t actually pull them apart. I think one aspect of that is that elite Romans looked at Greece and saw literary traditions, artistic traditions, that they wanted to reuse and borrow and adapt. There is no doubt that there’s a strong influence from Greece to Rome. You have to be a bit careful though of just seeing ancient Roman culture as if it was a kind of secondary culture, you know, that just took hand-me-downs from the Greek world. Rome is always adapting Greek culture, it’s using it in a different way. And, of course, Roman culture goes the other way. And when Greece is a province of the Roman empire, it is inheriting and adapting cultural forms from the Roman world. So it’s very much a two-way traffic. One of the things that the Greeks borrowed from Rome, we might not like this very much, was indeed gladiatorial displays and wild beast hunts. Now, there’s been a bit of a tendency to say the Greeks were far too pure for that kind of thing, that, you know, their minds were always on philosophy and theater and, you know, high culture. But what they did was they, and we can see the traces of this, they adapted their theaters to host wild beast hunts and gladiatorial displays. You can see where they put bars around the theatrical space to keep the audience safe from the animals that were being horribly slaughtered there. For me, Greece and Rome are always part of the same world, they’re always talking to each other. And one sign of that is of course that there were Greek settlements in Italy from very early on, from the 7th century BCE. And, in fact, some of the earliest Greek writing comes from Italy. So it’s a much more kind of intricately mixed up symbiosis mixture than just, you know, one culture borrowing from another. Rome has never gone away from the western world, and every generation, I think, and we’re going back centuries here, every generation has rediscovered it in a slightly different way, and they always, they always think they’re being very novel when they rediscover it. But I think that’s partly because, or very largely because, Rome has given us an image of what it is to be powerful, what it is to be larger than life, what it is to be funny, what it is to be an empire. And so, it’s provided many of the building blocks that we need in order to think about ourselves. A good example of that is all those dynast and princes and kings in the 16th and 17th century who had themselves sculpted or represented in paint in the guise of roman emperors. Now, to us, that looks actually a bit silly, we think, didn’t they think that they looked a bit silly wearing as modern people, those little Roman military skirts? But I think what we ought to be seeing is that what Rome was doing was providing a way of thinking about what it was to be powerful. And it does that from different perspectives on the political spectrum. We have a tendency to think that Rome provides a model for the right-wing, and when we think of fascist dictator Mussolini in Italy, who famously saw himself very much in the model of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the Emperor Augustus. And we shouldn’t forget that Karl Marx said that the French revolution, you know, took place in Roman dress. There are revolutionary aspects to Rome, there are dictatorial aspects to Rome, and they’re there terribly present for us, waiting for us to come and reinterpret them, and make them our own. And Rome has survived because every generation has made it their own.

– Chapter 2: The Roman triumph: the greatest celebration of all time?

– A Roman triumph or a triumphal procession was awarded to a super successful Roman general. It’s not clear whether there were any exact rules for this. Some ancient writers said, “Oh, you had to have killed 5,000 of the enemy to be awarded a triumph.” We don’t know if that’s entirely true. What it was was a vast procession through the streets of Rome leading up to the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest on the Capitoline Hill, with the general, the successful general, standing in a very elaborate ceremonial chariot, dressed up in an extraordinary purple outfit with a purple cloak and silver stars, which apparently mimicked the statue of Jupiter, the God himself, on the Capitoline Hill. He processed through the city, up to the temple to make a sacrifice to Jupiter in honor really of his victory. But it wasn’t just that. In front of the general’s chariot, you find the captives that he’d taken in the course of the war, and the spoils of victory. Those captives, we have some descriptions of them, and they seem to be most impressive when they’re of the highest rank and the most exotically dressed. And what a general really wants is to have a king walking before his chariot, a king in his regal outfit, but shackled and captured by the power of Rome. Some of them we can see from the sculptures that we have depicting this procession, some of them seem to have been actually carried in this procession, not walking. Some certainly did walk, but some were kind of put onto platforms, and bound hand and foot, were carried along for people to look at. And we know that the audience of the triumph were drawn to see what the people were like the Romans had now conquered. Now it could sometimes rebound, they sometimes felt very sorry for them actually. But the general is really parading his power over the dynasts and the ordinary soldiers that he had conquered. There was the booty, some of the best bits of loot that he’d taken in the course of his campaign. We often think of the spoils of victory in a rather limited way actually. We think of sculptures, precious works of art, coin coming into Rome and being on display to the people in the procession, and there were certainly plenty of those. But it goes much further than that. And what they were wanting to do was to, as it were, kind of exemplify what the conquered territory was. Triumphs differed hugely in scale and spectacle. Gradually, it seems they got more and more lavish as Roman conquest reached into places that were really rich, and in Roman terms, really exotic. And I think that what you have to see the triumph as, in part, is literally something that brings the Roman audience, who might have never been outside a radius of 30 miles of the city of Rome or certainly not Italy, it brings them face to face with the kind of stuff and creatures that they had never ever seen. I mean, they’ve not got picture books of what it looks like when you go abroad. There are some representations of the foreign places you find in painting, a mosaic, that’s true, but this is literally bringing the Roman people face to face with the world, and I think it’s likely uneasily from our point of view, the world that they believe they’ve conquered. So you could find animals on display, you could find plants, trees on display. In one triumph of 71 CE by the Emperor Vespasian and his son, Titus, they had balsam trees brought from Judea. So what you are seeing is not just the elaborate brica-brac, and sometimes it is very elaborate, this extraordinary stories of, you know, seeing the king’s throne encrusted with jewels carried along in precession, but it’s also the flora and fauna of the captured place. And that combines sometimes in a strange way with boasts on the part of the general, so that you get placards carried along with that, which list the places that the general conquered, the individual town, placards which depict the victories happening, the destroyed thoughts of the enemy. And behind the general came at least some of his victorious troops. They interestingly were said to have sang lewd songs slightly at the expense of the general, so he didn’t get above himself. And just in case he should get above himself, there he is dressed as Jupiter Optimus Maximus, you don’t want him to think that he really is a god. It said that there was a slave in the chariot with him saying, “Remember you’re a man, remember you’re a man, remember you’re a man” the whole time. But they go through the city like that. It’s now I think very hard to get a sense of the size and the excitement of it. We know they put up special stands, so people could get a good view. I suppose I tend to think of this as a Brit as something like what you might see in the coronation of a British monarch. But I think the coronation of a British monarch is a rather feeble comparison. You know, I think people were coming to see what the general had done, they were coming into the center of Rome to see what Roman conquest meant. So it’s hugely impressive, but it’s also very, very ideologically rooted. I think the main function of the triumph is for the local Roman audience, it’s for Romans to think about what it is to be Roman, but it has another side to it, which is, it puts fear into the enemy. It’s a ceremony news, of which I suspect, travels that enacts the humiliation of the defeated. And we know that there are several defeated monarchs and generals who kill themselves rather than be displayed in the triumph. The most famous of those I think is Queen Cleopatra who probably heard all about triumphs from her lovers Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. When Octavian, the future emperor, Augustus wants to take her back to parade as, you know, the key bit of booty in his triumphal procession, she is said to have said, “I will not be triumphed over,” and that accounts for her suicide. And I think that you can see that the eyes of the Roman people and, you know, the she humiliation of becoming a piece of spoil is something that you might think, and we know some did, “I am not going to do that, I am simply not.” You know, Cleopatra is a refusenik, Mithridates is another refusenik. It’s a ceremony of celebration, it’s also a ceremony of humiliation. The triumph must have been at its biggest, it must have been quite extraordinary. It’s hard to imagine that there was any Roman celebration that was more, you know, confident in some ways of its own spectacle. And the root of a triumphal procession, we don’t exactly know where it goes, but it must have been able to accommodate thousands, hundreds of thousands. It is really, really big news. Whether it’s the biggest kind of procession of its type in human history, it’s impossible to say, but it certainly provided the model in Europe for celebrations of royal or military power ever after. Successful generals in a Renaissance imitating the Roman triumph to celebrate their own kinds of victory. So I think in many ways it provides a model for what it is like to celebrate conquest. It’s a template for how the city puts its might on display. We have a very good idea of the number of triumphs that took place, because Romans recorded it as accurately as possible to be fair, not entirely accurately, because they attribute one triumph to Romulus, the founder of Rome, and he probably didn’t exist. So there’s some fuzzy edges, but, basically, they’ve got a list of triumphs and they add up to more than 200. What is interesting, there is a real big break in the kind of triumphal procession that you get in the reign of the first emperor Augustus in 19 BCE, because after 19, no one who is not either the emperor himself or a prince of the royal house, no ordinary general receives a triumph. So up to 19 BC through the Republic of Rome, it is for ordinary or rather the extraordinary generals to claim their triumph. Under Augustus, it becomes a royal ritual. The logic is that all wars after that point are fought as if they were the emperor’s wars. So when a triumph comes, it is the emperor who gets the honor of the triumph. So they become very, very monarchical, which they hadn’t been up to that point. It’s very hard to say which is their grandest or the most extravagant, over the top lavish, or bad taste of these ceremonies, but the ceremony that people pick out and that Romans picked out was the two-day ceremony that Pompey the Great held in 61 BCE for his conquest of the pirates, and also his conquest of the Eastern King Mithridates. Now this starts out by being extraordinary, because triumphs by and large are one day affairs. You know, you load everything up, you process through the city of Rome, you get to the Temple of Jupiter, Optimus Maximus, you do a sacrifice, and you have a great dinner, and that’s it. Now what Pompey does, he says that he cannot squash all his stuff into a procession that lasts just one day, so it’s a two-day procession. It is full of really, really extravagant spoils, particularly from the court of Mithridates. Actually one of these we have one bronze pot, which almost certainly goes back to Pompey’s triumph and still survives. It’s in the Capitoline Museums at Rome, and it’s clearly came from Mithridates’ kingdom, and it’s very, very likely was one of the things that was actually carried in the procession. It is not by any means the grandest, it’s a rather elegant plain bronze picture about 70-centimeters high. But we read of most fantastic ornamented sundials, we read kind of barrels load of coin, we read even of an image of Pompey himself presumably made out of the spoils, where his head carried in this procession as part of the fruits of conquest. His head is made entirely out of pearl, it must have been a colossal head made of pearl. It has to be said that this is one of the cases where in a sense Pompey got it a bit wrong. I mean people are always looking at the triumph, both wanting to admire it, be impressed, but also wanting to say, “I think this is a bit over the top, I think this is a bit vulgar actually, I think this is too luxurious.” So there’s always that counterpoint. And the head of Pompey in pearl was one of the objects that really captured that critical tendency, ’cause people said two things about it, they said this is a very effeminizing thing to do. Pearls in the Roman imagination were very, very much associated with women. So the critics of Pompey said “How could he have his head represented in that female material?” But there were also, I’m afraid, rather nastier insinuations made later because Pompey, in the end, he’s the major adversary of Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar and Pompey fight it out in the 40s BC basically for who’s going to run the Roman world. Caesar wins, Pompey flees to Egypt. When he gets to Egypt, he thinks he’s getting out of the boat to safety, actually, but the Egyptians on the shore cut his head off, and people looked back at this head, that is just the head of Pompey carried in the procession, and they wagged their fingers and said, “Hmm. That was an omen of what was going to happen to him in the end.” So there is always this saying that huge luxury, and Romans are very moralizing about this, huge luxury is always a bit dangerous. The moment of the general’s, the acme of his career, you know, the triumph is kind of thing you’d say what little Roman boys dream of as being the biggest success they could ever achieve: a triumphal procession. And yet, it’s very often slightly tainted with potential disaster, potential overreach. Any number of stories of, for example, triumphing generals who very soon after found that their sons died. Now kind of the success of the triumph comes back to haunt you. There was always a question of how far you really were as the triumphing general, the star of the show, and it was obviously extremely desirable if you are a general to have a great king in front of you, marching along in front of you to show that you had conquered a king, there was uncomfortably often a sense that the crowd were actually more interested in the king and the princesses and the sad captains, than they were in the general himself. So, it’s not all win if you have a triumph. There is a wonderful quote from the Roman philosopher, Seneca, who was also the tutor of the Emperor Nero, I’m thinking in part about triumphs, and it says, “Petty sacrilege gets punished. Sacrilege on a grand scale, that is what gets you a triumph.” It’s a quote which Seneca is partly drawing and adapting from a famous story about Alexander the Great who captures a pirate and asks a pirate, this is in the 4th century BC, he says to the pirate, “Why did you take other people’s property, what? Why did you steal things?” And the pirate replies, “If you steal things and you’ve only got one ship, you’re called a pirate. If you steal things and you’ve got a whole army and a navy, you are called a king,” right? Seneca, in a way, is adapting that, and having one eye on the triumph. And I think it’s quite I very much like, because it shows the Romans really reflecting on reward, morality, on who makes it big, who doesn’t, who gets blamed, and we do have, or much of the modern world I think has a tendency, to think of Romans as if they had, you know, no problem about any of this, they went off and they conquered things, and they came back with their booty and their loot, and they didn’t bat an eyelid, they thought it was holy to their good, they had no morals group. What Seneca’s saying is that, you know, if you rip things off, you go to temple and you take all the sacred objects from the temple, and you’re just a single guy, you’ll find yourself punished. If you do that on a grand scale, Rome honors you. And the question, of course, is that he’s raising about Roman imperialism and the Roman Empire is it actually different, you know? Is it just theft on a very big scale? Now it’s those kind of worries I think that the Romans are negotiating when they talk about triumph.

– Chapter 3: The Romans who shaped the world

There are a handful of Romans who we now perceive to have changed the world. I think it’s very hard to go back and to say whether that’s true or not, but there are Romans whose image and whose achievements for good or bad are so written up and so much part of the way history seems to have developed that we think of them as people without whom the world would not now be like it is. Now I think some of them are much murkier than we’d like to think, and we know much less about them than we imagine, but still, they occupy a place in how Western history thinks of itself having developed. I think what we ought to do is explore some of these really consequential Romans and ask a bit about why they have been so impactful on European history. And the one I would start with is the Emperor Augustus, the first Roman emperor. There is a bit of debate about whether Julius Caesar or Augustus should count as the first Roman emperor, but the first person to call himself Emperor was the adopted great nephew of Julius Caesar, born Octavian, who eventually changes his name when he takes sole power to become Augustus. His career is very long. After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, when Octavian is still very young, he intervenes, raising an army himself, to fight on the side of those who want to avenge the assassination of Caesar. There’s a long civil war that follows that. What turns out is that Octavian is the last man standing. He finally beats Mark Antony, another of Caesar’s great defenders. And in 31 BCE, as it were, left after more than a decade of civil war, left as the person who is defacto ruling the Roman world. What is then extraordinary is how he moves from being actually a particularly unpleasant young thug in those civil wars, really violent, vicious, competent in civil war, he transforms himself, and at the same time transforms the Roman world, he transforms himself into the elder statesman emperor. Gives up the name Octavian, he takes the name Augustus instead. Doesn’t mean anything really. If it means anything, I suppose, it’s revered one, and he establishes a system of one-man rule which lasts for centuries. He actually manages to craft a way that Rome could operate with one man at the helm, as against the republican tradition of power sharing and quasi sort of democracy. And I think that what is absolutely extraordinary is that, A, we don’t know how quite he did this. We have very few contemporary observing sources to tell us what happened during his reign. It lasts until 14 CEs, longest reigning Roman emperor. But during that period, whatever the opposition was, he manages to construct a kind of set of political relationships, which still includes the old elite, it still includes the Senate, but now focused around the emperor as an individual. And that doesn’t change. You know, for the rest of Roman history, that is how Rome is governed, and it provides a template for any number of monarchs and dictators ever after. It’s a mystery, and I think why it is so intriguing and enticing is we can’t quite see how he did it. We don’t know if at the end of the civil wars, he had a master plan, or as I suspect he’s improvising on the go to try to work out a system of power that people will, even if they don’t like, go along with, and it worked. I’m not a great admirer of Roman imperial power, but you do have to hand it to Augustus that he established a centuries lasting system of one-man rule. Extraordinary. I think as my number two, I’m going to have a fellow traveler of Augustus, and I’m going to have the Roman poet Virgil, for the simple reason that Virgil in writing his great epic of the foundation of Rome, Aeneas fleeing as a Trojan from the burning city of Troy to found the beginnings of the Roman race in Italy. He provided, for all time, a way of understanding what empire was and its paradoxes. It’s not a jingoistic poem, it’s a rather careful and thoughtful poem. It’s a poem I think than which no other poem has ever been so successful. It’s a fair bet, I couldn’t prove it, but it’s a fair bet that since Virgil died in 19 BCE, every day, somebody somewhere has been reading this poem, the “Aeneid,” and it captures both the ambition of the Roman Empire to be an empire without end, but it also captures the doubts, the problems, and the costs of what come with empire. In the final scene of the poem, you see the hero, Aeneas, kill somebody who has surrendered to him in a war crime that was a war crime even in Ancient Rome And the final scene says, “Look at the cost of empire.” It has been utterly influential ever after, and probably almost as influential, very close second, to Augustus himself. I think my third spot is going to go to Julius Caesar. I say that slightly reluctantly, because Julius Caesar was very much a flash in the pan. He has a fairly ordinary career when he starts out, he becomes clearly more and more concerned to become a single populist leader at Rome, to dispense with the trappings of democracy and to establish himself as a one-man ruler. He sort of does, that’s true, he does it by techniques that are still in the playbook of populist politicians, he speaks directly to the people, he bypasses the institutions of the state, you know, he uses the ancient equivalent of social media to communicate with the Roman people. And he does transcend the conventions and the norms of Roman sort of democracy. The problem is, and why he only comes in in third place is it’s a flash in the pan. He’s only there for five years, and most of the time, he’s off out of Rome somewhere else. He doesn’t just establish anything, he shakes everything up, but he doesn’t put structures in place. I think for number four, we’re going to go to Cincinnatus, who is, I have to confess, not entirely, but very largely a mythical character. But his myth is so strong that I think he counts for me as one of these really influential people. What we can tell about him is that he was a fairly, well, a very conservative politician in Rome in the 5th century BCE towards the beginning of the republic. He is very much an opponent of the rights of the Roman people, very much, you know, a conservative patrician, he has some pretty rocky encounters with reforming plebeian politicians. But what is key about Cincinnatus is that he’s counsel for a short time, after he’s been consul, the chief officer of the Roman state, he goes to his farm and he, as it were, says, you know, “I’ve done my bit, I’m now going to do the farm. I’m going to become an ordinary person again. A few years later when Rome is really suffering in a, you know, tense military standoff, Roman people come to him, the Roman authorities come to him, and they say, “Could you please come and save Rome? We need your expertise.” What he does is he goes back, he takes charge, he saves Rome against the enemy, but then he goes straight back to his farm. And I think what is so important about Cincinnatus is that, you know, his name is still reflected in Cincinnati after all, what is important is that he did not break through the conventions of the republic. He showed that you could serve the state without taking it over. And so he became a huge hero and a role model for those who wanted to lead without being an autocrat. So I think he nudges himself in there for me. For number five, I’m going to have the brothers Gracchi, Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus in the second half of the 2nd century BCE. Amazingly charismatic characters, which are sometimes put down, their charisma is sometimes put down to the influence of their mother Cornelia, who groomed them to be politicians. Why I’ve chosen them is, well, for two reasons. They represent the first time we see clearly a leading Roman politician explicitly and in a thought-out way taking the side of the non-elite versus the elite. Now, they come from an elite background, but both of them stand up in different ways for the rights of the poor and the dispossessed. Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC sees the terrible economic distress of the peasant class in Rome, and initiates a land redistribution program. Gaius Gracchus, his brother, a decade later, reinitiates that because it gets stalled. But Gaius Gracchus is the first person in Roman history that we can see has not just some good ideas, but he has some good ideas that fit together into a program. He has land distribution, he has the distribution of subsidized grain to the Roman people, he has anti-corruption laws, he has changes in taxation. He seems to me to be the first person who kind of has joined up politics in Rome. Now, I’m afraid both of them come to sad ends. Tiberius and Gaius are both basically subject to judicial murder by conservative senators, and they’re killed on the job in a way. But they become forever after this beacon of people who could reformulate how politics should be. And in Tiberius’ case, I think, in some ways, he’s not as radical as Gaius, but he explicitly says, “The prophets of the Roman Empire should go to the Roman people, not just to the elite.” That’s a crucial, crucial step forward. Number six is the Roman politician, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And I’ve chosen him because he is the absolute summing up of what it is to see oratory, persuasion, and speaking as the foundation of democracy. Cicero is not a military man, he has a bit of military experience, but he’s pretty lousy at it. He is a new man in Roman politics, he doesn’t have a whole set of elite ancestors, he’s not poor, but he’s not part of the established political class, and he speaks his way to the top. He sees that persuading your fellow citizens is about that is where power consists in him. He gets office very early in Rome, he unmasks what looks like a terrorist conspiracy against the Roman state from within the conspiracy of Catiline, he actually rather brutally puts it down, but his words have never ever been forgotten. Like so many Romans have a sad end, he is in the civil war between the heirs of Julius Caesar and the assassins of Julius Caesar in that civil war, he’s assassinated basically. But he made it clear and continues to make it clear that you can persuade people to act differently. You can still see Latin quotes from Cicero on placards in today’s political demonstrations. That’s how important he is. I’ve chosen as number seven, the Emperor Nero, not because I’m a particular fan of Nero, and in fact it’s now very hard to know how you cast judgment on Nero. The sources about Nero are so hostile, and yet we also know that he had popularity during his lifetime, and after his death, there were false Neros, people claiming to be Nero, bubbled up in the East saying, “Look, I didn’t die. Here I am, I’m Nero.” That suggests a degree of popularity. But I think that, in a way of reformulating what it was to be emperor, he showed that there were different ways of demonstrating your power. These have almost always got really rubbished by his opponents, and we are the inheritors of that rubbishing. Now we still talk, we still have cartoons, you know, of modern political leaders doing what Nero is supposed to have done, fiddling and singing while Rome burns, it’s still part of our own political rhetoric, but what is clear is that Nero put art and culture right at the heart of what it was to be a Roman emperor, and in some ways the example of Nero was always bubbling under the surface of Roman political power ever since. He has become the but of criticism, not just fiddling while Rome burned, but also his sense of apparent vanity. He was a great actor, and he would perform in theaters, and he would lock the theater doors, so that people couldn’t get out while he was still performing, so that, you know, some women were supposed to have had babies in the theater while they were waiting for the emperor to finish. But I think there is a sense there that saying power doesn’t just rest in the sword, doesn’t just rest in speechmaking, power is also represented in art, in culture, in theater, in the softer arts. I mean, Nero is about soft power, if you like, if we see him in a generous way. My last choice is the historian Cornelius Tacitus, active in the late 1st and early 2nd century CE. Now actually Tacitus, in real-life, have to say, was a bit of a collaborator with Roman imperial power. He flourished as he himself admits under a particularly obnoxious emperor demission, but that’s not why I’m choosing him. I’m choosing him because his account of the dynasty of the Julio-Claudian, the emperors that followed Augustus in the 1st century CE, his account of that dynasty is in my view the most searing account of one-man rule ever. He hones in on exposing how corruption works and on exposing the way that people collude with imperial power, the way the empire in the sense, not of the geographical empire, but the empire in the sense of one-man rule, pollutes the Roman state. When people read his Latin, they find him very hard to read, actually, the language is extremely difficult. People can often find that very frustrating and irritating, but that language has a point. What Tacitus is saying is that “I cannot describe how one-man rule works except in language that is itself corrupted,” right? One-man rule corrupts what you say. Now, in some ways, I think Tacitus’ modern heir is George Orwell who sees that the corruption of language and the corruption of speech goes along with corruption in power. You might notice, and I certainly noticed when I was compiling the list, that there were no women on it. Look, I’m a feminist, and I had been heart-searching, but I thought I could have found a woman, I could have found, for example, the emperor Augustus’s wife, Livia, and I could have put her in there, and in some ways, it would’ve made me feel better not to have an all-bloke lineup. I don’t think that would’ve been the right thing to do. I think that there were women of immense talent in Rome, of course, there were. There were women who had influence and who exercised power in all kinds of ways, of course, there were. I think the problem is that they are lost to us. We can reinvent them, but it is literally reinvention. I think that to some extent, you have to face up to the maleness of the official Roman world, I hope that I have faced up to it, and also to see there must have been different perspectives here, but they are almost entirely lost to us. Instead, what we get, when Roman writers think about powerful women, they do think of people like Augustus’s wife, Livia, but their power is always for the bad. Now, what is the role of Livia in that early dynasty? Well, it’s the role that she had in Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius,” she’s the poisoner, the schemer, she’s the person that you can blame for why things went wrong. I mean, women’s power is perceived in the ancient world as being corrosive, whether that’s Cleopatra who is seducing and somehow emasculating upstanding young Romans like Mark Antony, or the women of the imperial court who are scheming behind the scenes to bring about either their own erotic desires, “Who am I going to sleep with next?”, women are notoriously sexual beings for Roman historians, but also trying to influence who actually gets on the throne. Now, the trouble is, that might have been the case, we can’t know. But we do know that women are always very convenient people to blame for when men mess things up. The history of Western misogyny is very adept at finding women to blame for when things go wrong, and I think it more or less started in the Roman Empire. I think the question of how you judge these people is very tricky. People often write in to me and say, “I don’t like the way that you do sometimes make judgments about X as a mass murderer, when they’re 2000 years in the past. Surely, it’s often said, “You should be judging them on their own terms, not on your terms.” I’ve got two responses to that. One is, quite often, these people were hostilely judged in antiquity itself, but we rather brush that under the carpet. Julius Caesar, for example, it’s reckoned now that he may well have killed about a million Gauls in his campaign against Gaul, and there were people in Rome who said he was committing crimes against humanity. This is not a new invention that Caesar was a war criminal, there were people in Rome who said that. So I think we have to be very careful always to listen out for the discordant voices in antiquity itself. But I think perhaps more important is that the job of the historian, and this kind of explains I think why we sometimes find there’s a flip flop here between one sort of judgment of Alexander the Great and another, you know, favorable or not favorable, same with Caesar, whatever, is that the job of the historian I think is to have stereoscopic vision. I think it is important to understand these characters in their own context, and in their own terms, and how people, by the standards of their time, yes, I think you should do that. But I think that the modern historian can’t just leave their own moral values, you know, at the library door. I do at a certain point have to say I find the conquests of Alexander the Great, very, very uncomfortable, and I think what I particularly dislike in terms of our modern appropriation of them is the way we somehow seem to go along with approving of what they did. I might not want to disapprove of it, I might want to say, in part, that by the standards of their own time was okay, but I do have to say it’s not the standards of ours, and we have to realize that there are moral issues and questions about what happened in antiquity that we shouldn’t be afraid of bringing to the surface. I’m very happy to do that. I mean, I think it’s quite interesting, I’ve chosen a group of men for my most influential Rome, I think I had no choice but to do that. I can also say, but I think there is something about the misogyny of the Roman Empire that I deplore. And you have to be able to hold those two views at the same time, I think.

Chapter 4: Understanding The Odyssey

– I first touched base with “The Odyssey” when I was I suppose about seven or eight, but it wasn’t with “The Odyssey” as a whole, it was with the stories that we were told at school, and that my mum told me that were drawn from “The Odyssey,” now, how Odysseus challenged the one-eyed cannibal giant, the Cyclops, how he managed to get past the alluring Sirens, et cetera, et cetera. I learned the stories of tales from “The Odyssey.” I didn’t read “The Odyssey” in any detail until I was in my mid to late teens, both at high school and at university. And I think what was surprising to me was that “The Odyssey” isn’t just a story of tales of daring-do, which is what I thought it was, it’s a hugely complicated story about, you know, one man’s attempt to get home about questions of what it is to be a man, and questions looking not at Odysseus the hero himself, but looking at his son Telemachus of what it is to grow up. What really gripped me I think then about “The Odyssey” was its complexity. The fact that it starts right in the middle of things, we don’t see Odysseus for a bit, he’s supposed to be the hero, we zoom down on Ithaca and we find his family. Eventually, when we do hear these stories, they are told by Odysseus to somebody else, we don’t see them as it were firsthand. It is the most complicated postmodern epic you could ever imagine, and I never realized that until I read it cover to cover. How ancient listeners or readers, you know, understood and received “The Odyssey” is a really puzzling and intriguing question. We think we know, I mean almost nothing is really certain about “The Odyssey,” but we think we know that the poem in its now 24 books originated in a bardic culture. It started life as a series of partly interlocking, partly formulaic tales sung by bards, let’s say around a campfire or after dinner in the evening. It’s slightly different each time it was performed as people put different bits in, as the audience would say, “Oh, let’s have the Cyclops tonight,” you know? We’ve got this very fluid kind of oral reception and oral production first, you know, whatever date we think that is, you know, anytime from the 10th century BC onward. I think it is very, very hard for us to understand the sophistication of oral audiences. You know, I suspect we’d rather minimize the sophistication. I think that if we were more of an oral rather than a written culture, we would see the ways that oral points and oral emphases can hit home in a way that we probably would miss. The likelihood is that “The Odyssey” reached some kind of written form after generations of body composition, perhaps in the eighth century BCE first, whether or not it had anything to do with someone who was or was not called Homer, we haven’t a clue. But it didn’t just stop there, I think that it’s clear that “The Odyssey” is being tidied up and altered right up to the 5th century BC. I think at that point, we still have an oral aspect to “The Odyssey.” I suspect there are still people listening to “The Odyssey” in the 2nd century CE, but there are also very learned readers and commentators who are doing with “The Odyssey” much that we do, which is reading it really carefully at heart. It does look, and I think this is the conclusion of ancient readers and modern readers, it does look as if there is at some point, there is a kind of overarching author, or series of authors, who are pulling it into shape, and I think they’re reading it as sophisticatedly as we do. They’re looking for signs of what kind of culture, what sort of historical culture lies behind this. The kind of questions that we ask about “The Odyssey” do go back a very long way. So I think there are huge differences in terms of our ability to concentrate orally, which I’m sure that the first listeners had, but I think we also have much more in common with readers of “The Odyssey,” in, you know, 3rd century Alexandria, they were doing much what we are doing: reading it with great attention. I am really excited by the Christopher Nolan film. “The Odyssey” has not had much luck with filmmakers, I have to say. I’m hoping that finally someone will give us an Odyssey that we can really get into. And I hope that it will encourage a lot of people actually to discover or rediscover “The Odyssey,” if they haven’t done so already. It’s one of the reasons that on our new podcast, “Instant Classics,” we’ve got a book club where we will be reading “The Odyssey” over about a year to really talk it through book by book. I think that one has to reckon that people will find different Odysseys as they always have. It helps a huge amount if you see what the text is from which this movie is going to come. There’s so much in that to talk about that I think it will help really inform a kind of a criticism or an appreciation of the Nolan film, if people have already got into it. I’m very much looking forward to a great best seller list moment for “The Odyssey,” actually, in the next year or so. As for translations, I think it’s a bad idea to be too prescriptive. If somebody picks up from a secondhand bookshop or off the web a translation of “The Odyssey” that they get into, that’s fine. I think the really important thing is that you have an English text that most of them are pretty reliable. You have an English text which will take you along with it. In recent times, there’ve been two translations of “The Odyssey,” which I think if people were just saying “Which one should I read,” I would suggest they went to, one is Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” a few years ago, which is amazingly the first translation of “The Odyssey” by a woman into English. There’s also an even more recent one by Daniel Mendelsohn, which came out earlier this year, which is also I think excellent. They have some kind of translator issues, I think with each other, but they are very good up to the minute, very readable translations. That said, you know, translations are absolutely always interpretation. You cannot translate “The Odyssey” without interpreting “The Odyssey” and without, in some way, having a modern conversation with it. You know, why 19th century translations often do sound stilted is ’cause they were talking to 19th century people about “The Odyssey,” they’re not talking to us. I think there are all kinds of emphases that translators come in and help us see some of the difficulties in a new way. And what was very clear in the Wilson translation was that when she was talking about the slaves in the household of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, and his son, Telemachus, in Ithaca, she translated slaves as slaves. Now you go back to most of the standard translations from the 1950s or before, and they always use, or almost always use, that euphemism “serving girl,” right? They actually obscure the slavery in this culture. Wilson said, she wanted to look at this head on. And, you know, when she saw an enslaved person, she was going to call that person enslaved. And, of course, it does change your view of the kind of society that we see in “The Odyssey,” it’s perfectly legitimate. In some ways, you could say that both translations are technically legitimate, but what Wilson’s does is say, “Look a bit more carefully at what the status of these people are.” I think that every new translation is always adding something, opening up, yeah, okay, maybe it’s concealing things too, but it’s opening up different ways of seeing it, it’s also in the case of “The Odyssey.” it’s inevitably grappling with words that we don’t quite know how to translate. Very early in the first couple of lines of “The Odyssey,” Odysseus, he’s being talked about, the poet is calling to the Muse to tell the story of this man, the man we don’t yet know, but the man is a Odysseus. And the Greek adjective that goes with man is polytropos, and it literally means much turning, turny abouty, “Tell me about a much-turning man?” For centuries, in fact, back to Latin translations of “The Odyssey,” in the 3rd century BC, people have been wondering what the text meant? What does polytropos mean? Does it mean wily? Does it mean bashed around on his voyage? Is he kind of having a terrible, difficult circuitous route home? Is he a bit not trustworthy? Is he clever? And I think that quite often it’s possible and the notes on a good translation will help you when the translator explains, “Hey, look, I had trouble deciding what adjective to use here, and these were the choices I had, and these were the reasons that I made my mind up this way or that way.” So I think there’s something… I think translations are best when you kind of get messy with them, and you interrogate them a bit, and don’t take them as Gospel, but take them as interpretive experiments on the text.