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A First Look at the Prologue to Mary Beard's Emperor of Rome

Posted on 1st August 2023 by Mark Skinner

Mixing her unrivalled knowledge of Ancient Rome with her effortlessly engaging writing style, Emperor of Rome might just be Professor Mary Beard's finest book yet. Viewing the multifarious cast of Roman Emperors in the round, the revered classical historian paints a rounded portrait of all aspects of the role - and you can read an extract from the book's brilliant prologue below. 

Who’s your favourite Roman emperor? Mine is not exactly a household name (and he stretches the definition of ‘favourite’ a bit – I’m not sure that I would like to have actually met him). He is Elagabalus, a Syrian teenager who ruled Rome from 218 CE until his assassination in 222 – and a memorably extravagant, inventive and occasionally sadistic party host. His menus, so ancient writers tell, were ingenious. On some occasions the food would be colour-coded, all green or blue. On others, it would feature delicacies that were exotic – or revolting – even by upmarket Roman standards (forget the roast dormice, the most favoured of Elagabalus’s guests tucked into camels’ heels or flamingos’ brains, with foie gras served to his pet dogs). Sometimes he indulged his nasty, or juvenile, sense of humour by inviting ‘themed’ fellow diners: groups of eight bald men, eight men with one eye or with hernias, or eight very fat men, who raised a cruel laugh when they couldn’t all fit on the same dining couch. 

His other party tricks included whoopee cushions (the first ever recorded in Western culture), which gradually deflated under the guests so that they ended up on the floor; fake food, of wax or glass, served up to the least important banqueters, who would be forced to spend the evening, tummies rumbling, watching their betters eating the real thing; and tame lions, leopards and bears released among the revellers as they slept off the excesses of the night before, and such a surprise for some that, when they awoke, they died not from a mauling but from fright. Equally deadly, and a scene that captured the imagination of the nineteenth-century painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Elagabalus once reputedly showered his fellow partygoers with flower petals in such over-generous quantities that the guests were smothered and suffocated. 

The emperor’s faults did not stop with these dubious tactics as a host. He was apparently so committed to extravagance that he never wore the same pair of shoes twice (an uncanny echo here of Imelda Marcos, once ‘first lady’ of the Philippines, who was alleged to have had more than three thousand pairs stashed away in her cupboards). And with perverse and expensive bravura, he piled up his summer gardens with snow and ice from the mountains, and would only eat fish when he was many miles from the sea. Meanwhile he was said to have snubbed religious proprieties by marrying a Vestal Virgin, one of the most august Roman priestesses, bound to virginity on pain of death. In a further religious transgression, he reputedly initiated a subversive, though short-lived, revolution by replacing Jupiter as Rome’s principal god with ‘Elagabal’ – who was the god of his home town of Emesa, modern Homs in Syria, and the source of the name by which the emperor is now almost universally known (snappier than the ‘Marcus Aurelius Antoninus’ as one version of his official title ran). Nor did he leave untouched the traditional norms of sex and gender. Several stories focus on his cross-dressing, his make-up and even his attempt to surgically transition. One contemporary writer, Cassius Dio, the author of a massive eighty-volume history of Rome from its origins to the third century CE, claimed that the emperor ‘asked doctors to give him female private parts by means of an incision’. In our own day he has been heralded as a transgender pioneer, mounting a radical challenge to rigid binary stereotypes. Most Romans, I suspect, would have thought that he was turning their world upside down. 

Ancient accounts of his reign devote page after page to an extravagant listing of the emperor’s puzzling eccentricities, his disconcerting subversions and heinous cruelties – including, at the top of some lists, the human sacrifice of children. These, and other tales like them, are one focus of Emperor of Rome. Where do they come from? How well known were they to the ordinary inhabitants of the Roman empire? Who muttered, and why, about Elagabalus’s parties? And true or not, what can those tales tell us about Roman emperors, or about Romans more generally?

I am sure that most of them are not literally true (happily). But it is often the fantasies and untruths of history that tell us most about how people in the past saw their world. These ‘Elagabalan tales’ shine a particular light onto how Romans saw the power of their emperors and what they feared about them. The tale of the rose petals is a horrible reminder that the emperor could kill you even when he was at his most generous, and the idea that he would only eat seaside food inland and have snow in his garden only in summer suggests that the all-powerful autocrat would try to control the natural order of things (to turn summer, for example, into winter).

Amazingly, these are the kind of stories about rulers that we still tell about our own monarchs. It is not just that Elagabalus’s passion for shoes appears to match that of Imelda Marcos. His special treatment of his pet dogs has echoes of those rumours of the late queen’s corgis eating out of silver bowls. But my favourite overlap concerns another ancient Roman grandee, whose kitchens were discovered to be cooking up EIGHT wild boars. Was a very large party expected? No. It was simply that the cooks didn’t know exactly when the dinner would start, so they put on the eight boars to roast at intervals – to ensure that one would be ready at the right moment. It sounds a mixture of silly and fantastic, but it is very similar to the story that used to be told about Prince Charles (and repeatedly denied by Buckingham Palace). It was said that his staff cooked seven boiled eggs each morning, putting them on at different times to make sure that one would be done just as he liked it.

There is a bit more to these tall tales than meet the eye. They are part of the way that those of us on the outside of the palace walls imagine the life of a monarch inside. Kings and Queens eat more exotic food than us normal folk, sourced with enormous difficulty from distant places, and prepared with wasteful extravagance to indulge their whim: almost as true for us as for the Romans.

Comments

Keith Fletcher

Fascinating as always, but is the 'signed edition' really cheaper than the standard edition? Doesn't say much for the attraction of the author's signature!

Keith Fletcher
20th August 2023
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