I start the book with Elagabalus because the point about such stories isn\u2019t whether or not they\u2019re true. (My guess is that they\u2019re not, but were invented after Elagabalus\u2019s time to besmirch his memory.) My pitch is that, in a way, it doesn\u2019t matter if they are literally true, because they\u2019re true in another sense: they represent Roman fears about what the worst kind of emperor would be like. They\u2019re saying that you never know where you are with a bad emperor \u2013 that emperors are never what they seem, and that some of what lies at the heart of Roman imperial power is deceit, deception and fakery. In the orbit of the emperor, you can never believe your eyes.<\/p>\n
Even nature might be corrupted. Elagabalus\u2019s alleged tricks included only eating fish when he was inland, and having snow brought to his summer gardens. Again, these stories paint a picture of a mad, capricious emperor \u2013 but what they\u2019re actually saying is that the problem at the root of imperial power is its subversion of nature. You can learn a lot about what people thought about emperors from these tales, even if they are true only at the level of ideology.<\/p>\n
You write that Rome was an empire before it had an emperor. Could you elaborate on that point?<\/h3>\n
People sometimes think that the Roman empire<\/a> was acquired and governed by a Roman emperor. It was absolutely the reverse: though it\u2019s completely counter-intuitive, the Roman emperor inherited an empire.<\/p>\n The previous political system, generally known as the Republic, ended with Julius Caesar<\/a>\u2019s dictatorship. It was a sort of \u2013 and I mean sort of \u2013 democracy, with very \u2018sort-of\u2019 elections: it wasn\u2019t exactly one-man, one-vote equality. One of the things about the Republic that forever marked out Rome from almost any other early western power is that it was stunningly successful in conquest. People have always wondered why: some argue that it\u2019s because the Romans were simply nastier than everyone else, though I think that everyone was nasty, really. But certainly the Romans were hugely successful at defeating their neighbours and expanding their territory. By the second century BC \u2013 long before Rome had an emperor \u2013 it had acquired a huge land-based empire stretching around the Mediterranean from what\u2019s now Portugal and Spain to Greece and Turkey.<\/p>\n The key point here is that it was the enormous size of this empire that destroyed Roman democracy. The Republic was based on notional equality among the elite, and on the basic rule that nobody held any political office for more than a year, and that any such office was always shared with someone else. But although that system helped the Romans acquire that vast swathe of territory, it proved unworkable as a means to govern or keep it. Long before there was an emperor, unprecedented power ended up being handed to individuals, in order to put down rebellions or clear the sea of pirates or whatever the problem was in that moment. At the same time, the notional equality of the elite was being destroyed because so much wealth was being acquired from the empire, and some people were making themselves so much bigger than others. So, from the second century BC, a series of civil wars erupted, with kind-of prequels to emperors taking power. Out of all of that, one-man rule was established.<\/p>\n That change in system did help solve practical problems of governing the empire. Some provinces lay several months\u2019 travel from Rome<\/a>, and if you held office for only one year, you could barely get out to such distant realms and back again during that time. Ultimately, Julius Caesar cut through all of this bureaucracy to be made dictator \u2013 and, eventually, dictator for life. As a single ruler, he founded the political system we know as the empire. But it really was a case of the empire producing emperors, not emperors producing the empire. After Caesar\u2019s assassination, someone you\u2019ve described as \u201ca particularly nasty young man\u201d rose to power: Octavian.<\/p>\n Caesar was assassinated in the name of \u2018liberty\u2019 \u2013 ha ha \u2013 by some privileged aristocrats whom William Shakespeare<\/a> glorified. A decade of civil war followed, during which Caesar\u2019s supporters \u2013 notably Mark Antony and Octavian \u2013 defeated his killers, then turned on each other. Octavian eventually emerged victorious and became the first emperor proper, changing his name to Augustus [and reigning 27 BC to AD 14]. But he was a thug, at least in the first instance. He illegally raised his own private militia and joined forces with Mark Antony. He was then part and parcel of some extremely nasty civil violence and lawless killing. He is well known as being a violent young bloke: one story tells how he tore out the eyes of one of his enemies with his bare hands.<\/p>\n One of the great mysteries of Roman history is how, after starting out in that way, Augustus<\/a> was able to rebrand himself as a founding father and elder statesman. Some of that early violence might have been a bit exaggerated by his enemies, but some of it certainly wasn\u2019t. There are plenty of other terrorists and radicals who, after winning the fight for power \u2013 pretty nastily, sometimes \u2013 turned themselves into revered elder statesmen, but Augustus\u2019s must count as one of the biggest and most unexplained turnarounds. He ruled for 40 years, making him the longest-serving Roman emperor \u2013 and yet, if you\u2019d encountered him in the 30s BC, you\u2019d have steered well clear. Not only did Octavian rule for a long time, but he also established principles of emperorship that endured for centuries.<\/p>\n Quite how much of a ready-made plan he had, when he\u2019d just been fighting a civil war, I don\u2019t know. No doubt his most pressing aim was to not get a dagger in the back. Though ancient writers suggest he was working to a template that he already had in mind, I think he improvised a set of measures that lasted, and which are relatively clear.<\/p>\n One that was absolutely crucial was nationalising the army. Part of the problem that had emerged in Rome in the first century BC was that a whole series of ambitious men were raising their own private legions that were loyal to them, not to the state. That\u2019s how Augustus had operated during the civil war, and he must have seen that was a big problem. So he jettisoned the notion of temporary armies built by leading men, and replaced it with a professional army, with limited terms of service and a retirement package at the end. That broke the link between ambitious and powerful generals and their troops, and was very successful \u2013 but also hugely expensive. It\u2019s reckoned that paying the troops, plus retirement packages, cost around half the entire revenue of the Roman empire. But I think that\u2019s an indication of just how important Augustus regarded making the army the force of the state, not of individual generals. He also continued the traditional Roman conquests.<\/p>\n With the money that was left, he was phenomenally generous to the Roman people \u2013 not only in terms of cash handouts and providing shows and spectacles, but also of rebuilding the ceremonial centre of Rome, which had been rather higgledy-piggledy and not very well planned. He erected new buildings, many with decorations featuring Augustus himself. He flooded the Roman world with his image, both on coins and in marble. It\u2019s reckoned that there were between 25,000 and 50,000 depictions of him across the world. Though immortalised in these sculptures, eventually Augustus\u2019s rule \u2013 like all others \u2013 had to end.<\/p>\n You could say that Augustus was successful and lucky in everything apart from succession planning. That\u2019s where you see the big fault-lines in the system. Part of the problem was that he and his wife, Livia, had no living children of their own. They each had children from previous marriages, but didn\u2019t have children between them to take over the throne.<\/p>\n What happened instead was a series of adoptions, and failed attempts to marry off Augustus\u2019s daughter to potential heirs \u2013 none of whom lived long enough to succeed as emperor. Eventually, Augustus was left with only Livia\u2019s son from her first marriage, Tiberius, whom he adopted and who took over the throne. It\u2019s not hard to see why some historians imagined that Livia was angling for her son\u2019s succession all along, and had a hand in the premature deaths of the other potential candidates \u2013 though there\u2019s no evidence for that, only gossip.<\/p>\n So succession was a mess from the very beginning. As to whether anyone could become emperor: in theory, yes \u2013 but what really happened was that successors were chosen via adoption, first from the wider family of the emperor and then, from the second century AD, from a wider range of the elite. So it certainly wasn\u2019t like the way any American can dream of inhabiting the White House.<\/p>\n One feature of the Roman empire, right from its origins, was that Rome gradually allowed people from its empire into full citizenship and power. And, as the elite of the Roman empire became more diverse, so the diversity of the people on the throne also increased. Trajan came from Spain, for instance, while Elagabalus was from a Syrian family.<\/p>\n I think you\u2019re right: the fact that visitors to museums now see loads and loads of white marble statues can give us a misleading impression of the kinds of people who were Roman emperors. The exact ethnicity of Septimius Severus has been much debated, for instance, but he certainly wasn\u2019t what we might now term \u2018pale, male and stale\u2019. And of course those statues might have looked different when they were painted to reflect a range of skin tones and facial characteristics. So yes: looking at ancient statues, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all emperors were white. You\u2019ve mentioned Elagabalus again there. In your book, you make the point that it\u2019s vital to see these individuals not just as characters in macabre stories but as hard-working bureaucrats.<\/p>\n Some rulers must have been more hard-working than others. A key point of my book, though, is that, despite our tendency to see Roman emperors as a series of psychopaths, it just doesn\u2019t make sense to understand the Roman empire in these terms. The empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths, because in that case it just would not have survived.<\/p>\n As to what emperors actually did, I think the job description would probably have been the same in AD 210 as it was in 10 BC \u2013 though some would have been better at doing it than others. As the emperor Marcus Aurelius put it in the second century AD, when he was looking back at his predecessors: Roman imperial power, and imperial power more generally, is \u201cthe same play, just a different cast\u201d.<\/p>\n Some jobs would always have had to be done, regardless of who was emperor \u2013 and one of those was dealing with correspondence. The emperor\u2019s postbag must have been enormous, crammed full of petitions, begging letters, and reports from leaders and governors. Some missives would have been about matters of great geopolitical import, while others would have been about lost cows. There is no doubt that somebody in the royal palace was looking at those questions and signing them off. We don\u2019t know how many letters were actually dealt with by the emperor himself \u2013 just as we know that if we write to the prime minister now and get a reply, it wasn\u2019t actually written by the PM. But when Romans imagined the emperor, they imagined him with his red boxes adjudicating legal cases just as much as they pictured him having sex in the swimming pool. We talked earlier about Caesar\u2019s assassination, a fate that also befell plenty of his successors.<\/p>\n It certainly made an enormous difference. I think that modern readers of Roman history, me included, have tended to be a bit naive about this. We\u2019ve assumed, for instance, that Domitian<\/a> [ruled AD 81\u201396] was very nasty, and that\u2019s why he was assassinated, to be succeeded by the elderly but steady Nerva. Well, you could spin that: you could say that because Domitian was assassinated in a palace coup \u2013 with most of the conspirators coming from inside the palace \u2013 it was in the interests of Nerva and others to spread vile stories about Domitian. Now, we don\u2019t know which story is right, and I think it\u2019s always a bit too simple to somehow pretend that these monsters were really nice. None of them were nice in our terms, but it\u2019s still useful to remember that good men and bad men alike are assassinated. You end the book by writing that researching and writing it has opened your eyes to aspects of modern politics.<\/p>\n On the one hand, writing the book made me hate autocracy more. It\u2019s a system in which everybody is engaged in a fiction, a fake \u2013 even the emperor. He\u2019s the one person to whom no one will ever tell the truth. So I felt more distaste for autocratic power. At the same time, I felt a bit more sympathy on an individual basis for the probably very ordinary person on the throne. How do you live in a culture in which there is no truth? But I sympathised also with all those others caught up in that culture, right down to the bottom of the pile.<\/p>\n I suppose it\u2019s also made me think slightly differently about modern politics in this country and elsewhere. I could do an analysis of the hypocrisy of the British political system<\/a> \u2013 its preponderance of soundbites, its lies and systematic untruths \u2013 but I have sympathy for the men and women caught up in that system, too. Most of them probably didn\u2019t go into politics to be part of a sham facade of untruthfulness, but instead to try to make things better. And in a sense, we\u2019re all implicated in their problems, because we don\u2019t ever let them off the hook \u2013 we don\u2019t ever let them make a mistake. We\u2019re there on social media \u2013 me included \u2013 trying to out them and to cancel them. I felt a little more sympathy for them as people, while decrying some of the deplorable structural aspects of British or American politics \u2013 indeed, probably any big political system in the modern world.<\/p>\n The one thing you can say, however \u2013 and this has got to make us pleased \u2013 is that we\u2019ve got the ballot boxes and general elections, and we can vote the buggers out, whoever they may be. If we choose not to, that\u2019s our problem. No one could vote out an emperor, though, and of course one of the reasons why that world looks so bloody from our perspective is that there was only one way of solving a problem in the ancient world \u2013 which was death. So we\u2019re in a better position, and we should perhaps use our democratic rights more enthusiastically.<\/p>\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/09\/GettyImages-51240557-fe35b2b.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"A")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Why was he so very nasty, and how did he become Rome\u2019s first emperor?<\/h3>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/09\/GettyImages-170979656-2ccb19a.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"A")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Why were they so successful, and how did he change what rule meant?<\/h3>\n
\n
How did succession work? Could anyone become an emperor if they wanted it enough?<\/h3>\n
Did that expanding pool lead to more diverse figures becoming emperor? And is some of that diversity obscured by the fact that statues of emperors now seem to us to be universally white?<\/h3>\n
![\"Septimius](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/09\/GettyImages-1320411201-e277e4c.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Septimius")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>What tasks did they perform, and just how hard-working were they?<\/h3>\n
\n
Was there a link between meeting that fate and an emperor\u2019s posthumous reputation?<\/h3>\n
Without naming any specific present-day politicians, in what ways do you mean that?<\/h3>\n