Mary Beard has done it again. After her great success with SPQR, the British historian has managed to not only emulate her best-known work, but even surpass it in peculiarity with Emperor of Rome, an analysis of what it meant to be the first Roman citizen from Augustus to Alexander Severe. The latter character on which Beard wanted to dwell because, in her opinion, the Empire was transformed behind him into a chaotic succession of unconnected leaders.
Despite the cast that populates Emperor of Rome, the reader should not expect to find in its pages an exhaustive biography of each of the emperors. They are all dissected by Beard, but the author does not follow a chronological story, nor does she narrate all the episodes experienced by each of the protagonists, but instead uses the most everyday aspects of their lives to expose the difference between the idea that the Romans had of the emperor and what, in reality, this figure ended up being.
To do this, Beard takes the sexual or culinary eccentricities of the emperors, mixes them with extensive anecdote and season them with a professional use of highly original sources to give us an alternative vision of the Empire, dismantling many of the myths that, for centuries, passed for certainties about characters such as Commodus, Caligula or Elagabalus, among others. And, along the way, the historian takes the opportunity to dissect the figure of those supposedly revolutionary senators whose writings still continue to cloud our objective vision of imperial times. Spoiler alert: it is not so clear that the good emperors were so good.
But Emperor of Rome is also a story of those secondary characters who surrounded the autocrat of the moment, from his relatives and lovers to the last of the slaves, including his jesters and officials. In this last body Beard stops to explain what the work of the emperor really consisted of, whose performance his subjects idealized, perceiving the great chief as someone friendly, hard-working and essential who, inevitably, had to ascend to god after his death. .
Beard’s work constitutes, finally, a fascinating study on autocracy, incredibly entertaining, full of fresh anecdotes treated with that friendly style that characterizes the author, which also offers us a current reflection. Dictatorships like the one that dominated Rome for centuries are built on foundations of lies that must be unraveled, à la Mary Beard, so as not to end up under the yoke of the tyrant in power.