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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE CRISIS OF CLASSICAL STUDIES: ON MARY BEARD’S “EMPEROR OF
ROME”  
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Edward J. Watts
March 29, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book highlights both the strengths and the weaknesses of
classical studies at the present time. _

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_Emperor of Rome
Ruling the Ancient Roman World_
Mary Beard
Liveright
ISBN: 978-1-324-09560-6

THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE of classics has had a rough couple of decades.
Classics as we now understand it took shape in the 19th century as
Northwestern European and Northeastern American scholars defined a
canon of literary works written in Greek between the eighth and fourth
centuries BC and in Latin between about 100 BC and 100 AD. They taught
these works to the elite and aspiring elite in prestigious secondary
schools and universities for more than a century and asserted that
classical learning was a prerequisite for a person’s understanding
of high culture. Well into the 1940s, embedded classical references
animated everything from the plays of Albert Camus to the abstract art
of Mark Rothko. That moment of cultural centrality passed long ago,
however. For much of the second half of the 20th century, classics
slowly retreated from its position near the center of university and
high cultural life until it became a small, somewhat sleepy subject
that emerged into popular consciousness only when a Hollywood
blockbuster like _Gladiator _(2000) or _Troy_ (2004) appeared.
Classics is no longer sleepy. The legacies of ancient Greece and Rome
have reemerged as key cultural battlefields fought over by everyone
from left-wing scholars to gun rights advocates. Among classics’
critics are university administrators keen to eliminate majors that do
not lead directly to employment, and groups of scholars frustrated by
the discipline’s historical exclusivity and Eurocentrism. Its
champions include scholars fascinated by antiquity and its enduring
influence, as well as tens of thousands of undergraduate students who
sign up for classics courses each year, not to mention the many people
who, social media has recently revealed,
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think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. Classics has never
been more popular. Nor has it been more endangered.

This is, then, a moment when classics desperately needs another book
by Mary Beard, the Cambridge scholar whom _The_ _Guardian_ once called
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“the world’s most famous classicist.” Better than anyone else in
her generation, Beard has mastered the ability to explain to
21st-century audiences why the ancient world is interesting,
instructive, and useful. She has waged social media battles
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against misinformed people of all political persuasions who seek to
use the Roman past to make ill-founded judgments about our
contemporary world. Her work
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on television and radio has introduced millions of people to the art,
literature, and architecture of a beautifully complicated Roman world.
Her essays challenge people to think in new and exciting ways about
women, slaves, peasants, and other figures whose contributions to the
ancient world have long gone unacknowledged. And Beard’s books,
including her masterpiece _SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome_ (2015),
prompt readers to consider the complexity of the Roman world that
fascinates them.

Her latest book, _Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World
_(2023), showcases many of the attributes that make her earlier works
so appealing. _Emperor of Rome_ tells the story of the lives, labors,
and love affairs of the 26 men who ruled Rome between the reign of
Augustus (27 BC–14 AD), Rome’s first and most famous emperor, and
that of Alexander Severus (222–35), the mostly forgettable and
largely forgotten child emperor with whom Rome’s fourth imperial
dynasty concluded. Beard wisely decided not to make the work a
chronicle of the life and deeds of men that most readers have never
heard of and even fewer particularly care about. She says little about
the short reigns of Galba (68–69), Pertinax (193), and Macrinus
(217–18) while treating readers to long discussions of more famous
rulers like Caligula (37–41), Claudius (41–54), and Nero
(54–68). She is also well attuned to the need to make modern readers
comfortable with the many unfamiliar names that pop up in her
discussions. The book begins with a cast of characters in which images
of Roman rulers are shown alongside regnal dates and a brief note
describing how each man took power and died. It concludes with a short
appendix that explains how Roman emperors got the names by which they
are now known. These extremely useful tools help orient all readers,
regardless of their familiarity with Roman history.

_Emperor of Rome_ is not just about these emperors, however. Beard
also introduces the wives, lovers, family members, household
attendants, senators, slaves, and courtiers who made the professional
and domestic lives of Roman emperors possible. We observe these people
as they travel with the emperor across the vast world he controls. We
trace the rise and fall of their fortunes as they labor to please
their sovereign. And we dine with them at parties where the imperial
host could be entertaining, terrifying, or outright bizarre.
Sometimes, as when the emperor Elagabalus (218–22) served flamingo
brains to diners and then allowed his pet leopard to wander around the
couches on which his drunk guests had passed out, the parties could be
all of these things at once.

Beard is at her best when she overlays the testimony of Roman authors
with her interpretation of the archaeological remains of the
structures they describe. She meticulously reconstructs the various
imperial palaces of ever-increasing size that consumed more and more
of the Palatine Hill in the course of the first century AD and devotes
considerable attention to the villas, vacation homes, and private
islands where emperors relaxed outside of Rome. Beard brings readers
into the Sperlonga grotto on the western coast where the emperor
Tiberius (14–37) dined surrounded by priceless sculptures. She uses
photographs, plans, and vivid literary descriptions to uncover the
structures and artworks that once comprised the massive villa complex
built on the orders of Hadrian (117–38) in the Roman suburb of
Tivoli. And she encourages us to look anew at the Colosseum and the
Circus Maximus as places where the emperor and his subjects interacted
in a fashion that simultaneously reinforced Roman social hierarchies
and permitted the people to speak freely, as a group, to their
emperor.

Most of all, though, _Emperor of Rome_ offers a series of interesting
vignettes presented by a masterful storyteller with a perfect sense of
dramatic and comic timing. Beard knows how to introduce the lives and
work of unfamiliar characters in a fashion that concisely provides
both general historical background and intricate detail about their
actions. She has arranged these stories into thematically focused
chapters about things like imperial dinner parties (Chapter Three:
“Power Dining”) or the imperial court (Chapter Five: “Palace
People: The Emperor in His Court”), but Beard has also stacked each
tale so that it introduces a character or idea that she often returns
to later. This economical narrative style ensures that readers feel
they are always walking on firm ground as they journey deeper into the
world of Rome’s early emperors.

Despite the excellent qualities of this book, and it has a great many,
I fear that _Emperor of Rome_ represents something of a missed
opportunity to speak more broadly to the crisis the field of classics
now faces. Although it claims to be a history of Roman emperors, Beard
herself acknowledges, in both the work’s introduction and its
epilogue, that she has been quite selective in the range of emperors
and the span of time the book covers. _Emperor of Rome_ covers a
little more than 15 percent of the 1,500 years that emperors ruled the
Roman Empire, a situation that would be akin to writing a book called
_President of the United States_ and stopping with John Quincy Adams.

Beard acknowledges that “there was an unbroken succession of Roman
rulers down to 1453,” when the Eastern Roman Empire finally
collapsed, and explains her decision to stop her profile of Roman
emperors when she does because, “[w]ith the death of Alexander, the
job description began to change” and “what it was to be a Roman
emperor shifted dramatically” between 235 and the reigns of
Diocletian (284–305) and that of Constantine (306–37). This empire
of the later third and fourth centuries was, she writes, “a strange
and unfamiliar place.” It was also very different from the period
_Emperor of Rome_ covers, a span of time during which, Beard claims,
“not much changed on a grand scale for over 250 years: the Roman
empire hardly grew in size; it was administered in more or less the
same way; and political life in Rome itself followed the same broad
pattern.”

While it is true that the Roman Empire in 337 was quite different from
what it was in 235, there were also significant differences between
the empire when Augustus took power in the 20s BCE and when Severus
died in 235. Augustus assumed control of a Roman state that had yet to
define the Rhine and Danube as its northern frontiers. Large parts of
coastal northwest Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East sat outside
the emperor’s direct control; these were under the authority of a
constellation of allied states and client kings. Rome had not yet
conquered Britain, Dacia, or Arabia. Perhaps as little as 10 percent
of the 50 million or so people living within Rome’s boundaries were
Roman citizens, and the senate was almost exclusively drawn from
Italy.

By 235, the Rhine border was well established and the client kingdoms
in Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East—as well as the
independent regions of Britain, Dacia, and Arabia—had all become
Roman provinces. Severus directly controlled far more land than
Augustus ever had. The nature of the citizen body to whom the emperor
answered also shifted. In 235, every one of the tens of millions of
free people in the empire was a Roman citizen and nearly every
province provided senators to the Roman Senate. These changes made
Augustus’s job at least as dissimilar to that of Severus as
Alexander’s was to Constantine’s.

The Roman Empire changed continuously across the 15 centuries it
existed, and as it did, the job of ruling its lands and peoples
changed too. Stopping a study of Roman emperors in 235 because the
empire had changed seems arbitrary. It is, however, perfectly in
keeping with the way classics has defined Roman antiquity since the
19th century. Many classical Roman historians hesitate to venture
beyond the comfort of the early Roman Empire and engage in detail with
the other 85 percent of the empire’s history. Beard does better than
most by extending her study into the 230s, but there is still a period
of over 1,200 years to go.

Roman history did not always work this way. When the Viennese scholar
Johannes Cuspinianus wrote his history of Roman emperors for the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V in the 1510s, it stretched from Julius Caesar
to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In the early 18th century,
Montesquieu’s history of the Roman state similarly extended into the
15th century. So too did Edward Gibbon’s _The History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire_, the first volume of which appeared in
1776. Stopping Roman imperial history nearer to its beginning than its
end is, relatively speaking, a recent phenomenon.

The brevity of Beard’s coverage is also unfortunate because an
exhaustive history of Roman emperors would dramatically change some
aspects of this book. Beard’s comment that “[n]o woman in Rome
ever had any formal, executive power in the state” would make no
sense to the Romans living under the reigns of empresses Irene
(797–802), Zoe (1042), or Theodora (1055–56). Eleventh-century
visitors to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople would
also be puzzled by her claim that “the ashes of most emperors and
their families ended up in one of two huge mausolea” in the city of
Rome. These medieval Romans could look around that Constantinopolitan
church and see the sarcophagi of more than 50 different emperors and
imperial family members interred there between the death of
Constantine I in 337 and that of Constantine VIII in 1028.

Expanding _Emperor of Rome_’s chronological footprint would also
have extended its story in ways that could bring classics out of the
cul-de-sac in which it currently finds itself. Until she reaches the
Severan dynasty (which began in 193 and included emperors of North
African and Syrian descent), all of the emperors Beard treats are
Europeans from Italy, Spain, and Southern France. They fit quite
neatly into the comfortable, 19th-century, Northwestern European
ideals about what antiquity ought to be. This is why they, and the
empire they ruled, resonated so much with 19th-century Western
Europeans and North Americans. But, as Beard acknowledges briefly,
many of the emperors who ruled Rome in later centuries came from
places outside of Western Europe. They were much more important in
shaping the cultural, political, and religious legacies of communities
living in the Caucasus Mountains, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, and South Asia.

A book that included those emperors could show how the legacy of
Constantine I influenced views of Christian monarchy in places as
diverse as Axum (an ancient kingdom centered on land now part of
Eritrea and Ethiopia), Armenia, and Merovingian France. It could
explain why church councils called by Roman emperors such as
Constantine and Theodosius I (379–95) provided some of the
fundamental legal framework that governed medieval Christian
communities in Iraq, Iran, and Kerala. It could reveal that Coptic
church services in Egypt still commemorate the orthodoxy of emperor
Theodosius II (402–50) and condemn the heresy of his sister
Pulcheria and her husband, the emperor Marcian (450–57). It could
also describe the painful decision that the emperor Basil II
(976–1025) made when he sent his sister Anna off to marry Grand
Prince (and later Saint) Volodymyr of Kiev Rus, a decision that many
Russian Orthodox Christians believe led to their king’s baptism and
their nation’s conversion to Christianity. We could, in short,
understand a lot better why Roman emperors still matter so much to so
many people across the world—both within and outside Europe. This is
a way that classics can simultaneously answer the criticisms that it
is too Eurocentric and elitist while retaining the fervent interest of
those students and general readers who love ancient Rome.

That is not the book Beard wanted to write, however. Every author has
the prerogative to set the terms of their own work, and _Emperor of
Rome_ is excellently done according to the terms its author set. Beard
has put together a wonderful narrative that enlivens, in brilliant
color, the world of a group of Roman emperors that readers already
fascinated by a classical version of Roman antiquity will certainly
love. It is absolutely not Beard’s fault that classics finds itself
in its current troubles. But I do hope that someone of her stature
will choose to write the sort of book that might pull the discipline
back from the brink.

 

Edward J. Watts holds the Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and is
professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. The
author and editor of several prize-winning books, including _The
Final Pagan Generation_ (2015), he lives in Carlsbad, California.

* Ancient Rome
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* classical studies
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* Roman emperors
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* Politics
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* empires
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