Mary Beard (1) (1955–)

In Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, Professor Mary Beard examines what it meant to be the Roman emperor from the time of Augustus to Alexander Severus. She does so through an exploration of one-man rule, succession, power dining, palace types and construction, the emperor’s court, the emperor’s work, the emperor’s recreation, emperors who traveled beyond the Empire, how the emperor interacted with his people, and the deification of an emperor upon his death. While she show more naturally uses the expected emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, Commodus to Nero, she also has fun with examples like Elagabalus, accused of debauchery and sexual perversions. Well-researched like all of Beard’s work, this will appeal to those looking to learn more about the Roman empire without wanting a stale recitation of names and dates. Beard also works to dispel myths of what a Roman emperor was and how he fit into society, many of them created in antiquity to defame bad emperors. This audiobook is narrated by Mary Beard, so her genuine enthusiasm comes through and the listener may rest assured that she is correctly pronouncing the Latin sources. show less

Mary Beard is absolutely brilliant in these two lectures, The Public Voice Of Women delivered in 2014 and Women in Power delivered in 2017. In her academician’s voice she traces the dominant voice of men and the suppression of that of women in the public sphere, citing examples from Greek and Roman literature, her specialty. There are a few more modern literature references, as well as the perception of women’s voices in today’s media. She chronicles her own experience of abusive show more reaction to her writing, the silencing of Elizabeth Warren in the US Senate and the treatment of prominent world leaders such as Theresa May and Hillary Clinton, citing them as examples that we need to think differently about the structure of power:

We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?

Start a conversation; discuss it with your friends. This is a manifesto. Beard doesn’t claim to have a solution. But has carefully laid out the case for one. show less

Mary Beard is a writer of popular history in the best sense. She’s a genuine academic who has delved into her subject through years of lectures, seminars, and research, as well as indefatigable travel, yet retains the ability to convey her knowledge to us non-specialists in an accessible and entertaining way.

The title of this book is telling: rather than a set of potted biographies of individual Caesars, she looks at the generic picture they collectively form; “emperor” as category. show more Not that they are interchangeable (other than the standard torsos of their statuary depiction). Some were better, some were worse, yet Beard suggests that the monsters (Caligula, Nero) weren’t as evil as their reputation, while there may have been more to Claudius than the dotty uncle of legend. She notes that the manner of succession appears to be a variable that affects posthumous reputation. If the new emperor was the adopted (or, on rare occasion, the biological) son of his predecessor, then the recently deceased emperor was praised; if, instead, the overturn was violent (assassination, civil war), then the worst things imaginable—and the Romans had vivid imaginations—were ascribed to the deceased.

The most chilling sentence comes early in the book: Beard’s observation that the empire created the emperor, not the other way around. Much of Rome’s territorial expansion came when it was still nominally a republic. And the forms of republic (senate, consuls) continued under Augustus and his successors, albeit attenuated. This forced me to stop and reconsider the history of the U.S., which, for more than two centuries, has been an experiment—now threatened—in democratic republicanism. Yet, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase and continuing through the Mexican War, the concept of manifest destiny, and the purchase of Alaska, the United States rapidly expanded. Through involvement in two world wars, it then became the dominant world power. Eighty years after reaching this apex, we see the farcical yet deadly serious repetition of many of the steps by which Octavian reinvented himself as Augustus and officially made Rome the empire that it already was.

Many scholars are in thrall to the field they’ve devoted their lives to. Yet, Beard finds that the longer she studies, the more she has come to detest autocracy—the “terror of power with no limits”—which, she writes, “upturns the ‘natural’ order of things and replaces reality with sham, undermining your trust in what you think you see.” She dissents from Gibbon, who saw the time from Nerva’s accession (98 CE) to the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (180 CE) as the time in all of history when “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.” “For whom?” she pointedly asks.

This is the first of Beard’s many books that I’ve read, but I’ve watched two of the BBC documentary series she has presented. Her writing style here is indistinguishable from the scripts she narrates. It’s uncanny to be able to hear an author’s voice so clearly while reading. show less

A history of Rome, exploring its founding myths and realities, to the extent they’re knowable from the evidence. History is always about the present; Beard’s Rome is notable because it made conquered subjects into Roman citizens, with Roman citizens’ rights (although such rights could be hard to exercise from far away), and because many important figures from Roman history were immigrants, or near descendants of immigrants: Rome as melting pot. There are some repeating tics, like “it show more was more complicated than that,” but overall I enjoyed it as a history of people (almost all men, since that’s who left the records) scheming and fighting and doing the best they could to govern. show less