Knowing a lot is not the same as knowing how to disseminate it and Mary Beard has that gift. The emeritus professor at Cambridge, 2016 Princess of Asturias Award winner and author of several classics about Rome, returns with one of those books that are as enjoyable and fun as they are profound in the knowledge of those emperors who continue to fascinate us. Emperor of Rome (Criticism) also arrives in the midst of a debate that has traveled the world on the back of the networks and that ensures that men are obsessed with the Roman Empire. She was born in Much Wenlock (United Kingdom), 68 years ago.
Ask. Is what they say out there true? Are men obsessed with the Roman Empire?
Answer. It surprises me, but I tend to believe it’s true. In some ways, the Roman Empire is a safe space for male fantasy, a place far away in time, which does no harm to anyone and where you can be a macho in your head: you can wear a toga, build roads, do things. all those masculine things and safe, in a classic cocoon style. I have never met one of those men who thinks about the Roman Empire seven times a day, but I bet they are only thinking about a small part of it and not exactly about the women, or the slaves, or the bad sides, pain, death. They’re just thinking about celebrated masculinity. I hope you read my book because you will see that there is much more to Rome. That the empire is even more interesting than they think.
Q. Philippe Sands recently told me that if you put “Nazism” on a cover it sells, but if you put “British Empire” it doesn’t. Why do they sell issues like the Roman Empire and Nazism and not the British?
R. Because we are too involved and it requires a lot of intellectual courage to face it. The Roman Empire is very far away, we can enjoy it without feeling guilty. I would love for people to be more critical of him, but it’s a long way off. Nazism appeals to a self-congratulatory view of the modern myth that we alone defeated Hitler. No, it wasn’t like that. But it is a binding myth, you see it in the movies they show at Christmas and that appeals to our sense of virtue. And looking at the British Empire is hard, you have to face things you don’t want to see. World War II is very complicated, but popular culture has managed to simplify it. Popular culture also tended to simplify the British Empire into a civilizing mission, but that is no longer possible and is therefore a much more complicated issue to explore. History helps you look at difficult issues, but reading is enjoyable and people may decide that you are not going to become bitter reading about the British Empire.
Q. Returning to the Roman, what do we need to know? What would be the mystery that Mary Beard has left to solve?
R. My greatest mystery remains common life. There are big questions in ancient history that anyone would like to solve: how did Augustus manage to conceive of a one-man system, for example? But I’m interested in real life. If I could spend one day in the Roman Empire, and I say one because it would be horrible to spend more days, it would be in the public baths. See how they worked, who worked there, what they talked about… see the day-to-day life of Rome. I would like to dig beneath the surface rather than into the big historical questions.
There are big questions in ancient history that anyone would like to solve: how did Augustus manage to conceive of a one-man system, for example?
Q. He has studied all the emperors. Do you have any favorites?
R. They were all horrible.
Q. Also Marcus Aurelius?
R. I can choose the most interesting ones, the ones that make me most curious, but choosing one is difficult because we don’t really know what they were like. His reputation was established after his death or murder, it is a posthumous version. I love anecdotes, if they were stupid, if Caligula wanted to name his horse…, but the interesting thing is that the anecdotes are usually the same. The good emperors of the first 250 years of the Empire were the same way and so were the bad ones. Virtues and vices had a clear pattern. We only see perceptions of power, we rarely have real images of man. Marcus Aurelius was an example of this. Not so much for the meditations, a best seller for which I don’t have much time, except for his letters with his tutor, or the doctor who tells us about his stomach problems. He gives us an idea of those aspects, but not of the philosophy of his power, of whether they were kind or not.
Q. Murder was then a common way to solve problems. And we are repeating it in Ukraine, Gaza or Israel. Haven’t we evolved?
R. Yes, we have evolved because now this worries us. Murder then was a fact of life. When you live in a place without police, without crisis management… murder is the way to solve a problem. Now we know it’s not good. We still do it, we have not solved the problem of war, or crimes, but we already know that this is not done. We have advanced, we are better. Neither you nor I would like to go back.
When you live in a place without police, without crisis management… murder is the way to solve a problem. “Now we know it’s not good.”
Q. No empress among dozens of male emperors. Is discrimination eternal?
R. This is a problem we still face. The Roman world, like the Greek or earlier societies, had a rigid division of social roles between men and women. We can go back to the caves and I have no idea why. But from the first communities, men fight outside and women are inside, raising children. The United Kingdom has already had three female prime ministers – of which I am not exactly proud – but we still work with that division. Many people would say it’s a natural division. What has changed throughout my life is the number of people who say it, now there are many fewer, but they are still out there. That is why Rome has been so attractive to conservatives, because women were in a subsidiary position and if they tried to get out of it they were highly criticized.
Q. Let’s talk about Heligábalus. In addition to treating his diners to a menu of camel heels and flamenco brains, he put on makeup and wanted to have women’s organs. Was he a trans emperor?
R. We don’t know if it’s true, the important thing is that this warns us that the ideas of gender fluidity are not new. There is no society that has not been interested in the blurred border between masculine and feminine. In Rome there was a very firm division between the roles of some and others, it was the basis of the political and social order. And at the same time they questioned themselves. The societies in which there is the greatest division between the roles of men and women are those in which this division is most often questioned and there is a lot of this in ancient mythology. Men who become women and then reflect on how that experience works. There is a famous hermaphrodite statue with many copies in the world showing a woman with breasts and a penis. The Roman world helps us see our own debates about non-binary sexuality and gender fluidity.
Q. There are also testimonies about homosexuality, such as the letters of Marcus Aurelius to his teacher, Fronto. How usual was it?
R. If today we cannot know who sleeps with whom, even less so two thousand years ago (laughs). But it is clear that sexual norms were different. When I was a student we believed that the Roman Empire was a kind of hot bed where everything, anything happened, an environment of absolute freedom, at least for the upper class. One of the things we’ve learned in the last 50 years is that, it’s not that they didn’t have sexual norms, but that they were different from ours. An example is Hadrian and Antinous, his Greek slave and boyfriend. It seems that it didn’t bother an older man to have a dominant relationship with a younger man. The criticism came because, when Antinous died, he grieved and behaved like a woman, he put thousands of statues on him, deified him, gave his name to cities… If they criticized him it was because of the reaction to his death, not because of their relationship itself. . In that ancient world, those who grieved and cried were women, and Hadrian seemed to behave like a woman.
Q. What was the Roman legacy in moral issues or our social principles?
R. Both here and in the UK, the Romans are under our feet. We exist with them, we see what they built, our transportation system for example is based on theirs, we are embedded in the Roman infrastructure. There is not much legacy in terms of social organization, but there is in terms of common political problems. Something important for example for the Romans and also for us is: Do we believe that the leaders are sincere or are they acting? Is your word truly yours? It is something absolutely present in Roman debates. Tacitus’ notes indicate that Nero’s speech when Emperor Claudius was murdered or died was not written by him, but rather that he was the first emperor to rely on borrowed words. Now our politicians always do it and sometimes that bothers us, that they don’t speak for themselves, that they have speechwriters. We want to know what our leader is really like because we never see him except through his actions. There are a lot of anecdotes about Nero being an enthusiastic actor on stage and he was criticized because he was not acting as a true emperor should, they called him crazy… They questioned whether an emperor is simply an actor. And that idea of what is politically offensive is something we share with the Romans. We also share collaboration issues. What keeps the empire or my dictatorship running? It is collaboration. There is war and bloodshed, yes, sure, but also collaboration. We are all guilty.
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