‘Good emperors’ and ‘bad emperors’?

The standard story of the almost two centuries of autocracy between Tiberius and Commodus, those fourteen emperors across three imperial dynasties, focuses on the virtues and vices of the man on the throne, and on his abuse and use of autocratic power. It is hard to imagine Roman history without Nero ‘fiddling while Rome burned’ (more precisely, irresponsibly playing his lyre while the city was destroyed in a vast blaze in 64 CE), bungling an attempt to murder his mother by drowning her in a collapsible boat (a peculiar combination of ingenuity, cruelty and absurdity) or torturing Christians, as if they were to blame for the great fire, in the first of a sporadic series of violent Roman reactions to the new religion. But Nero is only one of a wide repertoire of different versions of imperial sadism.

The emperor Commodus, dressed as a gladiator and threatening the senators in the front-row seats of the Colosseum by waving the head of a decapitated ostrich at them, is often taken to sum up the ludicrous sadism of corrupt autocracy. One eyewitness, describing the incident, admits that he was terrified but, at the same time, so dangerously close to laughter that he had to pluck some laurel leaves from the wreath he was wearing and stuff them in his mouth to stifle the giggles. The antics of the reclusive Tiberius in his swimming pool on the island of Capri, where boys (‘little fishes’) were reputedly employed to nibble at his genitals underwater, point to the exploitative sexuality of imperial power – the scenes being gleefully re-enacted in Bob Guccione’s 1970s film Caligula. Even more chilling is the story of how Domitian turned sadism into a solitary pastime. He is said to have shut himself up alone in his room, whiling away the hours torturing flies by killing them with his pen. ‘Is there anyone in there with the emperor?’ someone once asked. ‘Not even a fly’ was one courtier’s sharp reply.

There are occasional examples of outstanding imperial virtue too. The philosophical Thoughts of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, cliché as much of it is (‘Do not act as if you were going to live 10,000 years. Death hangs over you’), still finds many admirers, buyers and advocates today, from self-help gurus to former US president Bill Clinton. The heroic common sense of Vespasian, Domitian’s father, deserves to be as well known. Coming to the throne in 69 CE after the extravagant Nero, he was reputed to be a shrewd manager of the imperial finances, right down to putting a tax on human urine, a key ingredient in the ancient laundry and cloth-processing industry. He almost certainly never uttered the snappy quip on the subject, ‘Pecunia non olet’ (‘Money doesn’t smell’), often attributed to him, but it captures just the right spirit. He was also renowned for puncturing imperial pretensions, including his own. ‘That serves me right for being a silly old man and wanting a triumph at my age,’ he is supposed to have said at the end of his triumphal procession in 71 CE, after he had been on his feet all day in a bumpy chariot, at the age of sixty-one.

These emperors are some of the most vividly drawn characters in the Roman world. But all the intriguing circumstantial details, from the swing of their togas to their bald patches, can deflect us from the more fundamental questions already glimpsed underneath the story of Gaius. How far it is useful to see Roman history in terms of imperial biographies or to divide the story of the empire into emperor-sized (or dynasty-sized) chunks? How accurate are the standard images of these rulers that have come down to us? What exactly did the emperor’s character explain? How much difference, and to whom, did the qualities of the man on the throne make?

Ancient biographers, historians and political analysts certainly believed that it made a great deal of difference, hence their focus on the flaws and failings, hypocrisies and sadism of the Augusti, and occasionally on their sturdy patience or tolerant good humour. Suetonius, in his series of biographies The Twelve Caesars, ranging from Julius Caesar to Domitian, including the three short-lived claimants of 68 to 69 CE, gives pride of place to the kind of revealing personal anecdotes that I have just quoted, and he lavishes attention on the diagnostic minutiae of his subjects’ eating habits, style of dress, sex life and clever sayings, from jokes to last words. It is here that we read of Tiberius’ acne, Claudius’ recurrent indigestion and Domitian’s habit of going swimming with prostitutes.

Even the far more cerebral Publius Cornelius Tacitus relished such personal details. In his account of the first two imperial dynasties, ending with Domitian, Tacitus, a successful senator and cynical historian, offers the most hard-hitting analysis of political corruption to survive from the ancient world – albeit written from the safe distance of the reign of Trajan in the early second century CE. He certainly had an eye for the big picture. The first sentence of his Annales (or Chronicles), a history of the Julio-Claudian emperors from Tiberius to Nero, runs simply ‘From the very beginning, kings have ruled the city of Rome’: ‘Urbem Romam a principio reges habuere.’ In just six Latin words, it was a direct challenge to the ideological foundations of the regime and the insistence of the Augusti that they were not a monarchy in the old sense. But Tacitus regularly rests his case on the character and the crimes of the individuals on the throne. He embellishes his description, for example, of the attempted murder of Nero’s mother, Agrippina, in the collapsible boat into a ghastly baroque tale, including one horrible detail of human naivety and imperial ruthlessness. While Agrippina swam gamely to the shore, her drowning maid tried to save her own skin by shouting out that she was the emperor’s mother: the desperate lie only ensured her instant slaughter at the hands of Nero’s henchmen.

Much of the great tradition of modern writing on the Roman emperors has been framed in similar terms, around imperial characters good and bad. The words of Edward Gibbon, whose History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in instalments from 1776, have had enormous influence on the views of generations of later historians. Before broaching the main theme of his title, Gibbon briefly reflects on the earlier period of one-man rule between Tiberius and Commodus, and he singles out for praise the emperors in the second century CE. His memorable aphorism, crafted with typical eighteenth-century self-confidence, is still much quoted: ‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus’ – that is, what many since have called the period of the ‘good emperors’: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.

These were rulers, Gibbon goes on, whose characters and authority ‘commanded involuntary respect’ and who ‘delighted in the image of liberty’. Their only regret, he concludes, must have been the knowledge that some unworthy successor (‘some licentious youth or some jealous tyrant’) would soon appear to ruin everything, as their predecessors had almost all done in the past: ‘the dark unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero … and the timid inhuman Domitian’.

It is a magisterial way of summing up almost two centuries of Roman history. Gibbon lived in an age when historians made judgements ‘without hesitation’ and were prepared to believe that the Roman world might have been a better place to live than their own. It is also deeply misleading, for several reasons. The various rulers were not easy to fit into any standard, stereotypical image. Gibbon himself concedes – in lines that are now rarely quoted, because they spoil the splendid certainty of the aphorism – that one of his favourites, Hadrian, could be vain, capricious and cruel, as much a jealous tyrant as an excellent prince. Gibbon must have known the story of how Hadrian had his architect put to death over a disagreement about building design; if true, it is a piece of imperial abuse worthy of Gaius.

And some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome; though less famous, it was clearly intended to rival Trajan’s and was carefully built just a little taller (see plate 10).

70. A typical scene of Roman violence from Marcus Aurelius’ column. The bound German prisoners are lined up and executed one by one. The head lying on the ground, next to its body, is a particularly gruesome touch.

There are also all the problems of sorting fact from fantasy that we find in the various stories about the villainies of Gaius. The many ancient tales of imperial transgression certainly offer unforgettable insights into Roman anxieties, suspicions and prejudices. How exactly Roman writers imagined that bad emperors revealed their badness can tell us an enormous amount about Roman cultural assumptions and morality more generally, from the particular frisson that attached – and still does – to sex in swimming pools, to the more surprising objection to cruelty to flies (probably a sign that there was nothing so trivial in the world that Domitian would not make a hobby out of hurting it). But as evidence for the reality of imperial rule, they remain a mixture of accurate reporting, exaggeration and guesswork that it is almost always impossible to untangle.

What went on behind the closed doors of the palace was usually secret. Some facts leaked out, some pronouncements were made in public, but for the most part conspiracy theories flourished. It did not take much to turn a nearly tragic boating accident into a bungled murder attempt (how, anyway, did Tacitus know about the foolish gambit of Agrippina’s servant?). And what we would call urban myths abounded. More or less identical anecdotes and apparently spontaneous bons mots turn up in the biographies of different rulers. Was it Domitian or was it Hadrian who wryly observed that no one would believe there was a plot against an emperor until he was found dead? Maybe both of them did. Maybe Domitian coined it and Hadrian repeated it. Or maybe it was a convenient cliché about the dangers of high rank that could be put into the mouth of almost any ruler.

More generally, the politics of regime change had a major influence on how each emperor went down in history, as imperial careers and characters were reinvented to serve the interests of those who followed them. The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were, like Gaius, demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters, devoted to the success of Rome, who did not take themselves too seriously.

These are the considerations that have recently encouraged a few brave, revisionist attempts to rehabilitate some of the most notorious imperial monsters. A number of modern historians have presented Nero in particular more as a victim of the propaganda of the Flavian dynasty, starting with Vespasian, which succeeded him, than as a self-obsessed, mother-killing pyromaniac who reputedly started the great fire of 64 CE not just to enjoy the spectacle but also to clear land for building his vast new palace, the Golden House. Even Tacitus admits, the rehabilitators point out, that Nero was the sponsor of effective relief measures for the homeless after the fire; and the reputed extravagance of his new residence, with all its luxuries (including a revolving dining room), did not prevent the parsimonious Vespasian and his sons from taking over part of it as their home. Besides, in the twenty years after Nero’s death in 68 CE at least three false Neros, complete with lyre, appeared in the eastern parts of the empire, making a bid for power by claiming to be the emperor himself, still alive despite all the reports of his suicide. They were all quickly eliminated, but the deception suggests that in some areas of the Roman world Nero was fondly remembered: no one seeks power by pretending to be an emperor universally hated.

This historical scepticism is healthy. But it misses the bigger point: that whatever the views of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

It probably did matter to some members of the metropolitan elite, the emperor’s advisors, the senate and the palace staff. Day-to-day dealings with the teenaged Emperor Nero may well have been rather more trying than those with Claudius before him or Vespasian after. And the absence of Tiberius, in his retreat on Capri, or of Hadrian on one of his many travels around the Roman world (he was an inveterate tourist, more often abroad than at home) must have had an impact on administration for those directly concerned – including at one point Suetonius, who worked briefly in Hadrian’s secretariat.

Outside that narrow circle, however, and certainly outside the city of Rome, where the effects of an individual emperor’s generosity could trickle down to the man or woman in the street, it can hardly have made much difference who was on the throne, or what their personal habits or intrigues were. And there is no sign at all that the character of the ruler affected the basic template of government at home or abroad in any significant way. If Gaius or Nero or Domitian really were as irresponsible, sadistic and mad as they are painted, it made little or no difference to how Roman politics and empire worked behind the headline anecdotes. Beneath the scandalous tales and stories of sodomy (which obscure as much as they enliven), away from the carefully constructed aphorisms of Gibbon, there was a remarkably stable structure of rule and – as we shall see – a remarkably stable set of problems and tensions across the whole period. It is those that we need to understand in order to make sense of imperial rule, not the individual idiosyncrasies of the rulers. After all, no horse was ever really made consul.

71. Part of the decoration of Nero’s Golden House. The surviving sections, mostly preserved within the foundations of the later Baths of Trajan, are impressive, but do not quite match up to the written descriptions of it. Despite various optimistic claims, no certain trace of its revolving dining room has been discovered. It may well be that much of the decoration that has been preserved, and that made such an impact on Renaissance artists (who dug down specially to copy it), came from the service quarters of the palace.