Page 89 - BBC Knowledge - October 2017 IN

emperor – his achievements, his relationships Augustus
and his foibles – should have been topics (63 BC–AD 14, emperor from 27 BC)
of obsessive fascination to his subjects. The first emperor
“Your destiny it is to live as in a theatre where THE his great-uncle Julius Caesar left
your audience is the entire world.” This was him with a commanding name and
fortune. By his mid 30s, he enjoyed
an unprecedented dominance over
the warning attributed by one Roman historian FIRST FIVE Born Gaius Octavius, his adoption by
to Maecenas, a close confidant of Augustus. ROMAN the Roman world. In
27 BC, he took the title
Whether or not he really said it, the sentiment Augustus: ‘Divinely
was true to his master’s theatricality. Augustus, EMPERORS Favoured One’. By
the time of his death,
lying on his deathbed, was reported by Suetonius he had established
an autocracy secure
to have asked his friends whether he had played enough to survive as
his part well in the comedy of life; assured long as the empire itself.
that he had, he demanded their applause as
he headed for the exit. Tiberius (42 BC–AD 37, Caligula
emperor from AD 14)
(AD 12–41, emperor from AD 37)
A good emperor had no choice but to be The iconic general His mother’s marriage to Augustus won Called Gaius, as a young boy he was The witty sadist
a good actor – as, too, did everyone else in the Tiberius a place at the heart of the new nicknamed ‘Caligula’ (‘little boots’) by
drama’s cast. Caesar, after all, was never alone imperial dynasty. An accomplished soldiers serving under his father. “I am
general, he was still unpopular with
rearing a viper,” said Tiberius, and so it
on the stage. His potential successors were public the masses, and his respect proved. On becoming emperor,
figures by virtue of their relationship to him. for republican traditions Caligula’s tastes for theatricality and
ensured he was never
hurting people fuelled
Even the wife, the niece or the granddaughter entirely comfortable as attacks on the authority of
emperor. His retirement
of an emperor might have her role to play. Get it to Capri in AD 27 fuelled the Senate. Even so, when
he was assassinated by
wrong and she was liable to pay a terrible price, salacious rumours, but, his own guards in AD 41,
but get it right and her face might appear on coins by maintaining peace, his death was widely
he won respect in
mourned.
alongside Caesar’s own. the provinces.
No household in history had ever before been Nero
so squarely in the public eye as that of Augustus. Claudius (AD 37–68, emperor from AD 54)
(10 BC–AD 54, emperor from AD 41)
The fashions and hairstyles of its most prominent The able ruler Tiberius’s nephew was prone to Known initially as Domitius, the son of The showman
members, reproduced in exquisite detail by twitching and stammering, which Agrippina was adopted by Claudius;
sculptors across the empire, set trends from Syria hindered his political progress. he later had his mother and wife
He became Caesar when his nephew
murdered. He refined Caligula’s policy
to Spain. Their achievements were celebrated Caligula was murdered. Though widely of appealing over the heads of the
with spectacularly showy monuments, their despised as being under the thumb senatorial elite to the mass of the
of women and freedmen,
people; the more murderous his
scandals repeated with relish from seaport to he proved an effective regime became,
seaport. Propaganda and gossip, each feeding emperor, invading the more his
Britain and
showmanship
off the other, gave the dynasty of Augustus commissioning a new flourished. Faced
a celebrity that became, for the first time, port for Rome. His with rebellion, he
committed suicide
death was believed
continent-spanning. Time has barely dimmed it. to have been caused in AD 68 – marking
by his wife (and niece),
Two millennia on, the west’s prime examples of Agrippina. the end of the Julio-
Claudian dynasty.
tyranny continue to instruct and appal.
“Propaganda and gossip,
each feeding off the a prison it was, and how long. Nothing could compare with it.”
As a man who had spent many years observing the imperial
other, gave the dynasty court, Seneca knew all about darkness. He certainly had
of Augustus a celebrity no illusions about the nature of the regime established by
Augustus. Even the peace that it had brought the world,
that became continent- he declared, had ultimately been founded upon nothing more
noble than “the exhaustion of cruelty.” Despotism had been
spanning” implicit in the new order from its beginning.
Yet what he detested, Seneca also adored. Contempt for power
did not inhibit him from revelling in it. The darkness of Rome
was lit by gold. Looking back to Augustus and his heirs from 2,000
GETTY IMAGES/AKG-IMAGES/ALAMY The exhaustion of cruelty achievement, sadism and glamour, power-lust and celebrity –
years on, we, too, can recognise – in their mingling of tyranny and
“Nothing could be fainter than those torches
an aureate quality such as no dynasty since has ever quite
managed to match.
which allow us not to pierce the darkness but to
glimpse it.” So wrote Seneca, shortly before his
“Caesar is the state.” How this came to be so is a story no less
compelling, no less remarkable and no less salutary than it has
death in AD 65. The context of his observation
was a shortcut that he had recently taken while
ever been these past 2,000 years.
travelling along the Bay of Naples, down
TOM HOLLAND is a presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Making History.
a gloomy and dust-choked tunnel. “What
89
OCTOBER 2017