Read a Q&A with Mary Beard! | Twelve Caesars

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including the best-selling history of ancient Rome, SPQR and has made several documentaries for the BBC (from Meet the Romans to The Shock of the Nude).

Today, Mary Beard is on the blog to answer a few of our questions about her new book, Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern. Read on …

Mary Beard

Please tell us about your book, Twelve Caesars!

MB: It is about the images of Roman emperors — especially the first twelve of them — that we still see all around us. There are those predictable line-ups of busts on museum shelves (though I am trying to show that they are not quite so predictable as you might think). But I’m also looking at modern cartoons (like Mr Trump dressed up as ‘The emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned’), modern paintings recreating some of the most dramatic moments of ancient Roman history and even a chocolate emperor’s head made by a Turkish artist. You’ll find here a vast range of imperial faces, from an ancient head of (perhaps) Julius Caesar pulled out of the River Rhone a few years ago, through masterpieces by Mantegna and Titian, to some sculpture by the nineteenth-century African-American artist, Edmonia Lewis – and more.

Why was it important to you to write this story?

MB: I wanted to make these images interesting again. We all tend to walk past Roman emperors when we see them lined-up in museums (confession: I do). I wanted to explore their ancient and modern stories and put some of the excitement back in. I hope I have shown that emperor spotting can open up a new way of looking at some very ‘taken-for-granted’ works of art. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be able to tell your Nero’s from your Titus’s before you start (most Romans probably couldn’t either).

What interests you as a writer and historian about approaching history from an artistic perspective?

MB: Historians can be a bit too preoccupied with written texts. One of the ways most of us understand and debate the past is through the images we see. We miss a lot if we don’t look at the images too. I can’t claim to be an ‘art historian’ in the strictest sense of the word, but I have looked at a whole range of paintings and sculptures with the eye of a student of the ancient world. And I think I have found some things that the art historical experts have missed.

Within the past year, we’ve seen lots of statues of historical figures torn down across the world. What role do you think art will continue to play in documenting our current political figures and how might future generations respond to that?

MB: Our current ‘statue-wars’ are one of the reasons that these imperial images are so interesting. They were put up by people who knew that they were not admirable characters (and a lot of them were horribly assassinated). So why immortalise them in marble? I am not sure that I have the total answer, but I do think they remind us that statues are not only about commemorating our heroes, but also about making us think harder about how we relate to the past. We shouldn’t forget that statues are a bit more complicated than they might seem.

Is there a particular artwork or representation from history that is particularly memorable or significant to you? If so, why?

MB: There are hundreds. One I got attached to when I was writing the book was J. W. Waterhouse’s ‘The remorse of Nero after the murder of his mother’. It shows the murderous, mother-killing tyrant lying on his bed a bit like a moody teenager – which is what, of course, he also was.

What do you love about reading and writing history?

MB: I love the fact that it is both about the past and the present. There is a real pleasure in connecting as best we can with what happened, and why, 2000 years ago. But it always gives us a different perspective on the present too. I don’t mean that ancient Rome provides answers to our own problems, off the peg. I mean that history encourages us to look at ourselves through a different lens.

What is the last book you read and loved?

MB: I just finished Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, which is a brilliant exploration of civil war in Cyprus, and how that ripples down to twenty-first century London. And it has a very special role for a fig-tree (I didn’t think that was going to work, but it did).

What do you hope readers will discover in Twelve Caesars?

MB: I hope they will be surprised by how varied and unexpected the images of Roman emperors are, in the modern as well as the ancient. I also hope that it will mean that people don’t ever glaze over again in a museum when they walk past a line-up of Roman imperial faces. I hope they will linger a while, not hurry on.

And finally, what’s up next for you?

MB: This book has been focused on images and largely on those produced after the Renaissance. For my next book, I am going back more directly to the ancient world and am going to write what is almost a sequel to SPQR. It’s not really a chronological sequel, but it is concentrating on the rule of the emperors from the first century BCE to the third century CE. I am trying to go beyond individual biographies to some of the big questions. How did the emperors rule the Roman world? Why have some become symbols of monstrous tyranny? Where did they live and what on earth did they do all day?

Thanks Mary!

—Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern by Mary Beard (Princeton University Press) is out now.

Twelve Caesars

Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern

by Mary Beard

What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore?

In this book—against a background of today's "sculpture wars"—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the "Twelve Caesars," from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian...

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