It is these precious survivals from the Roman world itself that have made it possible for the BBC television series to re-create in a compelling and dramatic way some of the key turning points in Rome’s history. Of course, we shall never know exactly what it was like to be there, or be able to reconstruct all the complicated motivations and aspirations of the characters concerned. And we have to recognize that the ancient historians on whom we partly depend were themselves sometimes resorting to imagination and guesswork; after all, how could Tacitus possibly have known what actually happened at the secret murder of Nero’s mother? But we have enough evidence to let us begin to get inside Roman heads, and to see the problems, dilemmas and conflicts from their point of view. We can tell a very good – and historical – story indeed.
This book complements the television series, as well as being a marvellous read in its own right. Focusing on the same pivotal moments, Simon Baker has put them into a broader context. He has filled out the historical background to each, and exposed some of the intriguing problems of the evidence on which the dramatic reconstructions are based. Sometimes we are confronted with conflicting versions of the same event. How do we choose between them? Sometimes the evidence simply dries up. Then, like Tacitus and all historians, we are forced to make good guesses and to use our imagination. The result is a history of Rome that combines vivid drama and a gripping story-line with a keen alertness to bigger historical questions, and to the challenges of drawing a clear narrative thread out of the evocative, but complicated and diverse, ancient evidence.
Ever since ancient times, people in the West have been retelling the history of Rome and re-creating it for their own purposes in fiction, painting and opera, and latterly in film and television. There have always been good and bad versions of this – cheesy clichés as well as powerful and arresting images and narratives. The figure of Julius Caesar has been a particular catalyst of such reconstructions. For centuries he has prompted some of the sharpest analyses of the nature of autocracy and liberty, and raised a question that remains with us even now: can political assassination ever be justified?
William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, itself loosely based on a translation of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, is only one of many reflections on the rights and wrongs of the case. The audience’s interest is divided between the title role of Caesar, killed less than halfway through the play, and the fate of his assassins, which dominates the second part. Do we feel that we are on Caesar’s side – a legitimate ruler illegally put to death? Or is the killer Brutus our hero for being prepared to murder even a friend in defence of popular liberty? How far do patriotism and political principles demand that we sometimes flout the law and ride roughshod over personal ties of friendship and loyalty?
Predictably enough, the answers proposed for these particular historical and literary conundrums were especially loaded around the period of the French Revolution. Voltaire, for example, presented a dramatic version of the events, which clearly had one eye on the execution of the French royal family when it unequivocally backed the assassins’ deeds as honourable. But twentieth-century politics also found good food for thought in the dilemmas raised by the events of the Ides of March, 44 BC. Orson Welles’s debut production at the famous Mercury Theatre in New York in 1937 was a staging of Julius Caesar, which (in a then daring experiment with modern dress) had the cast of Caesar’s supporters kitted out as Mussolini’s fascist thugs.
Not all the characters discussed in this book have had quite such an enduring shelf life. Tiberius Gracchus, for example, is not exactly a modern household name. In fact, outside academic ancient history, posterity has served his mother Cornelia rather better than it has served him. A model of devoted (and ambitious) parenthood, she is supposed to have turned her nose up at the rich jewels being shown off by a friend – pointing to her sons instead as her ‘treasures’. In her doting maternal role she starred in a whole series of eighteenth-century paintings, usually depicted with a pair of (to us) rather priggish boys at her side, and looking decidedly sniffy at the strings of pearls and suchlike being trailed in front of her. And, again in her parental role, she makes a striking appearance alongside other Western heroes, from the Greek tragedian Sophocles to the emperor Charlemagne and Christopher Columbus, in the famous nineteenth-century memorial stained glass at Harvard University. But even Tiberius has recently enjoyed a certain celebrity, being used as a pointed comparison for the occasional modern politician (such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela) known as a radical or revolutionary reformer.
The emperor Nero, however, has had almost as busy an afterlife in Western culture as Caesar. One of the greatest and earliest Italian operas, Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppaea (1642), explores the intense relationship between the emperor and his mistress Poppaea. A case study in devious manipulation, as well as in the power of passionate love, she is depicted cynically disposing of all the obstacles in her path towards marriage with the emperor – including the opposition of the moralizing but virtuous Seneca. The opera ends with Poppaea being gloriously crowned as empress of Rome. But a well-informed audience will already know that this victory will be short-lived, as Poppaea is destined soon to die after a vicious blow from Nero himself (a scene powerfully dramatized in the BBC series). It is a chilling and timeless exploration of passion, ruthlessness and immorality.
More often, though, Nero has found a decidedly lurid role in modern popular culture, especially in film. The classic image of a luxury-loving and decadent emperor, he has been portrayed countless times consuming unlikely foods (dormice and pretty little songbirds, as the usual cliché of Roman dietary habits would have it) amid grape-strewn orgies, cackling over his megalomaniac schemes to rebuild Rome after the great fire of AD 64 and ‘fiddling while Rome burned’.
Much of this is the product of modern elaboration and the projection of all our stereotypes of Roman luxury on to the convenient figure of Nero. But the theme of ‘fiddling’ (that is, ‘playing the violin’ – not, as it is often now taken to be, ‘footling aimlessly’) goes back to an ancient story that, while Rome was in flames, the emperor climbed up a tower to get a good view of the blaze and sang a song on the destruction of the legendary city of Troy. True or not, this was no doubt meant to portray the emperor as a self-obsessed artist, utterly out of touch with practical realities. In fact, as recounted in Chapter III, whatever his artistic ambitions, Nero seems to have taken eminently sensible steps to cope with the immediate aftermath of the fire.
There was also a story that he looked for scapegoats to blame for starting the fire, and picked on the early Christian community in the city – whose view that the end of the world was nigh may well have made the accusation more plausible. To make an example of the Christians, according to Tacitus, he crucified them or burnt them alive (using them, it is said, as lamps to brighten the night). It was the first Christian ‘persecution’, and St Peter may have been one of the victims.
This has given another distinctive theme to modern portrayals of Nero. Film and fiction have indulged in touching but entirely implausible fantasies of Christian heroism in the face of Neronian tyranny – often enlivening the picture with the subplot of a pretty young Christian girl converting her young pagan boyfriend, and taking him with her to a noble but gory death (usually involving lions). Many of these stories are versions of a best-selling novel, Quo Vadis, by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, which was published in the nineteenth century and quickly translated into almost every European language (the title, meaning ‘Where are you going?’, is taken from words addressed by Peter to Jesus).