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The most famous film version of this book was made in 1951, starring Peter Ustinov as a villainous Nero with an upper-class English accent (the goodies were American). But, as always, even if villainous, Nero did retain an aura of glamour too. In fact, the film’s makers, MGM, promoted it with a series of ‘tie-in’ products. These included some gaudy boxer shorts and pyjamas, advertised under the slogan ‘Make like Nero!’ Persecutor of the Christians he may have been, but – or so the implied message was – it was still fun to feel like ruler of the world by sporting Nero’s brand of underwear.

As we look back, some of the ways that past generations (even relatively recent ones) have re-created the Romans and Roman history can seem strange, unappealing or downright laughable. We can hardly see how Shakespeare’s actors strutting the stage in their own Elizabethan costume could ever have done plausible duty as Romans – though we are, I suspect, more sympathetic (inconsistent as it may be) to Orson Welles’s fascist thugs. It is almost equally hard to take seriously those wooden paragons of virtue in so many Hollywood movies, dressed up in white sheets, and orating in a pretentious fashion – as if they had jumped straight out of the nineteenth-century House of Commons or a schoolboy’s Latin textbook.

But we do still retain a soft spot for the marvellous images of Roman debauchery and cruelty set in luxurious baths, at dinner parties or the amphitheatre. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, for example, staged some really compelling scenes of butchery and mass crowd dynamics in the Colosseum; though, interestingly, these were largely based not on the ruins themselves, but on nineteenth-century paintings (which Scott found more convincing and impressive than the real thing). We can enjoy too those fictional re-creations of Roman life ‘below stairs’, such as the classic musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which first appeared on Broadway in 1962, was made into a film in 1966, and was revived at the National Theatre in London in 2004). This drew on the traditions of ancient Roman comedy itself, but owed much of its appeal to the glimpse it offered of what might have happened beneath the glittering marble veneer of the city.

Part of the reason that some of these older visions of Rome now seem to us so unconvincing is that our understanding of Roman history and culture has changed in the interim. New information continues to be discovered. For example, our picture of life on a Roman army base has been enriched in the last few years by private letters and other documents (including the famous invitation to a birthday party from one officer’s wife to another) unearthed at the fort of Vindolanda in northern England. In Italy one of the most impressive discoveries of the twentieth century was the excavation of a large villa at Oplontis, near Pompeii, which seems to have belonged to the family of Nero’s wife, Poppaea, and allows us to reconstruct her background with much greater confidence. And it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that we obtained a full, reliable text of the autobiography of the emperor Augustus, which had been discovered inscribed on the wall of a Roman temple (dedicated to Augustus as a god) in Ankara.

No less significant are the changing interpretations of old evidence. One particular debate, which is acutely relevant to our account of Tiberius Gracchus and Julius Caesar, concerns the underlying motivations of Roman politicians, especially in the hundred years or so before Julius Caesar’s rise to power. One view, prevalent for much of the last century, is that there was very little ideological difference between the opposing political leaders. What was at stake was no more and no less than naked, personal power. If some (such as Gracchus or Caesar) chose to rely on the support of the people rather than the aristocratic Senate, that was simply because it offered the most direct route to the power they yearned for. Increasingly, this has come to seem to a new generation (as, in fact, it had already seemed to our predecessors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) an inadequate way of seeing the debates and political struggles of the period. It is hard to make sense of the violent clashes around Tiberius Gracchus without imagining that a meaningful conflict about the distribution of wealth in the state was at stake. And it is this view that the television series and this book have followed.

In many ways, though, changing images of Rome are a consequence of each generation looking for something different in Roman history. True, some things remain fairly constant. It seems very unlikely, for example, that we shall ever shake off our notion of Rome as a culture that is somehow larger than life, for good or ill. The sheer extent of its empire and the size of its monuments, such as the Colosseum, will probably ensure that. But recent historians have tended to shine their spotlight on aspects of Rome that their predecessors left barely illuminated.

They have, for example, chosen to look beyond the monumental centre of the city. Certainly, from the period of Augustus onwards, the heart of Rome was packed with temples, theatres and public buildings of all sorts, constructed not just from white marble, but also from precious multicoloured marble embossed with gold and occasionally encrusted with jewels. It must have been a staggering sight to any visitor from more ‘barbarian’ provinces, such as Britain or Germany. But there was always a seedier side. This was not only the poor back-street world that A Funny Thing. . . tried to capture. But also, before the age of Augustus (who boasted that he had transformed Rome from a place of brick to one of marble), the whole city was much less glittering and grand, certainly not full of the planned urban spaces, promenades and porticoes of popular perception. Frankly, with the exception of just one or two neighbourhoods, it probably looked more like Kabul than New York. And it was about as violent.

Part and parcel of these changes of vision is a growing tendency to question the image of ancient Romans as somehow very like us (or perhaps more like our imperialist Victorian ancestors) – different only in the sense that they wore togas and, picturesquely but no doubt uncomfortably, ate their dinners lying down. Historians now tend to find their fascination with the Romans lies as much in their foreignness as in their comfortable familiarity. Their norms of sexual behaviour, of gender difference, of ethnicity were quite different from ours. They lived in a world (as one historian recently put it) ‘full of gods’, and the élite were served by battalions of slaves, a whole subordinate population of humans who lived outside the rights and privileges of humanity. The account given in this book, and in the television reconstruction, tries to incorporate some sense of that difference between them and us.

Of course, all reconstructions are inevitably provisional. And the implication of these changing attitudes to Roman culture (and they are bound to go on changing) is that our own modern version of Rome, however historically grounded it is, is likely to appear in a hundred years’ time as quaintly old-fashioned as nineteenth-century reconstructions now look to us.

But why bother with the Romans at all? Partly because, in Europe at least, they are still with us. Their precious treasures, artworks, bric-a-brac and kitsch fill our museums. The monuments sponsored by several of the key players in this book are still prominent landmarks in Rome: the great arches of Titus and Constantine are the best known of the city; the Colosseum, built with the profits of the Jewish War, is visited by millions of tourists a year; Nero’s extravagant Golden House can still be explored underground. Further afield, the traces of their activity mark the landscape across their empire – in our road networks, our town plans and our place names (it is almost certain that any British town or village whose name ends in ‘-chester’ is sitting directly on top of a Roman camp or castra). And, of course, their surviving literature – from elegant love poetry to thundering epic, from hard-headed history to self-serving memoirs – is as impressive, acute and provocative as any in the world, and it is worth all the attention we can give it.