Mary Beard’s excellent new book, Emperor of Rome, begins with a timeline of Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus that gives each emperor’s years of reign, a quick fact or two, and often, his manner of death. But these three pages are the last time that Beard presents her readers with anything like a forced march through Roman history. Indeed, her book is specifically designed not to do that, and Beard sounds somewhat exhausted by the idea that she might. “Mercifully, this book is not a history of almost thirty individual rulers, one after the other.”

　　Instead, Beard is interested in cutting through the stultifying lists of names and the accumulated weight of sensationalist stories attached to them to work out what Roman emperors did with their time. What was, roughly, the job description of the emperor? How was their work carried out? Putting aside misbegotten impressions from centuries of propaganda, what was the life of the emperor really like? With chapters on the basics of one-man rule; the complexities of succession; the arts of Roman dining, palace architecture, and sculpture; palace inhabitants; job duties; travel, and, finally, death and deification, Beard’s book revels in trying to determine exactly what emperors did and how they did it.

　　The book’s first chapter, “One-Man Rule: The Basics,” uses Pliny’s speech of praise to Trajan and Augustus’s essay, What I Did to determine what the expectations were for the job of the emperor. “He should conquer, he should be a benefactor, and he should sponsor new buildings or restore those that have fallen into disrepair.” Additionally, Augustus’s essay points careful readers to two important imperial principles of power: military rule and a reconstruction of democracy toward imperial ends. The emperor personally controlled all the military forces in the empire, a “big stick” that an anecdote about Hadrian sums up with the comment, “A man who commands thirty legions always knows best.” 

　　That overwhelming military might surely supported the imperial need to “reconfigure Rome’s sort-of democracy” by keeping the external structures of democracy in place while putting the actual functions under the emperors control. Elections, for example, continued to exist, but were essentially just a rubber stamping of the emperor’s selected officials. In the kind of lively illustrative detail that Beard uses so effectively throughout the book, she reminds us that the “voting hall” whose construction was begun by Julius Caesar was used for gladiatorial shows by Augustus.

　　But it is not the vision of Roman military might or the grand restructuring of political systems that primarily interests Beard. In a branch of history that is often understandably caught up in the flashy, the anecdotal, the spectacular, and the martial, Beard is delightfully and unabashedly interested in paperwork. As a result, for me, the most surprisingly engaging chapter of the book focuses on the desk job of being emperor.

　　As Beard points out in her introduction, despite the noted excesses of the empire, it makes no sense to think it could have survived if it were ruled by a “series of deranged autocrats.” So how did the work get done? Mostly, it was done by mail, it turns out, as local administrators in the hundreds wrote to the emperor to ask about everything from refurbishing the city baths to oppressing Christians to creating fire brigades. The emperor’s advice and consent were needed for everything, and he seems to have been constantly reading.

　　Beard points us to Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan—a selection of 100 business letters were preserved by Pliny—and the way the letters capture the frustration of letters that take four months to arrive, but that must cover every detail. Any beleaguered modern CEO can surely sympathize as Beard opens the emperor’s mailbag for us and lets us read the contents and the “repeated refrain” of “I think you could decide this for yourself.” The chapter leaves us with the injunction to picture the Roman emperor always, “with his trademark pen in hand—and also with his piles of cash, hoarded, extorted, thrown from the rooftops and branded with his own head.”

　　Beard’s book is a reminder that the public face of a powerful political figure often bears no relation to the truth.

　　If the image of a togaed emperor stuck glumly at his writing desk is less entrancing for readers of this review than it is for me, other chapters of Beard’s book have different charms, though the approach of cutting through the mask of Roman Imperial history to try to access its truths remains the same.

　　Beard’s chapter on images of the emperor is a fine example. On coins, medallions, and jewelry, in wall paintings, dishes, and even on gaming pieces, as well as on thousands of statues, the face of the emperor was everywhere. How accurate were those portraits? And how could those thousands of statues preserving the emperor’s official image have made it to every corner of the empire?

　　We cannot begin to see who was directing this operation, who was making what we might call the “propaganda” decisions, still less who was making the models or the sculptures themselves. Even though they were part of one of the most significant moments of artistic change in the history of the world, we cannot name a single sculptor of any of the marble and bronze portraits of Augustus that have survived.

　　Beard attends to the ordinary and leaves us wonderstruck.

　　It happens again and again in Emperor of Rome. Beard takes us to the grisly abattoir of the gladiatorial ring and outlines the grim orderliness of its spectacle. Where did people sit, and in what order? Could the empire really have borne the cost of slaughtering the mass quantities of animals and gladiators reported in ancient accounts? We visit the famed feasts of imperial dining halls, and Beard explores the feats of engineering that enabled them as well as exploring their political importance for creating a consistent and unifying image of empire as well as a sense that Rome—and the emperor—were everywhere. She recounts the ignominious deaths of emperors, the speed with which their faces and names were chiseled off statues and monuments and replaced by their successors, who simultaneously proclaimed these predecessors as gods.

　　Through it all, Beard’s goal is to penetrate the storied parade of imperial names to find the facts that lie beneath.

　　Beard’s book is a fascinating and readable work of history. But it is also, in troubled political times, a reminder that the public face of a powerful political figure often bears no relation to the truth. The famously over-the-top imperial dinners could be seen as an unpardonable excess of luxury or as the height of sophisticated dining. The emperor who was a figure of power and terror was the same emperor to whom one wrote about small local land disputes or lost livestock.Beard reminds us that “the toolkit with which people have constructed an image of their rulers, judged them, debated the character of an autocrat’s power and marked the distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’ has always included fantasy, gossip, slander and urban myth.” Her work on the details helps us to penetrate the fantasy and to discern, maybe, something of the “real” emperor.

　　A moment that crystallizes this approach for her readers is her description of a triumphal celebration of Trajan’s military victories in Mesopotamia. Beard writes:

　　It is easy to see the major problem this presented for [Trajan’s successor] Hadrian. How was he to mark the successful campaigns of his predecessor, who was already dead? The answer was that a model of the dead emperor was made, probably out of wax, and that was processed in a chariot around the city. And all of this was to celebrate some conquests … that, by the time of the triumph, were already in the process of being given up.

　　Autocracy, Beard warns us, “replaces reality with sham.” The more we look at its spectacle, the less clearly we see it. We must look at the overlooked, the detailed, the dull paperwork if we ever hope to see what is really going on in Imperial Rome or in our own time. Put it on your shelf as a useful companion to Gibbon and other more traditional histories of imperial Rome.