It is called the imperial presidency. For decades, presidents of both parties have pushed to expand the power of the office — President Trump has pushed very, very hard, and in ways that might leave some people wondering what year it is.
One of the people who may be wondering is the classicist Mary Beard, who knows better than most that wielding imperial power has a very long history. She reflected on how the political realities of ancient times still resonate today in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.
John Guida: Perhaps ancient Rome can help us think about, and try to make sense of, structures of power in today’s politics. When you see in Washington today plans for a hulking triumphal arch or a version of a gladiatorial fight on the lawn of the White House, what do you think?
Mary Beard: It is hard not to see a reflection of ancient Rome here. That goes without saying in the case of the triumphal arch. The whole tradition of these arches goes back to Rome itself (sometimes erected to commemorate a special victory, sometimes to commemorate Roman success more generally), and there are several ancient examples still standing (the Arch of Constantine, by the Colosseum, is one of the best known). They were copied by kings and dynasts in the West ever after, from boastful permanent monuments in marble to temporary structures in plaster put up to mark a particular festival.
It’s worth remembering, though, that the original Roman versions would have been probably showier than what the president plans, vulgar as that seems to me. The rather austere ancient monuments we now see have lost their gilding and gold fittings, their paint and the gilded sculptures often perched on top (rather outbidding Trump’s lions — don’t tell him!). It’s worth remembering, too, that the president isn’t the first to have wanted an arch in Washington. We only narrowly missed one originally planned in the 1980s to be part of the Navy Memorial. And of several others proposed, the only one that got built was a temporary plaster version over Pennsylvania Avenue to mark the end of World War I.
Guida: And then the Ultimate Fighting Championship spectacle at the White House marked the president’s 80th birthday.
Beard: Yes, cage fighting on the White House lawn really is reminiscent of Roman gladiatorial combat, hosted by emperors on a vast scale in the Colosseum, and more modestly at their own homes. Once again, though, the emperors outbid the president. I don’t just mean that some gladiators really did fight to the death. Many Roman emperors leaped into the arena to fight with the gladiators (probably in a very carefully staged way). The first “Gladiator” movie was right on that score — another thing we should probably keep from Trump.
Guida: So what role does spectacle play in holding or expanding power? How would you explain the difference, if you think there is one, between a Roman emperor’s attending fights at the Colosseum and a U.S. president’s planning a triumphal arch?
Beard: There are strong similarities between Rome and many later political systems, not only the modern United States. The emperor has to be seen, has to leave his mark, has to outbid earlier emperors. So Trump’s arch is planned to be a tiny bit higher than any other arch in the world. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, still standing in Rome, was designed to be a tiny bit taller than the earlier Trajan’s Column.
But spectacle could be risky, too. Why did emperors want to compete as a gladiator in the arena? Because they were frightened that the popular spotlight was on the gladiators, that they were being upstaged by gladiators … so the only way was to risk looking an idiot by joining them.
Guida: If we compare political systems: The Constitution structures the American version and features a system of separation of powers. There is now intense conflict about the relative strength (particularly the presidency) or weakness (Congress) of those powers.
Is it fair to say that the Roman Republic period — what you have described as a “sort-of democracy” — featured a very early version of separation of powers? Can you talk about how that was structured, and how that arrangement built an empire?
Beard: The fact is that the notional division of powers in Rome was often controversial and fought over. I call the Roman Republic (which was such an inspiration to the American founders) a “sort-of democracy” because the power of the individual ordinary man (and I do mean man) was formally defined as less than that of the individual aristocrat. Under very complicated voting arrangements, the votes of the poor counted for less than the votes of the rich. That said, major decisions of war and peace, elections and lawmaking were in the hands of popular assemblies (with all their inequities). The question was how the power of people related to that of the elected magistrates (consuls, etc.) and the Senate. By definition, the magistrates were all chosen from among the elite, and the Senate was nothing more than a council of all ex-magistrates that had no formal power, but a huge amount of authority.
Guida: How much do we actually know about that system?
Beard: This kind of government grew up in a period for which we have very little evidence. Later ancient writers themselves struggled to get their heads around this, and the best they came up with was the idea that Rome was a “mixed” constitution (part democracy, part aristocracy, part monarchical — they were thinking there of the powers of the magistrates). For us the weakness of the system is obvious. It was all very well when there was broad consensus at Rome. But conflict exposed the fault lines. What if the people wanted to flout the (ultimately informal) authority of the Senate?
It was partly this kind of conflict that brought about the fall of the Republic. There was a symbolic moment in the final conflict between Julius Caesar and his rival Pompey in the 40s B.C.E. The Senate tells both of them to disband their armies. They just ignore the instruction — because in the end, all the Senate had was authority, not power.
Guida: How did that evolve into rule by emperor?
Beard: The internal fractures that I have just been talking about are part of the story of the evolution of one-man rule. But an even bigger factor was empire. Rome’s vast empire was “acquired” (to put it euphemistically) during the period of the Republic. The emperors inherited the empire; they didn’t acquire it.
The central problem here was that the kind of governmental organization I have just described was fine for a small city-state, but very ill suited to governing a vast empire. For example, the magistrates (who were also military commanders) were elected for only one year at a time. By the first century B.C.E., it might have taken months just to reach conflicts at the margins of empire. And the sheer size of what was now “Rome” produced problems that were too big to be solved by very temporary officials. The Roman Republic began to give some individuals extra powers to deal with those problems. Pompey, for example, was given a huge command to deal with pirates — the Roman word for terrorist — across the Mediterranean.
But those powers in the end surpassed the traditional forms of government, and it was soon clear that the big politicians of the first century B.C.E., with the vast riches of empire behind them, were fighting to become one-man rulers. Julius Caesar was only the last of several attempts.
Guida: You have said that one-to-one comparisons of a contemporary president to an emperor don’t really hold up. What about discrete aspects? Does anything about Trump give off emperor vibes and remind you of certain strategies or characteristics of one or another emperor?
Beard: Comparing President Trump to a particular Roman emperor is a good party game, but no more. But you can see similarities between the practices of the current administration and the rule of the Roman emperors, and of many other dynasts through history.
One thing that strikes me is the habit of changing your mind. It is easy to take that as mere vacillation — why can’t the president just make his mind up about tariffs, Greenland or whatever? But it is a classic tactic of the power play of autocrats. Mind-changing is a form of control. It means that everyone, including your own advisers, have to keep listening to you, have to keep adjusting to your new view. There is a wonderful story along those lines told of the emperor Caligula, who in the first century C.E. decides to invade Britain, gets to the shores of the Channel, then says he has changed his mind, has his soldiers collect some seashells and goes back home. That’s power.
Guida: Was character important to the rule of an emperor? Was there any connection between good or bad character and the well-being of the empire?
Beard: The character of individual emperors is almost impossible to gauge. The simple reason is that the reputations of these rulers were in the hands of their successors. If an emperor died in his bed and was succeeded by his son and heir, he generally went down as a “good” emperor (it was in the interests of his successor to paint him as such). If he was assassinated, he was usually painted as a monster (he was so awful, the idea was, that he had to be overthrown). Some of those assassinated may have been monsters, but not all: They were seen as monsters because they were assassinated, not assassinated because they were monsters.
In general, though, the supposed characteristics of “good” emperors remained remarkably constant throughout the first centuries of imperial rule. They were generous, but not extravagant; they scored notable military victories; they erected buildings for the good of the community; and they were hospitable to the elite (nice, simple suppers up at the palace). “Bad” emperors were the reverse.
Guida: In the Trump era, longstanding arguments over American identity have re-emerged. In short, are we a creedal/propositional nation (unified by beliefs and ideals) or a nation defined by ethnic or religious identities (heritage, or blood-and-soil)?
You have written that ancient Rome was a (surprisingly) inclusive society, and Romans were willing to bring new members into their community and share the privileges of citizenship. Was that inclusivity contested — did “heritage” Romans define a much more narrow ideal of what it meant to be Roman?
Beard: This is one of the most striking and unexpected features of Rome. Now, Romans were not modern liberals, and there was plenty of nasty ethnocentricity. Greeks were often said to reek of perfume; emperors from “abroad” — and they increasingly came from outside Italy — were satirized for their odd accents.
But the basic principle of Rome was that you could become Roman. That was an idea that went back to the myths of Rome’s origins. One mythical founder of the city, Aeneas, was a refugee from Troy; the other more famous mythical founder, Romulus, made Rome an “asylum” welcoming all-comers. One of the central factors here is that you didn’t have to do much to express your Romanness (there’s no saluting the flag). And crucially it was always assumed that a Roman could have two “homes”: Rome and wherever their ancestors came from. The orator Cicero, for example, was Roman and from the little town of Arpinum.
Guida: The Trump Treasury Department would like to print a new $250 bill that could feature a portrait of him (federal law prohibits printing money with the image of a living person, so Congress would have to get involved). The department has also announced that his signature will appear on future U.S. currency.
How did Roman emperors use currency as a political tool, and did that shape citizens’ views of power and the powerful?
Beard: Coinage was crucial in Roman perception of imperial power. Julius Caesar was the first leader in the West in 44 B.C.E. (just before his assassination) to have his living head systematically on the coinage (plenty of the dead were portrayed on earlier coinage, but not the living). It was controversial, seen as a marker of excessive power, but it became absolutely standard after him. Even Brutus, one of his assassins, had his own head on coins a couple of years later.
The point was that forever after the inhabitants of the Roman Empire carried the emperor’s head around in their pockets (and we in Britain still do). One question for the Roman emperor was how to get his image out there. Coinage was one answer to that.
There were also written slogans on coins. How effective these were, we don’t know. Sometimes they seem a bit desperate, or hopeless wishful thinking. I think particularly of “The Harmony of the Armies,” which regularly appeared at times of civil war.
Guida: How did the role of elites — political, business, military — shift in the Republic versus the emperor eras of ancient Rome?
Beard: There was a lot of nostalgia among the elite for the Republic. But it was mostly no more than that. We like to think that the old elite would have been actively working to undermine the system of one-man rule, but they didn’t. They conspired against individual emperors, but not against the system of one-man rule itself. After the mid-first century C.E. (at the end of the rule of Caligula), we have no evidence for any publicly expressed desire at Rome to return to the Republic. It’s a regime built on collaboration.
Guida: Did citizens have any means of holding the powerful to account?
Beard: There was no longer any electoral system of all the citizens to hold the emperor to account, but the venues of popular entertainment were places where the general public could very clearly express their discontent. It’s no substitute for real power, but it was clearly quite frightening for the emperors. The Circus Maximus (where the chariot races happened) could hold over 200,000 spectators, perhaps 250,000, bigger than any modern sports stadium. When the crowd demanded changes there, emperors were wise to give in.
Guida: When Augustus cast a new imperial scheme, he did so, you said, “in the words and slogans and ideas of the old.” How do you separate rhetoric from the evolution, and reshaping, of power? What rules or norms that previously constrained power — perhaps particularly with the Senate? — were discarded or redefined, and how?
Beard: That’s exactly Augustus’ point: You can’t separate rhetoric from the reshaping of power. So far as the Senate was concerned, in some ways its power increased under the emperors. Its decrees had used to be merely advisory (“authoritative”). From Augustus on, they had the force of law.
But that is rather overshadowed by other factors, pulling in different ways. So, for example, you could paint the imperial regime as a military dictatorship. The emperor controls the army (for the first time all Roman soldiers were under a single commander). But an awful lot of power between emperor and Senate was negotiated face to face, in a dance of rhetoric and manners. In this the emperor was always the boss, but he could be exposed.
There is a nice story of a legal trial taking place in the Senate, of a man accused of treason. When it comes to a vote, one senator asks the emperor (who is part of the proceeding) whether he will be casting his vote first or last: If last, he said, he fears he might “vote the wrong way by mistake.” It’s a packed story: It is partly ostentatious deference. It partly exposes the power of the emperor. But the senator gets his own way, because the emperor is put in the position of being effectively forced to vote first and to vote for acquittal, to show his mercy — as the senator wanted.
Guida: We’ve heard a lot about flattery in the halls of power — often as applied to dealings with President Trump, whether it’s members of his own cabinet and sycophancy in the G.O.P. or as applied by global leaders. When it is noted, it is generally to criticize.
But you have suggested that in ancient Rome, flattery was an effective tool in interactions among the powerful, including the emperor. Does flattery get a bad rap today?
Beard: The anecdote I have just told is one answer to that. Paradoxically, flattery can be a means of power. That is not how we tend to think of it. We think of the need to flatter the person in power as demeaning. And so in a way it is, and it has always had a bad rap.
But it is also always more complicated. Flattery can always be ironic (showing up the person at whom it is directed) or, as in the senatorial anecdote, it can be used to get your own way (also showing that person up). But the bottom line is that flattery can disempower the flattered, not just the flatterer. Just imagine it: The emperor is the one person in the palace who knows that no one is ever telling him the truth.
Guida: Is it true that Rome’s administrative state was small by contemporary standards — that it lacked, in today’s terminology, state capacity? If so, did alliances help keep the state secure?
Beard: The administrative footprint of Rome was tiny by any modern standards. So, absolutely right, it ruled with the collaboration of the local elites — and for many of them the prospect of closer links with Rome, of Roman citizenship and the incorporation into the Roman elite itself was a clear incentive. The Roman emperors who came from “elsewhere” — for example, Trajan around the turn of the second century C.E. from Spain, Septimius Severus a century later from North Africa — were a symbol of that incorporation. Rome was essentially an empire of collaboration.
Guida: In the United States, Christopher Nolan’s new film “The Odyssey” opens soon. Why do you think this story remains compelling to contemporary audiences? Does Odysseus not having GPS to guide him home have anything to do with it — or the lack of technology more generally?
Beard: “The Odyssey” shows us that a GPS system will get you “home” only in the most limited sense! “The Odyssey” is compelling because it faces so cleverly all kinds of questions that we still face and ensures that we don’t overlook them: What does “home” mean? How do you grow up? What makes a good leader? How do you define the difference between civilization and barbarity? Is that as easy as we might think?
Mary Beard is the author, most recently, of “Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old” and a presenter (with Charlotte Higgins) of the podcast “Instant Classics” (and its companion, Bookclub). She is also classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and professor emerita of classics at University of Cambridge. John Guida is an editor in Times Opinion.
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