Poured Over: Mary Beard on Twelve Caesars

“And imagine what did it feel like to think this was new? Their life, all kinds of different images as time goes on, and people in the Renaissance and later want to recreate for themselves, particularly in painting, but not always in painting….what it is to create a likeness of someone who’s been dead for a millennium or more?” Historian and bestselling author Mary Beard (SPQR, Women & Power, Confronting the Classics) joins us on the show to talk about her new book, Twelve Caesars, what it means to make a likeness if you’ve never met your subject, power and representation and propaganda, trying to help us see under-appreciated museum displays (tapestries and coins to start) with fresh eyes, and more. Featured book: Twelve Caesars by Mary Beard. Produced/hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.

Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

From this episode…

B&N: But is our knowledge of Rome and Roman emperors and the Roman Empire, are those images based more in interpretations from the Renaissance than they are from the actual Roman sources?

Mary Beard: They’re a wonderful mixture. And I mean, I think part of the fun and this is also part of the kind of you have to let yourself go a bit line is that, yes, an enormous amount of kind of influence on our images of the Roman world and these Roman people comes through the Renaissance. Well, the Renaissance wasn’t inventing it completely new. They were also looking back to ancient texts to ancient sculptures, some of which they misidentified, some of which we misidentify. And so it’s a wonderful, rather exciting amalgam of all sorts of influences. And there are some characters and famous sculptures who come into take very high prominence for a while where everybody says, that is the best ancient image of X Julius Caesar that we have. And then 50 years later, that image has been overthrown. And we’ve chosen another one. So it’s a kind of marvelously shifting set of categories, which I think makes it more exciting.

B&N: You’ve always been very clear, though, that you engage in history, and that it’s a conversation that there is nuance that we need to challenge some of the conventional wisdom, I guess, is the phrase I’m looking for. And I want to go back to Caesar for a second, because everyone has an opinion about Caesar. He’s essentially a pop culture icon at this point, whether it’s modern television, or modern film, or certainly Shakespeare’s plays, and whatnot….Part of the reason I want to come back to is the idea that all of these images represent a story that’s being told. And the question is who’s telling the story. And you mentioned that Caesar is the first emperor who put his image on coins in the Roman Empire. And this then goes from there, but we’re not really clear, who’s carving the images, who’s making them available, who’s decided that that, in fact is the image–you have a great story about the head that they find in the river Rhone at Arles, and a Frenchman says, Wait a minute, this is wild. And he says something very funny, and I’ll let readers discover it on their own. But you even think that this is not a head of Caesar. So how did we get here?

You’ve always been very clear, though, that you engage in history, and that it’s a conversation that there is nuance that we need to challenge some of the conventional wisdom, I guess, is the phrase I’m looking for. And I want to go back to Caesar for a second, because everyone has an opinion about Caesar. He’s essentially a pop culture icon at this point, whether it’s modern television, or modern film, or certainly Shakespeare’s plays, and whatnot. And the reason I want to come back to it, or part of the reason I want to come back to is the idea that all of these images represent a story that’s being told. And the question is who’s telling the story. And you mentioned that Caesar is the first emperor who put his image on coins in the Roman Empire. And this then goes from there, but we’re not really clear, who’s carving the images, who’s making them available, who’s decided that that, in fact is the image– you have a great story about the head that they find in the river Rhone at Arles, a Frenchman says, Wait a minute, this is wild. And he says something very funny, and I’ll let readers discover it on their own. But you even think that this is not ahead of Caesars. So how did we get here?

Mary Beard: Just to go back one stage, I think a lot of people, me included, walk round art museums, and we look at lineups of Roman busts, named “little label with some Emperor’s name.” And first of all, we glaze over. They’re not exactly the stars of the modern art gallery. That’s part of what my book wants to try to do, to get it bring these wallflowers into the spotlight. But what nobody sort of ever tells you is that all these busts were identified not because there was any label that came down from antiquity on, you know, there was no carved letters at the bottom, saying this is Julius Caesar. They’re identified by mixing and matching and looking at them and comparing them to other things that have been identified as Julius Caesar, so there is a kind of black hole at the center of this. And that black hole is surrounded by some things we really know very well, like, Julius Caesar was the first Roman to try to flood the world with his image. What does it mean to be an autocrat? Well, Cesar sees that you’ve got to get your image out there. And he’s very modern, in that sense…. There’s, you know, a very straightforward idea in a kind of world before our own sort of mass media, what you want to do with your put your face into the field of vision of people in the Roman Empire. And he certainly does that….We have no idea who decided that Julius Caesar, his head would go on the coins, for example, or that Julius Caesar would ship off sculptures to all around Italy and further afield, you know, and you can you can have fantasy imaginings about Caesar and his mate sitting down to dinner and saying, you know how but brilliant idea, I’ve got a brilliant idea, let’s put your head on the coins. And that may indeed be what happened. But the processes of this are just lost to us. And they’re not just lost to us. For Julius Caesar, I think it’s fair to say we have no idea who it was who sculpted any of the ancient portraits or Roman emperors, anywhere, or at any period. So it’s a kind of strange, again, sort of slightly fragile ground to be standing on because we call these things portraits and they are portrayed but rather modern romantic view of portraits, which really stresses the relationship between the artist with their sculptor or painter and a sitter and thinks about what kind of image of the sitter the artists capture.

B&N: You have an interesting question when you’re talking about all this. And you say, What constitutes a likeness has always been one of the big questions of art history and theory from Plato to Ai Wei Wei. And I love the connection from Plato to Ai Wei Wei, but I’d like to talk to you about this a little more, because I do think in many ways, from what I’ve learned from your book, it sounds like controlling the emperors image was a form of propaganda, it was a form of, call it press relations, before we had these things. So is it just solely about the power? Or are they trying to also cement their legacy? Can they separate the two?

Mary Beard: I think if we go back to the emperors themselves, it was an imaginative attempt to transmit their power….When we look at these series of emperors–this is why we walk past them, frankly, in art museums–is that that particular image of political power has become so normalized for us. Basically, we are a slightly different version of it with men in suits, but it’s very much how we have come to assume Roman power looks is a kind of conservative version of that. We think of it as a bit uninteresting, I think. I suppose what I want to say is look, go back to 10 B.C., or 20 A.D., and this is a radical new version of what it is to be a leader. When you see that image of Augustus or Tiberius, or Caligula, it knocks you in your face, it’s new (it isn’t a wrinkly one), that this is power representing itself in a completely different way. It must have been gobsmacking to see that it, almost upsetting, I think, to see that new image of power. And I think one of the things one has to say is that yes, it is about propaganda, your shorthand term for it, but it is so successful an innovation in propaganda that we now take it absolutely for granted. And imagine what did it feel like to think this was new? Their life (and all kinds of different images as time goes on), and people in the Renaissance and later want to recreate for themselves, particularly in painting, but not always in painting….they have to ask themselves, what it is to create a likeness of someone who’s been dead for a millennium or more?