Historian and nonfiction titan Mary Beard makes another foray into antiquity with Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World. With so much time and distance between us and the Romans, and such scant resources available, it can be challenging to connect with ancient rulers in the same manner as those from only a century or two ago. Beard seeks to bridge this gap with Emperor of Rome, taking the reader into the daily lives of Caesar, Caligula, and others while parsing through formal rituals, dinner etiquette, assassination attempts, and a trail of difficult mothers. There is no denying Beard's intellect or passion, but by pursuing a thematic outline rather than a chronological one, Emperor of Rome can be difficult to follow for those of us without much foreknowledge of the ancient world, and the prose is not captivating enough to make up the difference.

Mary Beard is one of the most renowned and respected historians of ancient Rome and in this book, she delves into a comprehensive look at the Roman emperors. Rather than studying them chronologically, she has organized her book into themes and lenses (such as women, slavery, food, administration, etc.) covering details with an engaging style, making the book enjoyable and easy to read.

However, the book is not perfect. It lacks some historical criticism and depth in some areas and sometimes glosses over important events and figures. It also does not provide a clear chronological framework, which can make it confusing for some readers. Those looking for an academic treatise may be disappointed, as the book is more aimed at the popular history crowd.

Overall, this book is a testament to Beard’s passion and expertise, and a delight to read. I recommend it to anyone interested in learning about the Roman Empire.

Mary Beard should be listed under essential reading for all history buffs. Tackling the complexities of what it means to be emperor, Beard encapsulates this through a thematic approach and unveils their day-to-day decisions, problems, and tasks. Her points are refreshing and thought-provoking, showing how even some of the most powerful men dealt with very similar and tedious problems that we do today.

Thank you W.W. Norton & Company, Netgalley and the author Mary Beard for a copy of this ebook in exchange for my honest review.
This book was absolutely phenomenal. I really appreciated how it delved into details we don't often consider when we study Roman emperors, and I think that this book provides really great insight into how we view these men. I also appreciated that Beard made it accessible for people who don't know a ton about Rome while keeping at level that is truly a deep dive. This book is easily 5 stars.

A new nonfiction from the author of SPQR. While Beard’s first book focuses on the Roman Republic, this one shifts to focusing on the empire. Instead of a formulaic recounting of emperors, she dives more into what the life of a Roman emperor was like. Beard does a great job avoiding technical writing so that anyone can read this and enjoy it. I also liked the different approach to the empire! It was a new take on the subject.

I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In Emperor of Rome, celebrated classicist Mary Beard sets us straight on the autocrats who ran the show in the imperial city. Forget those Technicolor epics from the 1950s and 60s. The emperor’s job rarely called for scooting off a batch of Christians to the Colosseum or staging caged-captive roll-abouts through town.

Beard’s Emperor is a sweeping survey of dictatorial practices and predilections in the two centuries following the assassination of Julius Caesar. Think of it as an antidote for tired pop-media accounts of hijinks on the (Capitoline) Hill. And you can count on Beard to trump the movies with fresh takes on a cast of characters often humorous, often shocking, often repulsive.

Drawing on contemporary accounts that can claim at least a scintilla of plausible veracity, Beard spotlights the routine, the quirky, and, yes, the murderous habits of rulers from Augustus through Alexander Severus. There were just 20 of these emperors, not counting the unlucky seven doomed upstarts who briefly grasped at power during two short periods of civil war.

But Emperor of Rome is no standard-issue chronological history. It’s a topical overview — and a terrifically entertaining one at that — with Beard selectively zooming in on the lives of her autocrats as they conduct the affairs of state, receive or wave off favor-seekers, and fete their subjects with banquets and arena shows. Surprisingly often, they take the imperial juggernaut on the road, with bulging entourages numbering in the high hundreds. The intent of these road trips: to show the flag in distant provinces, put down regional uprisings, or unwind on long vacations.

The destinations on these jaunts could range from North Africa to the Middle East or to Greece, Germania, and beyond — even to the empire’s edges at the border of present-day Scotland. Trajan (r. 98-117 CE) was the most traveled of Beard’s cohort, leaving Italy on two extended forays that took up the better part of four years.

Clearly, Roman emperors got away with a lot until they didn’t. About half of Beard’s 20 died by assassination (a few rumored but most reliably reported by solid sources). But life was good for the top guys as long as it lasted. Their positions made them the richest people in the empire, able to commingle their personal fortunes — substantial in their own right — with those of the national treasury. And their prominent subjects, when they died, were required to leave their own acquired wealth to the boss.

All of Beard’s emperors offer abundant examples of sovereign excess. Take Elagabalus, a cross-dressing Syrian teenager who ruled from 218-222 CE. He apparently loved to stage grand banquets for his subjects. There were color-coded dinners, where all the offerings were of the same hue (put your imagination to work on this one), and there were meals where guests’ couches were fitted with giant whoopee cushions (Beard credits him as the inventor of these devices).

And then there were repasts where “tame lions, leopards, and bears” were released to wander among the unsuspecting, dozing diners, some of whom, it’s said, were startled to death upon awakening to the hot breath of a slavering beast in their faces. Also, Elagabalus “once reputedly showered his fellow partygoers with flower petals in such over-generous quantities that the guests were smothered and suffocated.”

Another contemporary source, Cassius Dio, reports that the same Elagabalus “asked doctors to give him female private parts by means of an incision.” We can only assume — Beard and history being silent on the procedure’s outcome — that it was unsuccessful and non-fatal, as he, too, was ultimately a victim of assassination, though not on the operating table.

Another autocrat, Commodus (r. 180-192 CE), apparently fancied himself an action hero, training and sparring with gladiators and taking on, after his fashion, a horde of bears in the arena:

“In 192 CE, just a few weeks before he was killed by his trainer in a palace coup, [Commodus] hosted fourteen days of bloody shows…in which he himself was one of the star performers…The emperor opened the murderous proceedings by killing one hundred bears. It was more a tribute to his accuracy of aim than to his bravery, for…he speared them with javelins from the safety of gangways specially constructed above the arena.”

After reading Emperor of Rome, you can amaze your friends with example after example of peculiar behaviors from the men in charge: Vespasian imposing a tax on urine, Nero treading the boards as a theatrical performer while emperor, and Caligula, armed with a real dagger, killing a gladiator equipped with a wooden one.

Still, this is much more than a cabinet of curiosities. Beard supplies a wealth of fascinating background, much of it seriously informative, on the habits and practices of rulership in an era that few non-specialists would otherwise have the occasion to discover.

A nice survey of Roman emperorship (at least in the hey-day of the empire). Certainly not the only book you'd want to have on Roman history (and less comprehensive than Beard's previous <i>SPQR</i>), but it's got a different slant on historical writing than I usually encounter. Recommended to those already interested in Roman history (and who have read some other books or listened to other podcasts on the topic already).

While I enjoyed every word of Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome, I can’t say it was a conducive time of year for me to read it. I was beset by work and personal concerns and it took such a long time to get through it. As a reader, this is the worst kind of reading: I need steady, continuous reading to fully appreciate a narrative, whether fiction or non-fiction. Maybe I’m old, or distracted, or both, but I lose the author’s thread and purpose if not. What I was grateful for, therefore, and what grounded me in Beard’s history of the Roman emperors, were her voice and approach.

Beard has a breezy, casual tone to writing popular history that belies her erudition and expertise. She writes like a great history lecturer, one of the best experiences of my liberal arts education, and reading her feels like she’s sitting next to me and telling me great, interesting stuff. She tells us early on that her intent is “to set free [ancient texts and documents] from the lecture room and the research seminar.” Her approach too helped me keep focus, over a protracted reading time, on her narrative: she doesn’t tell us about the Roman emperors chronologically, but concentrates on different aspects of their lives (food, clothing, spectacle, even paperwork, etc.) so that the emperor you meet in chapter one is also the emperor you learn about in every chapter, from a different angle. To orient us further, the details from the publisher’s blurb:

In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome. Now she shines her spotlight on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE). Emperor of Rome is not your usual chronological account of Roman rulers, one after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius.

Beard asks bigger questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? She tracks down the emperor at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven. She introduces his wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers—and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters into his hands. Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman (and our own) fantasies about what it was to be Roman, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before.

The heart of Beard’s theme is the elusiveness of knowing the Roman emperor, which is, in essence, the elusiveness of trying to know the past. Early on, in elucidating her purpose, Beard tells us: “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.” In this conglomeration of deceptions and uncertainties, Beard’s purpose isn’t to help sketch a picture of the Roman emperor, but to suggest the “terror of power without limits.”

In considering the many aspects that went into creating the emperor: conqueror, gladiatorial fan, administrator, judge, I’m not sure that Beard has been able to grasp who these people were. Beard isn’t sure, that’s my impression. As she expresses her vast knowledge, her expansive reading (truly impressive erudition), her astute understanding of the use of image to create power and influence, I was in awe. And, unlike most history books, thorough, erudite, brilliant as they may be, Beard achieves something they rarely do: she entertained me. She writes with wit and ease and she makes history something we can all learn from and about at her side. But when I came to the end of her book, I didn’t really know who these emperor-people were. What’s really interesting is I’m not sure Beard does either.

Contrarily, Beard’s ability to throw light on history clears up when she speaks about the anonymous: a case in point? Her comment about those forced into the gladiatorial arena: “For it was the excluded, the condemned, the abominated and the ‘foreign’ who performed here — those who were, by definition, not (fully) Roman.” In the end, I think what Beard means to suggest is that the “emperor,” by definition, is constructed by who and what surrounds and defines him. I deliberately say “him” because Beard is fully aware, and has spoken and written of in other places, that women are not at the forefront of power. She doesn’t hold much candle, and neither do I, that they were working in the background, even if they were. It doesn’t count. So, what are the emperors, but lacunae of meaning-making. Which doesn’t take anything away from their individual willful use of power. A conundrum for the historian, but a thought-provoking, entertaining, and erudite book for the reader.

I am grateful to W. W. Norton and Company for the opportunity to read and review this title, with an e-galley available to me on Netgalley. This doesn’t impede the free expression of my opinion.

The Emperor of Rome follows the lifestyle, mythologies, supporting characters that made a Roman Emperor a Roman Emperor. The book is framed by the peculiar written history of Elagabalus, the infamously evil, infamously lascivious emperor who (we're told) wished to become a woman. I'm embarrassed to say I'd fallen for the story, and Beard's thesis throughout challenges the idea of basically everything we know about emperors as we know it.

The author, through thematic chapters rather than chronological, shows the political machinations underpinning the stories that have been passed down for nearly two millennia. As the chapters are organized by themes, there are some very interesting ones (and less interesting ones). As always, I'm drawn to information on the lower classes and women, but overall it is a solid sampling of the world of what a Roman Emperor was supposed to be.

While I am rating this 3.5 stars here, it was a lot less engaging than SPQR. I often took breaks with it over the month and a half it took to get through, which never happened with the former book. I rate quite harshly in comparison to other readers, so I have to reiterate that The Emperor of Rome is a solid book worth picking up, but if it drags for you, don't feel bad. The thematic framing is good for casual reading but makes it very difficult to ground yourself in a period for vigorous learning. It's not so much a historical text in the traditional way but a social one. It's a very minute difference in this text, but nevertheless something I noticed.

Mary Beard's Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World is a "lives of the rich and famous," focused specifically on the Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar to Alexander Serverus. The rational for selecting this time period was that anyone encountering Roman rule would find much the same in governance, structure and daily life. It is after Severus's rule that the empire began to splinter with rapid change of rulers, and the eventual splitting.

Beard begins the work with the listing of the 'main characters' serving as a handy quick reference listing each of the emperors, a brief lineage, their wife/wives and a year span of their rule. From then the book spends the first two chapters establishing the setting, an overview of Roman history and how it shifted from republic to empire. With this background in place, Beard then follows an Emperor from dinner table to death, moving through different aspects of Roman life as centered on the emperor in many different aspects of daily life.

A recurrent motif of Emperor of Rome is how little detail there is about some of the aspects, aside from a few surviving writings, much of what we learn is from the perspective of witnesses and historians, we have little from the emperor's themselves. There is always the constant question of what the writers motivations might be in recording their account, with all the political entanglements and frailty of mortality. In the chapter about palaces, the archeological record is used to support different documents, of which we know best the lowest floors of a building, with upper floors still something of a mystery.

By choosing to have chapters focused on common topics, Beard is able to compare and contrast the different choices and ruling style of the emperors, instead of merely detailing a chronological discussion of their eras. And there is a good deal of variation, with some emperor's supposedly focused merely on pleasure or whimsy of wealth (Nero) to the very well traveled Hadrian.

Beard's Emperor of Rome shows a fuller idea of what life was like for over 2oo years of Imperial Rome. Recommended for those interested in history.

“Emperor of Rome” explores the fact and fiction of these rulers of the ancient Roman world, asking what they did, why they did it, and why their stories have been told in the extravagant, sometimes lurid, ways that they have. It looks at big questions of power, corruption and conspiracy. But it also looks at the day-to-day practicalities of their lives. What, and where, did they eat? Who did they sleep with? How did they travel?”

“The old-style Emperor of Rome, who has been the focus of this book has left an enduring mark on the history and culture of the West. His statues have bequeathed a template for representing power, clad in battle dress or toga. His titles lie behind the modern language of autocracy, from emperor (imperator) to prince (princeps), Kaiser to Czar (both from Caesar). He is a figure who has given us an image of how to rule, as well as a warning of how not to.”

A few years ago I tried to read this author’s “Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern”. I thought that it would be a discussion of the lives of the Emperors as reflected in art. In turned out to be art history, and it bored me. Fortunately, this new book is what I had hoped to get from the prior book. It describes the job of Roman Emperor. It includes: how they lived, what they ate, how they decorated their homes, the exercise of power, class differences, their paperwork, who served them, cash flow, Emperors at play, how and where they traveled, how they looked and how they died. The book explores the various ways in which the lives of the Emperors are portrayed in books and art are a reflection of how the Emperor’s’ successors and subjects needed them to be.

I liked that this was not just a chronological slog through the lives of all of the Emperors, and I also liked that there are no battles. I’ve read plenty of books like that already. This book is dense, but I found it lively and fascinating. There are illustrations and an extensive bibliography that includes suggestions for places to visit.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

In "Emperor of Rome" Mary Beard takes on Rome's early emperors- not to give us biographies of them as individuals, but to explore what it meant to be an emperor in ancient Rome. It is a really interesting examination of what the people expected/wanted their emperor to do, the role they wanted him to play, and how he was judged "good" or "bad" according to how he was seen to fit that role.

Instead of going chronologically by person, Beard goes by subject: dining, entertaining, religion, military life, etc., and explores what those things meant to the Romans and what the emperor's role was meant to be (as best we can tell)- including some notable successes and failures. She's good at reminding us of which sources are more reliable than others and why, who was trying to curry favor with the current emperor in their writings, and how that would influence what they said compared to what historians and archaeologists can discover about them.

What was really interesting to me was discovering how much of a role the emperor really was, compared to the individual. There were specific forms for the emperor in art, in letters, in speeches, and Beard argues that it didn't matter who the person was who filled the role- especially the further you got from Rome itself. The man was meant to fit the formula and what tends to stand out or be invented later on are stories about things that didn't fit the formula.

The book itself was a bit dense at times, and hard going, although other times I found it easy to read and enjoyable. Not the lightest of books, but very thought-provoking and interesting.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

This book, a sequel to Mary Beard's incredibly popular book SPQR, follows the emperors of Rome, but not in a chronological way. Rather than tell the full history of one emperor and then the next. Mary Beard traces the more mundane and ordinary parts of each of their reigns. She covers spouses, slaves, interests, etc. of each emperor rather than just focusing on their military abilities and political machinations.

While this view of the emperors is interesting, the amount of information is a bit overwhelming, and it left me so inundated with facts that it felt more like Mary Beard has no self-editing and merely edited for grammar. A thematic approach is absolutely a valid alternative to chronological history, but without an rhyme or reason to how information was presenting, it feels more like stream of consciousness info-dumping. Because of this, it was a far less enjoyable read compared to SPQR.

This fascinating book unveils the personal lives of Rome's emperors from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus. Journey inside the palace walls, into the streets of the capital, to far-flung corners of the empire, and even to the afterlife as Romans understood it. Witness tense power dynamics with rivals and personal relationships with lovers. Meet the everyday citizens seeking imperial aid, and the servants tending to daily needs. This unprecedented perspective challenges assumptions about life in ancient Rome, inviting you to reimagine these iconic figures through the lens of their humanity.

This book is so interesting and fun! It's smart, informative, and authoritative, but still enjoyable and easy to read. It's sure to become one of the leading works in the field.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

Mary Beard structures this book in such a way that if you have a curiosity for a certain period or emperor, you can read the sections you’d like. Beard has a way of immersing the reader, which is so lovely and inviting. I highly recommend!

Ever since I read her brilliant "SPQR," I have considered Mary Beard to be the best possible guide to ancient Rome. Her deep knowledge of the subject, combined with her dry wit and eye for surprising detail, make her a great storyteller. And she confirms that reputation in her latest book.

I think it may attract new readers because this time she focuses on the Roman emperors, but even if you are familiar with the most famous names, be prepared for many unexpected turns. A fascinating volume!

Thanks to the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Liveright, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

I am not going to review this book. I tried very hard to get into it but the writing style took me completely out and I was unable to get into it. I could only manage a few chapters. It reads almost like a text book but the narrative is so bogged down by fact that it stops being a narrative. Plus the fact that it is a pdf instead of an ePub doesn't do it any favors. I can't bring myself to finish because I feel It would be torture so I will only say that I wasn't a fan of the little I read and that I think you should consider not sending out pdf's because it really detracts from the reading experience.

A book like this probably has at least two kinds of reviewers: 1., experts in the field, who are in a position to evaluate the author's claims against their own knowledge, and who may, academia being what it is, have bones to pick; and 2., general readers hoping to inform themselves and, maybe, already familiar with the author's reputation and one or more of her other books.

I'm in the second category. What I know about ancient Rome comes from reading a few histories for general readers, including other books by Professor Beard. Are her theses here original and her insights fresh? I couldn't say -- but they were new to me, and so I found them illuminating.

Beard's overarching theme here is that "Emperor of Rome" was a persona -- a screen, almost, behind which the real individual remains unknowable. We have whatever relatively scant evidence survives after a couple of thousand years, and most of that is either indirect (what does Pliny's "Speech of Praise" actually tell us about its subject, Trajan? or does it chiefly tell us what one prominent Roman thought a good emperor ought to be?) or frankly unreliable (if you had your predecessor assassinated, your narrative about him would depict him as a Wicked Emperor; if he had adopted you and thus provided your claim to rule, your narrative would depict him as a Good Emperor). Apart from Marcus Aurelius's "Jottings to Himself" (as Beard calls what most of us know as his "Meditations") and some letters (which may have been written by aides), we have no personal writings by any emperor.

I did a great deal of highlighting, between the factual information and the insights that were new to me. Beard's prose is, as always, lively and engaging, with flashes of humor. She's not an apologist for the empire -- I'm pretty sure the conservative "greatness of Rome" nonsense makes her gag -- and she's alert to hints of what life under a man with (ostensibly) absolute power might have been like, in particular for people held as slaves but also for the mighty "enjoying" evenings with the likes of Eliogabalus. She also brought to my notice the surprising precarity of life as an emperor of Rome: since there was no provision for the transfer of power except by the death of the previous incumbent, a great deal of assassination went on.

It's most unfortunate that in the ARC, captions for the illustrations are represented by strings of Latin gibberish -- at least, I assume it's gibberish! -- so I can say nothing about how useful the figures are or what the captions may add to the information in the text proper.

Thank you to NetGalley & the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review! My sincere compliments to Mary Beard for being able to write so informatively, while still being very understandable. I'm very impressed with how this book is perfect for people who seriously study history or Ancient Rome, and for people with just a simple interest. Emperor of Rome is well-researched and introduces readers to such really interesting concepts that it will definitely make for a fascinating read. I promise you'll learn so much you never knew about the office of Ancient Roman emperors!

Thoroughly researched and written in a way that appeals to the scholar but is still accessible for the reader outside the ivory tower of academia, Emperor of Rome is an excellent companion volume to SPQR. Rather than a long, dry list of which emperor followed whom and what wars were fought in which regime, Emperor of Rome explores the existence of the emperor -- the administrative structure supporting the empire, the ins and outs of the chain of succession, the imperial mythmaking carried out with each succession, and so much more. This is a rich, deep text that ignited for me an even deeper hunger for ancient history. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read an advance copy!