Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts Book 74)

by Mary Beard

1.1 Visitors in the late 1960s reading the information panel in front of the Roman sarcophagus outside the Arts and Industries Building on the Mall in Washington, dc: the ‘Tomb in which Andrew Jackson refused to be Buried’. All this happened more than a century after those first, and more familiar, Twelve Caesars. But Alexander was still an emperor very much in their style, even down to the seedier stories and allegations (the slightly too close relations with his mother, the danger of the soldiers, the outrageous predecessor and the brutal assassination). In fact, modern historians have often seen him as the last in the traditional line of Roman rulers, which had begun with Julius Caesar; and one sixteenth-century printmaker and publisher, by some creative counting and strategic omissions, managed to double the original Twelve and end up with a diagram of imperial succession that placed Alexander conveniently as emperor number Twenty-Four.3 What followed his murder was very different. It was decades of rule by a series of military adventurers, many holding command for a couple years only, some of them barely setting foot in the city of Rome, despite being ‘Roman’ emperors. It is a change of character in Roman power nicely symbolised by the frequent claim—true or not—about Alexander’s immediate successor, Maximinus ‘the Thracian’: on the throne for three years between 235 and 238 Ce, he has gone down in history as the first Roman emperor who could not read or write.

The main reason that Nero appears in the stained-glass window at Poiters was that he was the emperor who supposedly, among his other persecutions, sent Saint Peter and Saint Paul to their deaths.

For a start, there is an inextricable two-way influence between the old and the new. Unsurprisingly perhaps, modern images of emperors have almost always been produced in imitation of (or in response to) ancient Roman prototypes. That is true, of course, for many classicising themes in art. Every modern version of Jupiter or Venus, of guileless Naiad or of raunchy satyr is the product of some kind of conversation with the art of antiquity. But with these imperial rulers that conversation is especially intense. Modern conventions in the ‘look’ of many individual emperors—from the cool classical profile of Augustus to the shaggy beard of Hadrian—have often been derived from detailed study of surviving Roman art and literature.

There is also plenty of material elsewhere in the literary tradition of pagan and Christian Rome, besides Suetonius’s Lives, that has occasionally provided a stimulus for modern artists. This includes a set of highly inventive, whimsical biographies of later emperors, now going under the title of the Augustan History, which have given us a variety of extravagant anecdotes. The stories of Elagabalus’s deadly rose petals are only the start. If we believe the Augustan History, the same emperor enjoyed pretentiously colour-coded meals (all blue, all black or whatever, depending on his mood) and invented the whoopee cushion (to be surreptitiously and embarrassingly deflated at dinner under his posh, pompous and, no doubt, anxious guests).

I shall be showing that it is not self-evident at all, and asking directly what these modern images of emperors were for. What did they mean to those who commissioned, bought or looked at them? Why did so many people in the West choose to recreate a series of emperors most of whom had such a strong reputation (even if an unreliable one) for immorality, cruelty, excess and misrule? Only in the case of one of Suetonius’s Twelve (that is, Vespasian) were there no rumours at all of death by assassination. Why then were they celebrated on the palace walls of modern dynasts? And why did they occasionally decorate the council chambers of republics? To put it another way, leaving aside Andrew Jackson’s own particular scruples about ‘Caesarism’, why would anyone want to be laid to rest in a hand-me-down coffin claimed once to have held the remains of an assassinated Roman emperor?

Julius Caesar also established a template for the future with an entirely new use of images. He was the first Roman to have his portrait systematically displayed on coinage. A few precedents for this had been set by the kings and queens who came after Alexander the Great in the Greek world, but in Rome itself only the imaginary portraits of long-dead heroes had ever featured on coin designs. It was Caesar who firmly set the tradition, lasting in many places until the present day, that the head of the living ruler belonged in the purses of his subjects.8 He was also the first to use multiple statues of himself to parade his image to the public in Rome and much further afield.

At least eighteen pedestals have been discovered in what is now Greece and Turkey, with inscriptions to show that they originally held a statue of Caesar put up while he was still alive; three more are known in the towns of Italy, and Arles and the other towns of Gaul may well have had their fair share too.12 And that tradition continued for centuries after his death. Across the Roman Empire, there were any number of attempts (sometimes much later) to commemorate in ‘portraits’ the man who gave his name to the long succession of Roman rulers. Perhaps those images of Caesar as conquering hero and proud ancestor of the imperial regime did something to assuage the grim precedent of his assassination that must have haunted many of the rulers who came after him.

Many of the obvious diagnostic clues that we might expect are now missing, or never existed. There are, to start with, no helpful labels. Not a single statue has ever been discovered still attached, or even adjacent, to a pedestal carrying his name (and if a bust has ‘Julius Caesar’ inscribed on its base, that is a strong indication that the bust—or the inscription—is modern). Nor do images of Roman rulers, unlike those of Christian saints, ever become associated with symbols that point to their identity. There was nothing like the keys of Saint Peter or the wheel of Saint Catherine for the Caesars. And their bodies never gave any hint of who they were. Whether the emperor concerned was thin or fat, tall or short, there was no reference to that in their full-length statues, which are more or less identical figures, clad in a toga, armour or heroic nudity. There are no portly Henry VIIIs, or hunched Richard IIIs. With Roman rulers everything comes down to the face.

It may be reassuring to know that men have been ‘combing over’ to conceal their baldness for two thousand years, but how exactly would you expect a sculptor to represent the trick?)

One major problem that the tricky old reptile never entirely solved, however, was the system of succession. It is clear enough that he intended his power to be hereditary, but he and his long-standing wife Livia had no children together, and a sequence of chosen heirs died at inconveniently early ages. Eventually Augustus was forced to fall back on Tiberius, Livia’s son by her first husband, who in 14 Ce became emperor (hence the title ‘Julio-Claudian’ now given to this first Roman dynasty, reflecting its mixed descent from the ‘Julian’ family of Augustus and the ‘Claudian’ family of Tiberius’s father).

It is hardly surprising, then, that for centuries, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, imperial coins were the most popular collectibles across Europe, and not just among the super-elite. The combination of their portability, their relative plenty and so their relative affordability put them within reach of men and women of far more modest means. (Despite some occasional posturing about ‘scarcity’, it is reckoned that in the mid-fifteenth century an emperor’s head on a silver coin probably sold for only about twice its metal value.14) The best evidence for the extent of this collecting is hidden away in the author’s ‘acknowledgements’ at the end of an account of the life of Julius Caesar, and of the main players in the civil wars after his death, published in 1563 by Hubert Goltzius, a writer, painter and printer from Bruges.

One hallmark of these sets of Caesars, like the Aldobrandini Tazze, was the sense of completion they implied. That was signalled by the numbers, I to XII, often printed or inscribed next to the imperial faces on paper or plaques, and sometimes even on more prestige painting and sculpture. These made an obvious incentive, for those who had not acquired the complete set all at once, to fill the gaps (and, of course, it was from the principle of ‘filling the gap’, or of getting the buyers ‘hooked’, that much of Wedgwood’s profit came). But the numbers were also about asserting a sense of order. That was partly in practical terms: they enabled anyone to line emperors up ‘correctly’ even if they could not quite remember whether Otho (VIII) came before or after Vitellius (IX); and, in the case of those imperial chairs (Fig. 1.12), no matter who drew the short straws of Caligula or Nero, they offered a diagram for the seating plan at dinner. There was, however, a bigger point. As one art historian has recently summed it up, numerical cycles of the Caesars ‘seemed to symbolize the encyclopaedic knowledge of collectors’; they reflected ‘a complete well-ordered knowledge of the past’.

One set of tapestries, for example, depicts Pompey taking sad leave of his wife Cornelia, before going off to join battle with Caesar, a rare moment of tenderness in an otherwise brutal poem. Most modern critics, and early modern caption writers, have misinterpreted this as Caesar saying goodbye to his wife, but one woven caption correctly identifies it: ‘Pompey the Great makes for his camp; Cornelia sadly sails to the island of Lesbos …’ (and in another version of the scene, where the caption misidentifies the main figure as Caesar, in the image itself the logo of Pompey’s side, ‘Spqr’—‘the Senate and People of Rome’—remains visible on the standards behind the general).

(Nero’s dying words were ‘What an artist the world is losing’),