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

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).