Return of the Caesars: the making of emperors and dictators
Autocracy is something today’s democracies thought they had left behind, but two books — one focused on antiquity, the other on modern history — shed light on how it is enabled
Martin Wolf
A statue of Julius Caesar in Naples looking out to sea © Alamy“Caesars are back, big Caesars and little Caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and backward nations.
The world seems to be full of self-proclaimed Strong Men strutting their stuff, or waiting in the wings, or licking their wounds and plotting a comeback after their humiliating fall.”
As a snapshot survey of our times, Ferdinand Mount’s opening salvo in his book Big Caesars and Little Caesars is an accurate one.
From Washington to New Delhi, from Ankara to Brasília, from Moscow to Budapest, the actual or would-be Caesar struts on to the geopolitical stage.
In Mount’s telling, Boris Johnson’s London, too, was a part of this depressing story.
Caesars are also the subject of Mary Beard’s new book, Emperor of Rome.
But her focus is on the original ones, the Caesars of antiquity, and the story of the society that brought us not just Julius Caesar, the first “Caesar”, but also his great nephew Octavian, later Augustus, who turned Rome from a republic into an empire.
Above all, it describes how the despotism Augustus created, and within which his successor Caesars lived, actually worked.
The two books are very different: Mount’s learned but also journalistic; Beard’s a beautifully written product of a lifetime of deep scholarly learning.
But, however different they may be, both shed light on autocracy, a system of government that today’s democracies thought they had left behind forever, and one whose essence is exposed in Beard’s magisterial analysis of the world of the early Roman emperors, who would later be reborn as the tsars, kaisers and emperors of European history.
Mount’s main point is a warning: “We must do our best to head the would-be Caesar off at the pass.
We need to be alert to the flaws of an upcoming Caesar: his relentless egotism, his lack of scruple, his thoughtless brutality, his cheesy glitz.”
We should put our faith instead in the virtues of the representative assembly, of the messy process of legislation, and of the rule of law.
Of course, he is right.
Like Caesar’s Gaul, Mount’s lively book is divided into three parts.
The first, on the idea of a Caesar, pours scorn on a rather strange mixture of actual and would-be tyrants.
Oliver Cromwell, both Napoleons, Hitler, Trump and Johnson all make an appearance.
Mount, an author who once ran Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street policy unit, says his book is about “Big Caesars and Little Caesars”.
But are catastrophic psychopaths, like Hitler, and unprincipled shysters, like Johnson, really alike?
I rather doubt it. Yet he is right on one point: hero-worshippers helped enable them all.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini saluting a statue in Rome of Julius Caesar in 1935 © Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesThe second section examines how such people emerge.
Mount follows the sociologist Max Weber in arguing that a key ingredient is “charisma”.
The leader’s charisma justifies his breaking the rules.
He is above the pettifogging restrictions that bind smaller men.
Mount duly describes all the lies that accompanied the ascent to power of a Napoleon, a Caesar, a de Gaulle, a Hitler, a Trump and a Johnson.
He suggests that the emergence of such figures is a characteristic of the modern mass age.
The Caesar is the evil twin of the great democratic leader.
That was also true in the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic.
In the third part, Mount examines how such Caesars fail.
Here he is even more eclectic, describing the conspiracy of Catiline under the Roman republic, the gunpowder plot in 17th-century England, the Cato Street conspiracy of the early 19th century, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in India, the toppling of Johnson and Trump’s failed coup in the US in January 2021.
Mount’s loathing of the chiselers, bullies and creeps who have tried and still try to become despots is beautifully expressed.
He describes Johnson memorably, as a “shocker, a rotter, a stinker”.
Yet, for all the pleasure the book gives and the righteousness of its cause, it seems unbalanced, almost a little unhinged.
Surely, neither de Gaulle nor even Johnson should appear alongside Hitler.
Beard’s book is extraordinarily informative about what it meant to be the Roman emperor, rather less so about how the empire worked so well.
After all, it survived in the west alone for some 500 years.
In that period, it had more than 70 emperors, an astonishingly high proportion of whom were assassinated.
Yet it endured.
The author does not explain why it did so, perhaps because she largely ignores the army, its most important institution.
What she does do is explain how the emperor himself lived, worked and related to those around him, up to the death of Alexander Severus in 235AD, after which, she argues, what it meant to be emperor changed.
Initially, this transformation was due to the dramatically higher turnover of emperors, prior to Diocletian’s ascent to the throne in the late third century.
But then came the creation of another capital in Constantinople, the conversion of the empire to Christianity and the final splitting of the empire into two at the end of the fourth century.
Beard lays out the programme of her book almost at the beginning.
“In the chapters that follow,” she writes, “I shall track the emperor down through the intriguing world of fiction and fact — from the imperial dinner table to the military frontiers, from his doctors’ reports to his appearance in jokes, satires and dreams, from his office desk to his last words.”
And she delivers on her promise, starting with the emperor’s “job description”, the challenges of succession (which were never solved), the pleasures and perils of imperial dining, the imperial palaces and the role of freedmen and slaves in the imperial court.
Imperial decisions and correspondence, the emperor’s staggering wealth, the role of the gladiatorial games and the Circus Maximus are all details.
Readers are given comprehensive descriptions of the nature of imperial travel, especially Hadrian’s, and attempts at military expansion — temporary (such as Trajan’s conquests in the east) or probably worthless (such as Claudius’s conquest of Britain).
Not least, she illuminates imperial propaganda, including the system for spreading identical (and highly idealised) statues of emperors across the empire — invented by that political genius, Augustus, as was almost everything else — as well as the practice of declaring (the right) dead emperors to be divine.
Along the way we learn how Augustus managed to dispose of the republic by keeping its institutional forms, shorn of the reality.
The empire was divided into the provinces that contained armies, where he appointed the governors, and the provinces that did not, which the senators could share out.
Beard describes how dangerous it was for even the greatest of subjects to irritate an emperor. But she also shows how dangerous it also could be to be the emperor. Life in imperial Rome was perilous.
Fakery is pervasive in every aspect of the relationships between the emperor and those over whom he rules
Other notable moments include the extraordinary decision by emperor Caracalla in 212AD to spread Roman citizenship across the empire, though nobody apparently knows why.
The book also glances at the bigger, global picture.
As Beard notes, the Chinese empire at that time, of much the same size, had 20 times more senior administrators than did Rome.
This was a remarkably amateurish administrative system, though, crucially, the army was not.
In many ways, this empire seems quite alien.
Whatever happens, Trump will not become a god.
Yet, suggests Beard, some aspects of the Roman empire are enduring features of any autocracy.
“Working on the Roman empire for so long I have increasingly come to detest autocracy as a political system, but to be more sympathetic not just to its victims, but to all those caught up in it from bottom to top.”
The point, she writes, is that it is a horrible system.
Fakery, above all, is pervasive in every aspect of the relationships between the emperor and those over whom he rules.
Between arbitrary despot and those at his mercy, nothing decent and true can exist.
As she says, the emperor is never “one of us”, though, when with the army, he presumably had to be particularly careful to pretend he was.
The fakery even applies to the dead.
Whether an emperor went down to history as a “bad” emperor or a “good” one depended on whether his successor was his own choice or the product of an assassination.
Above all, the imperial system rested on propaganda — the invention and reinvention of stories about the rulers.
Yet autocracy is not just fakery.
It is also system of terror — the terror of power without limits.
But Beard’s book concludes with a contrary point that also applies to Mount’s: “It is not violence or the secret police, it is collaboration and co-operation — knowing or naive, well-meaning or not — that keep autocracy going.”
This is right in the large, but not for individuals.
The difference between freedom and autocracy is whether one can hope to live unscathed after one ceases to collaborate.
At the moment when most people come to believe they cannot, it becomes difficult to stop the collaboration.
And so it was that the Roman republic died and the empire was born and endured.
In the western world, no other republic was as successful as the Roman had been before that of the US in the 18th century.
Will that republic perish, too?
After the attempted coup against the last presidential election, we may now ask ourselves that question.
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