A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond Page A

Senate and People of Rome.
    The Roman term
imperator
was given to a general by the acclaim of his troops, whereas the superior king figures of modern history derive their status from the Judaeo-Christian ritual of
being anointed with oil by a priest, in early days under instruction from the Almighty. Emperors in Rome never claimed divine right and had to wait for death to be deified. They believed in
vox
populi – vox dei,
that the voice of the people expresses the will of God (and not, as revolutionaries would have it, the other way round); they insisted that the people, that is to say
the legislators, had to approve their most outrageous actions.
    This explains the amount of time the successors of Augustus spent terrorizing the Senate. Nero, having failed to arrange a fatal accident for her, had his mother killed but legalized matricide
by inventing a conspiracy which she was supposed to have mistress-minded. As we shall see, he even managed to convert the event into a Triumph. And consider Caligula, always billed as the monster
of the classical world; feckless, whimsical and cruel, he would have approved the dictum of his latest (American) biographer, that while power corrupts, absolute power is more exciting. In fact,
making his horse into a consul never happened, and was his joke anyway. His thirty-nine named victims were carefully chosen and were fewer than those of the Emperor Claudius (who couldn’t be
kept out of the courtroom).
    Caligula despised the Roman people which is why he was wished on them by his predecessor, Tiberius, equally contemptuous, but less amusing and amused; but he respected their
laws. By modern standards – Hitler executed 10,000 Germans after the July plot – Roman Emperors were restrained in their treatment of conspirators, having no secret police and only
rarely holding trials in camera. In fact, Caligula practised ‘open government’, in that when reintroducing the
Lex Maiestatis
(discouraging
lèse-majesté
– offences against his sacrosanct person) he had the terms set out on a bronze tablet. He published his accounts, lifted censorship and even published the names of the clients at his brothel
on the Palatine. (Another of his terrible practical jokes.)
    The Roman Empire could not have lasted so long had its subjects not believed in the efficacy and eventual justice of Roman Law. One of its most famous citizens, Saul of Tarsus, knew exactly what
he was doing when he appealed unto Caesar.

THE ROMAN ARMY
    Colonel de Gaulle, in his revealing book – like Hitler and Franco 13 he stuck to his principles –
Le Fil de
l’épée (The Way of the Sword),
published in 1932, praises the army as the embodiment of a nation’s will. He wrote. ‘France was created by the sword. Our fathers
entered history via the sword of Brennus [he of the Brenner Pass,
ed.
]. Roman armies brought them civilization. The fleur-de-lys, symbol of the nation’s unity, is but a javelin framed
by lances.’ De Gaulle and his admirer (but not his friend) Churchill were the last statesmen to believe in blood. Both had experienced the First World War at its most disagreeable, Churchill
with his battalion – he had asked for a brigade – and de Gaulle who had been present at Verdun where the mutiny had been put down by another future head of state, Pétain; but if
the experience had dismayed them it had not discouraged them. The Roman Army – and still less the Japanese – would not have tolerated trench warfare. The Roman soldier respected his
life and would not have obeyed a commander who did not share that view. Both would have regarded the grumpy deference of the British tommy and the sentimental sacrifice of the French
poilu
– in their hundreds of thousands – as unprofessional.
    In equating a nation with its army, de Gaulle is thinking like a Roman; indeed to contemporaries the Roman armywas the religion of Rome, and Rome the religion of the army.
With good reason, since the vulnerable