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Explore the corridors of power in ancient Rome

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date05 April 2024
Publication titleHuddersfield Daily Examiner
For example, Marcus Aurelius was known as the philosophising ruler who oversaw a period of peace, but his reign was heavily punctuated by bloody imperial expansion and the persecution of Christians

Dame Mary Beard peels back the layers of Roman propaganda in her latest documentary to show how power was wielded, and rather than simply chronicling events, she takes us inside the palace where smutty graffiti was written by slaves and Augustus, Nero, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and lesserknown oddballs like Domitian and Elagabalus terrified their dining guests.

Emperor "There are all these stories about Roman emperors - the emperor Domitian skewering flies with his pen, or Caligula deciding that he would make his horse a consul [magistrate]," Dame Mary says. "I think the brutal truth is we don't know if they're true."

Much like film stars and royalty today, the historian and classicist says the emperors are vehicles for historians to understand how we projected "our own questions and anxieties and aspirations onto them".

Dame Mary, 69, says: "I see both now, in celebrity terms, and in the ancient world, tons of people thinking, what would I do if I was the most powerful person in the world? If I could sleep with anybody, who would it be?

"And if I had more money and more wealth than anybody else, what would I eat? How would I dine? What would my dinner party look like? And to some extent, I think that in all of this, what you're seeing is people's attempts to imagine what it's like."

Dame Mary says the reputation of Elagabalus - who recently hit headlines for being reclassified as an LGBT figure by a Hertfordshire museum because he was the focus of...

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