Marcus Aurelius

Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, was renowned during his reign (193-211 AD) for the mass killings of his rivals (ruthlessness even by ancient standards); for his genocide against the Scots (a rare recourse, despite Rome’s bad reputation as imperialists); and his budget-stretching generosity to his soldiers. He had an unusually glamorous Syrian wife, Julia Domna, who indulged her pet philosophers and her husband’s superstitions while setting a hairstyle trend. He had women Christians thrown to wild animals. His two sons, Caracalla and Geta, notoriously hated each other. The Roman empire ran economically while Severus was alive (with many old buildings repaired and renamed, as though Severus had built them)

Emperor of Rome? Is there a typo in the title? Mary Beard’s latest book is about not one but 30 Roman emperors, from Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) to Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE), so why the singular? The answer is that Emperor of Rome is a study of autocracy and one autocrat, as Marcus Aurelius put it, is much the same as another: ‘Same play, different cast.’  Beard’s subject is emperors as a category, because it was the symbol of rule rather than the ruler himself that mattered to the 50 million imperial subjects between darkest Britannia and the Saharan desert in the first three centuries of the Christian