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Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game. Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. The ancient world had Nero. We've got, well, you know who.
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Together we will make America great again. History never repeats itself, exactly. But sometimes the rhymes are pretty in
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your face when it comes to power, ego and a touch of chaos. Honestly, the Roman emperors and modern leaders may have more in common than you'd think.
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Charlotte Higgins, writer, Guardian journalist and occasional classicist.
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And I'm Mary Beard, historian and one time Twitter addict.
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This is Instant Classics, where we take big ancient stories, dust them off and see what they tell us about life.
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Now, each week we're going to look at stories and ideas from the ancient world and how they live on.
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Today, we want to clear up some myths, we want to tell hidden stories. And like Russell Crowe in Gladiators, we want to entertain you, although with fascinating discussion and conversation and insights rather than actual bloodshed.
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A
And today we're asking the big one which Roman emperor is Donald Trump? Most like? Right now is a kind of brilliant moment to be a classicist, because in the past you used to fetch up at some party where you didn't know anybody. People would say, what do you do? And you'd say, I'm a classicist. And they would look for someone else to talk to or say, do you mean Jane Austen or what? Right. Not now. Since, I suppose since 2017, they've always had a question. You say, hi, my classicist, and the response is, oh, great to meet you now. Then it comes out, which Roman emperor is Donald Trump most like?
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B
Yeah, I get that a lot, too, Mary. And I find it really hard to answer. Really hard to answer.
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A
So what do you do?
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B
Well, I have. I generally try and avoid answering it until I'm absolutely pressed. And then I do have an answer. It's not an answer that I'm really, absolutely happy with, I have to say, because I think there are lots of problems with the question and it's really hard to give a straightforward answer. But I do have an answer that I do give.
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A
And you're going to reveal it to us at some point during this episode?
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B
Well, yes, but I'm also Much more curious about your answer. If you do get off your skeptical kind of horse something in the end, do you?
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A
Well, what I tend to do is I tend to start by getting all academic y. And I tend to say, now, really, that's a very difficult comparison. And there are 101 different reasons why you cannot possibly even think it remotely useful to compare the American president with a Roman emperor. This doesn't usually go down all that well. Poor old. My interlocutor is getting more than they bargained for. They wanted a name, not a lecture, Right. So eventually, when really pressed and when I'm desperate to go and get another glass of wine, I do give an A. And I always choose, usually the same one. I choose an emperor that I think the person concerned won't have heard of. Cause I think then they'll have to go and look him up.
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B
You're so sly.
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A
But I'm not gonna tell you right now. I think there's more interesting things to talk about.
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B
I think, you know, I kind of think, you know, it always frustrates me as a question slightly. I mean, I can totally understand why people ask the question. I mean, in a way, In a way, even though it's a question that frustrates me is also quite a good question. Because, you know, Rome and contemporary US are just obviously kind of interwoven together in all sorts of ways. And some of those are very obviously big historical things, such as the founding fathers of the USA sort of setting themselves up to resemble, in a way, the Roman Republic. And now we're with Trump. We're in this kind of unnerving, shifting space where it looks like we're easing into or stuttering into some kind of autocratic or authoritarian rule. And of course, that makes us think about the shift between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. And there's the whole thing about Washington, D.C. even just looking kind of like Rome in the sense that it's full of extraordinary kind of classical temples that are museums and seats of government. It really has that center of empire feel and then that kind of generalized sense that the right in America, the political right in America is quite obsessed by Rome. And, you know, they love classics because it's supposed to, in their view, it's supposed to be all about Western civilization, which they're extremely keen on for not very pleasant reasons.
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A
And, I mean, I think, in addition to that, I mean, you must be right. I mean, you can't talk about American politics without talking about Rome. We've got the words that you have to Use like the Senate. There is a sense in which America is the new Rome in a crude sort of way, but nevertheless it is. But I think also you find you're drawn into that comparison because of some of the accessories that Trump brings with him. I mean, there is the luxury, the gold, the bling. And actually his enthusiasm for classical architecture. He wants everything to have columns.
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B
Yeah, everything's very neoclassical, everything's very gilded. The way he self projects is quite imperial. So the way he likes to be photographed. I was thinking of two photographs actually, one of whom in the Kennedy Center. When he took over as chairman of the Kennedy center earlier this year, he was photographed on the balcony at the top of the Kennedy center, you know, in glorious isolation, as if looking down on the masses below. Very sort of Roman emperor vibes. And then secondly also of his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, which he of course signed off, where he's again in this sort of glorious isolation. Very formal, very full of kind of luminous power, like a statue almost.
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A
But I think there is a contribution from Rome here because the reason, one of the reasons why the comparison entices us, you know, attracts us, is that we actually know quite a lot about Roman emperors, their quirks, their habits, the uses and misuses of their power. So we've got something, it seems, to compare it with, and an awful lot of that, that information, the, the anecdotes that most of us actually have heard, even if we think we know nothing about the classics. Nero fiddling while Rome burns or Caligula wanting to turn his horse into a Roman official, the consul. That comes from an almost amazingly rich collection of biographies by a man called Suetonius, writing in the second century CE about the first 12 Roman emperors, starting with Julius Caesar, who wasn't quite an emperor, but was assassinated 44, and ending with Domitian brackets assassinated 96.
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B
Yeah. And Suetonius is such an interesting person because he's, he's not, he's not a senatorial guy, he's not a. He's not in the political classes. He's a sort of slightly, a bit down the social scale from these very grand people like, like his contemporary, the historian Tacitus, who also tells us a lot about Roman emperors. And he was the archivist in the actual imperial palace. So he had access, Suetonius, to real stuff. And he also wrote a bewildering number of books, incredibly prolific, most of which are lost. But the one I would most like to read is his book on Greek swear words, which I just think like, brilliant. He also wrote biographies of great poets and all the rest of it. And he also wrote alongside this book on Greek swearing, supposedly he wrote a book about Greek grammar problems or something. And it's like, yeah, what a range. What a range. Suetonius.
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I'm quite pleased that we've got the biographies of the Empress, not the Greek grammar problems. But I think that one of the things that one has to kind of take on board is that now we quite largely see the characteristics of the Roman emperors through the eyes of Suetonius, who has given us the great stories, who has served us up with stories of terrible misdeeds, curious facts. It is so vivid.
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Sexual peccadilloes by the armful. And I think we have to mention is the BBC adaptation I, Claudius, based on Robert Graves. Robert Graves based his novel on Suetonius. So I think in the culture, there is this filtering through. So, Brian, you know, for me, I'm afraid the Emperor Augustus is Brian blessed, and it is ultimately because of Suetonius.
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That's true. I mean, and I think that he has helped loads of people, and he maybe has not helped in other ways, but he's helped loads of people have an idea of what a Roman emperor might be. And that has gone on for centuries. And so it drives this comparison, I think, because there may be all kinds of ways of comparing Trump with, you know, the kings of ancient Mesopotamia, but it's. We have got our view of monarchy very largely through Suetonius, biographies of these emperors, and so it all fits. We've got presidents, we've got emperors, we've got stories, and we can try to match them up.
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B
Okay. It's obvious in a way. So, you know, Rome, contemporary America. But can we really compare Trump to an individual Roman emperor? I mean, there are really kind of fun, specific examples. Right. There's the brilliant thing. And you pointed this out on your social media a few months back, Mary, when Trump had his military parade in the summer on his birthday, that had an absolutely brilliant resonance with the great general Pompey, Roman General Pompey, who was said by the writer Pliny the Elder to have had an amazingly lavish military parade or triumphal procession through Rome on his actual birthday, which I have to say makes Trump's birthday military parade look really, really, really feeble. A bit tacky, because this. I mean, the. According to Pliny the Elder, who wrote about it, one of the things it had was a gaming board, complete with a set of pieces, all made out of precious stones, 3 foot by 4 foot long. I mean, forget tanks, guys. This is where it's at. With an extraordinarily heavy golden moon resting on it. There were pure golden dining couches, golden vessels inlaid with gems, you know, golden statues of gods and goddesses, Minerva, Mars and Apollo. I mean, this makes rolling out your tanks and F16s look pretty feeble, but there is this resonance. It was like, this is my gig and I'm going to do it my birthday.
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A
Right, right. I mean, I think if Donald Trump knew his Roman history and with Pompey the Great, we're going back just before the emperors, his great rival of Julius Caesar. In fact, if he thought there was a comparison with Pompey and he knew his history, he'd be a bit worried. Because the other thing that Roman writers say about this great parade is that it was so over the top, it was a bad omen. And Pompey, Pompey even had a head of himself carried in this military parade made entirely out of pearls. And ancient writers said, oh, that's very, very womanish because it's all made out of pearls. But they also said, thinking about what in the end happened to Pompey, which was a pretty nasty decapitation, they said, huh, this is a premonition of what was going to happen to him in the end. So I think there you've got the sen, that there does look like a comparison. You know, no one's going to piss on my parade. This is on my birthday and it's my tanks, et cetera, et cetera. But everybody also knew that it was, as with Pompey, slightly crossing the boundaries of what was acceptable. Now, often I think Trump's group, Trump himself, etcetera, maybe without realizing some of the downsides of the comparison, do actually try to play a bit, you know, quite consciously play a bit with Roman echoes. And there's this extraordinary story which I've been following over several years really, of Steve Bannon, who isn't now exactly still within the Trump inner circle, but certainly used to be. And what's he done? He's attempting to open what he himself calls a gladiator school for right wing politicians in Italy.
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B
I mean, you couldn't make it up. You really couldn't. And then you've got the whole Elon Musk Roman, or was this actually fascist salute business? I don't even really know the difference between these things. What's your take on that, Mary?
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Well, one thing's pretty clear, that there was no such salute that any Roman emperor, leader or general did. That looked remotely like that. It was actually invented as a Roman gesture in the 18th century. But of course, it's also the case that the whole fascist operation with that salute was kind of invented as if it was the inheritor of Rome. So it's kind of whole set of Chinese boxes there of who invented this first or who didn't. But there is no way that Romans went around doing what Hitler and Mussolini did with their hands. They might have done other things similarly, but they didn't hold their hand up like that.
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B
Yeah. And what I can say is that Elon Musk held his hand up in a way that looked very much like what they were doing in the 1930s. So I think we can take whatever we want from that, but I know what I take from it.
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A
But there's also this kind of whole mar a lago scene, which I think is quite interesting, because one of the things that people always wondered about Roman emperors is what did they do when they went to their lavish country palace, rather than being in the eye of the city, whether that was Rome or, in Trump's case, Washington. So there was a huge kind of question mark about what emperors did in their spare time.
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B
Yeah. It's like Tiberius on Capri, isn't it? On the island of Capri. And he has this. He sort of retreats to his island paradise and spends less and less time in Rome. And he's reputed to have a sort of number of small boys who are his kind of sexual playthings and who kind of pleasure him in the swimming pool. I mean, it's kind of a bit eek. But anyway, that's one of the things that Suetonius tells us.
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A
But that kind of sense of game, true or not, you know, what did Tiberius actually do when he went. You know, he's the successor of the very upstanding Emperor Augustus, you know, at the beginning of the first century ce, and he's going off to his secret seaside hideaway. What does he get up to and that? I mean, again, there's upsides and downsides. You know, there's a mystery retained of what the emperor does when we can't see him. But also we kind of project all our fears about his vices. And that's. I mean, I think very much that's trump mar a lago, you know, what does he do?
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B
Well, like Nero. Nero used to go to Baiae, which was the sort of the Riviera of the Roman world. Right. It's where rich Romans went to disport themselves. And there's a story in Suetonius about him for his sort of sexual pleasure having married women set up, as it were, kind of pretend brothels along the shore and him visiting all of these sort of pretend brothels to have sex with these kind of respectable married women. I mean, it's such a kind of weird story and then you think, God, is it true or is it just a kind of tabloid esque suetonious enhancing rumor? But then sometimes despots do behave like despots. And I was thinking, when you said about Caligula's horse, I was thinking the King of Thailand, at least according to the American ambassador of the time in very recent history, did actually make his dog Fufu, chief air commodore of the Thai Air Force. Right. So sometimes I think, I don't know, like despots do behave like dust bots.
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A
Hang on, Charlotte, this is where in my party conversation after, you know, when I'm up against the wall and the. My interlocutor is not so pleased with my very academic explanation of what the parallels between Mr. Trump and the Emperor might be. It's where my interlocutor kind of gets pushed, tries to push me. And of course one of the things I'm going to say then is, look, I'm not a. I'm not really sure how much of this is literally true. And I think with the Caligula story, it gets reported now as Caligula made his horse a consul, you know, so he made this racehorse, he turned into the, you know, one of the senior offices of the Roman political offices of the Roman state. And again a bit nitpickingly, you say, actually that's not what Suetonius says. It says it's reported that he wanted to, you know, very different. Right. And at this point, I suppose, you know, I start to think that instead of thinking about individual little bits of despotic behavior, you know, that could be, you know, Imelda Marcos's shoes. Anybody old enough to remember Imelda Marcos?
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B
I'm definitely old enough to remember Imelda Marcos and her shoes.
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The wife of the dictator of the Philippines. Now she was supposed to have had a cupboard full of sort of thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes, which there is some dispute about whether these were ever found.
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B
I think it was more than a cupboard. I think it might have been the whole building. Yes, a super large cupboard.
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But you know, again, you can do a sort of, I think rather feeble game of snap which says, oh yeah, there's stories about Caligula and his shoes and the other emperors are Said never to wear the same pair of shoes twice. And so the temptation to kind of find little anecdotes about modern leaders and ancient leaders and then say, aha, snap. Aren't dictators always the same now? Partly, yes, but I think that we would do much better. And I think this is what we got to move on to not thinking about just the individual anecdotes, but to thinking about the kind of structures of power that these anecdotes, whether they're told about modern leaders or ancient leaders, what those anecdotes and those vivid stories reveal about how one man rule works. I think that seems to me to be at a whole different level from saying Trump looks a bit like Caligula to me.
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B
That's right. So there are kind of structural, you know, we're in the world of how autocracy really works here. And actually, I think in a sense that was my point. In other words, sometimes I think autocrats behave in the way that autocrats behave because there's a rhetoric and there's a kind of, there's a pattern of behavior. You know, you're, you yourself know you're an autocrat if you're behaving a little bit like a Roman emperor, maybe. But that is about these sort of big, big structural questions that might bring together everyone from like Richard III to Stalin.
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A
And they, they keep, I mean, one of the things they do is that they keep everybody subservient. Now. I mean, I think you see that very clearly with Trump, that kind of capriciousness, which first of all, I think imagine it as being just kind of irritating. He can't make his mind up or whatever. I think it's nothing like that, that kind of changing your mind. It'll be tariffs at this level or tariffs at that level. No, I'm going to do it differently. I'll tell you next week that absolute ultimate caprice is a huge weapon in the armory of the dictator because nobody ever knows quite what side you're going to come down on.
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B
I totally agree. And I think it may be the single most important thing about the way Trump inhabits his role is I'm going to give you two weeks to think about your uranium enrichment program, and then I will consider bombing you, but then he bombs you the next day. I mean, the mind changing, the going up to the brink and then pulling back, the shifting allegiances between different powerful leaders and that nobody and that if you are working for him or in any way connected to him as a kind of leader of a lesser Power, a huge amount of your life then becomes managing, keeping this guy on side. And that's, that's where it's so Roman.
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A
And there's a wonderful story, not actually from Suetonius, but from Tacitus, a historian writing at about the same time, looking back to the reign of Tiberius, Tiberius who holed up on Capri when he wanted at the beginning of the first century ce. And there's a wonderful story about a guy who actually manages to sort of expose Tiberius use of caprice. And it's. They're in the Senate and there's a trial going on of some governor who's done something he oughtn't to. I can't remember what it was. And Tiberius is a member of the Senate. Technically, emperors belong to the Senate. And this trial is happening and there's going to be, after the hearing, there's going to be a vote, you know, guilty or innocent, guilty or not guilty. And all the senators are kind of looking at each other thinking, oh, blimey, I've got to make sure I vote the same way as the Emperor does. Because if I don't vote like Tiberius does, that could be kind of awkward for me at this point. One brave senator who does afterwards, I have to say, come to a not very nice end, but not unconnected, apparently says to Tiberius, please, would you vote first, Caesar? Always called him Caesar.
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B
Right.
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A
Please, would you vote first, Caesar? Otherwise I might find that I have inadvertently voted the wrong way later. Right, brilliant. So Tiberius votes. He has to vote for acquittal at this point, and everybody else gets off the hook because they can all say acquit. But what it was doing, it was, it was kind of breaking through, that sense that we all had to sit and wait until we found out what the Emperor was going to vote. And so. And that was going to be really dangerous for us. And this guy just says, so are you going to vote, sir? Because I don't want to get it wrong. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, as it were. So I think that kind of. The management of caprice is also terribly important.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. There's a story about Caligula also, who asked some people who'd been exiled in the previous reign what they'd been thinking and talking about while they'd been in exile. And they were saying, and they answered him by saying, we were praying for your predecessor to die and for. And for you to release us. And because they'd given him that answer, all the people who Caligula had exiled, he then thought, well, I'd Better execute them, then, because they'll be all praying for my death. This is in Suetonius, the invasion of Britain story. Yeah.
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A
The structures of dictatorial foreign policy is horribly revealed by the story of Caligula's planned invasion of Britain.
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B
So, yeah, this actually was also pointed out to me by a dear ancient historian friend who we both know called James Davidson. When I asked him what he thought, what Emperor Trump was most like, and he immediately said, Caligula. And it was for this reason. It was to do with Caligula, it was to do with Caligula, it was to do with Trump's sort of moving towards Canada, moving towards Greenland, making the Gulf of Mexico, America, making these sort of gestures that aren't yet, let's hope fulfilled, of very aggressive foreign policy. And it reminded him, and I think he's right, it reminds me too of Caligula wanted to. Said he wanted to invade Britain and he actually didn't do that. The invasion of Britain was left to the Emperor Claudius a bit later, but he took an army all the way to the beaches in France and got the army, in this very peculiar story, to pick up seashells from the shore and pretend that these were the sort of spoils of war. It's a really odd little story that it's quite hard to make sense of, but I quite like it. I quite like seeing it in this
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A
Trumpian sense, because you see that it's. That this is caprice, not just about keeping the people round about you guessing all the time, but it's keeping the whole world guessing. Shall I. Shall I invade Greenland or not? Or maybe I should just go on a visit, you know, and shall I. What am I going to do with Canada and Caligula? Playing with the idea of shall I invade Britain? Is. Is very much out of the same playbook, I think.
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B
I mean, the way people behave around Trump, it does remind me of the way people behave around Roman emperors, the flattery that people put in the way of Trump. There was this amazing thing that was going around earlier in the summer and it was something that Mick Huckabee had posted. Mick Huckabee, the ambassador to Israel. And it was, honestly, it read to me like some kind of imperial panegyric, the sort of poems that were written to flatter the emperors, of which we have some examples. And it was all about, you know, Mr. President, God spared you in Butler Pa to be the most consequential president in a century, maybe ever. The decision's on your shoulders. I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you, sir, but there is only one voice that matters, his voice. And so on. You know, like this idea that Trump is the appointed servant of God and that he's being addressed in this extraordinarily obsequious way by, you know, someone who's an official of state in the. I mean, anyway, that struck me as off the scale, but also super Roman.
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A
And it's also the whole issue of the corruption of language that goes along with the corruption of politics. I mean, we're not. George Orwell isn't very far from the historian Tacitus here in saying that what, what autocratic one man rule does, I mean, it corrupts everything, but it corrupts the way you speak. It makes words mean different things from what they previously had meant. And that you see in buckets with Roman emperors and you see it with Trump. Now, I think that the response to that is that we're probably not very good at understanding the rules of flattery. And I very strongly feel, you know, that this is particularly Trumpian language now, both used by him and about him, is, is a kind of pollution of language. But some Romans saw that you could use flattery to your own advantage. And one of the. The rules for being a clever flatterer, and we have some examples of this in the praises heaped on Roman emperors is you praise the Emperor for doing something that you want him to do. You are so wonderful. This was said about the Emperor Trajan, for example, in the early second century ce. You're so wonderful because your house is always open to the Senate and we can come and we can have simple suppers with you and we feel so at home. Now, Trajan's palace might have been open to the Senate, but in a sense what the speaker was doing there is saying, open up your house to us, mate. So flattery.
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B
I feel like there are whole units in the French government, the British government, you know, the Canadian government, working out what flattering language to use to Trump so that they don't piss him off and how to do that, I mean,
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A
and how you use flattery to get what you want.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
It creates an image for me, which I find quite a scary image, actually, from the point of view of the Emperor that you'll. We deplore the flattery. We think it looks absolutely dreadful. But if you're the Emperor, there's one thing you know, that no one is ever telling you the truth. You're the only person in the palace who never hears the Truth. And so you come soon enough to a sense of the isolation of a figure like a Roman emperor or an American president who doesn't know what's really going on.
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B
And I suppose a thing that we haven't talked about, which I think is also absolutely massive. I mean, it's so looming we almost haven't noticed it, but it's vast, is how emperors relate in a kind of populist fashion, too. The people like this whole bypassing of. Well, I suppose under the Roman Empire, it's not as if there isn't a Senate and these structures that are left over from the Republican age, there is the semblance of some kind of demi democratic polity. But in reality, the Emperor holds all the cards. And the Emperor is also appealing super. Directly to the masses in Rome. And of course, that is exactly what Trump has done.
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A
It's Trump and social media. It's almost as if he's copied that well from Julius Caesar, but from any number of populist leaders. The basic strategy is that you talk to the people without going through the official channels. Now, Caesar did that because it looks very much as if what we now read as Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War when he was massacring the Gauls in the middle of the first century bce. It looks as if that's a stitched together version of a Roman equivalent of tweets that what he did was he sent people back from Gaul to read out on the street corners of Rome what Caesar had been doing. So he didn't report to the Senate, who then let it filter out by whatever the official means were. Julius Caesar sent somebody out to say, come on, everybody, this is the words of Julius Caesar. And that is really very like the Trumpian method, isn't it, that you that put it out now on Truth Social, and you say, please take note. But it's not mediated through any other channels other than your own voice. And that's absolutely crucial, I think. And it's how almost every single populist politician has worked. Julius Caesar was one. I don't think that that means that Trump is like Julius Caesar. I think more it means that Julius Caesar and Trump are using the same standard tactics of populist leaders which have always been used by then.
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B
Okay, so I'm very aware that if we were at a party and someone was saying, Charlotte and Mary, which Roman emperor does Trump most resemble? They would probably at this point be saying, you've said some interesting things about, like, the nature of populism and the structures of Single person rule. But can you, can you actually then start to say, look at Roman historians, look particularly at Suetonius and say Trump is more like Caligula than Nero and less like Tiberius than Julius Caesar. What, like, to what extent are we really able to winnow this down and answer the question at all? I mean, really, what I'm saying is answer the damn question.
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A
Okay, true answer is I'm still going to stick by this idea that no, it is not a particularly helpful comparison. These people are 2000 years away from us and they live in comfort. Completely different structures of power. I mean, you know, one of the things is that the only way you can get rid of a Roman emperor is to kill him. There is no.
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B
Well, someone had a good go with Trump. I mean, we do also. I would also say we do. He was democratically elected, which does make a really, really big difference.
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A
But I'm imagining myself at the party and I'm actually busting for another glass of wine, really. And I think unless I can get, unless I can bring this Trump conversation to a close, I've got to be all night. So my answer usually is, and it's picking on an emperor that I believe most people have never heard of. You will get it out of me in a minute. And I give them an answer, partly thinking, well, at least they'll have to go and look him up, won't they? So there will be some good will have come out of this. So a little research, even only on Google, will have been done by my inter. Interlocutor and the emperor that I usually use. Though if we do a, if we do an episode on here, you might get a bit better known. So I might have to change. But the emperor I usually use is Elagabalus.
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B
Oh my God, Mary. Elagalabus. Is he the one with the roses?
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A
See, you know me no good do this to you. Early third century cell teenage emperor who I have to say, whose habits make Nero and Caligula look like little pussycats, frankly. But some of the anecdotes not told by Suetonius because Suetonius was long dead before the reign of Elagabalus, but by other Roman writers. Some of the anecdotes told about Elagabalus do fit into that idea of how does autocracy work? And you just mentioned the famous, the
- [39:03]
B
most famous, the only thing I know about Elagalabas, to be honest, I mean,
- [39:07]
A
I can't even say him. Charlotte. Elagabalus.
- [39:10]
B
Right, Elagabalus.
- [39:11]
A
And it wasn't even his name, actually, it's his nickname. But he. The famous anecdote is that he invites a load of people to dinner. Fantastic generosity. Everybody's having a wonderful time. And Elizabeth, at the end of the evening, the ceiling opens and millions of rose petals fall out the ceiling. It's a well known Roman trick, actually, that. Not on, not on this scale, but Romans loved things falling from the ceiling and the rose petals fall onto the guests. Elagabalus is safe. He's sitting on a higher daisy and they completely smother and kill the guests. The guests are put to death by the rose petals. So anybody wants to look it up, there's a great painting by Lawrence Alma Tadema capturing this scene done in the late 19th century. It's very easy, and I think this is where my point about structures of power comes in. It's very easy to look at that story and to think, well, I don't
- [40:23]
B
believe that it would have taken a lot of rose petals. That's always my thought.
- [40:28]
A
I just don't, I actually don't believe it's possible to smother people to death with rose petals. So this is one of the anecdotes that we actually kind of know can't possibly be true. Then you say, so why were people, why did they tell it? Why did they, why does it get told? Why does it become part of the tradition about Elagabalus on its relevant. I think to Trump, there's a very strong warning message there, which is that you cannot trust an emperor even when he is being generous. In fact, the generosity of imperial power kills you. Elagabalus was killing with kindness. And I think there are factors of that kind of, that sort of message that we see in Trump's generosity to people. I mean, I think Elon Musk might have some stories to tell along those lines, but come on, I want to know, because you, you haven't actually.
- [41:34]
B
So much more boring than yours. So much more boring. I mean, when pressed, I have said Caligula. And it's partly because. And it's not because I think Caligula and Trump are at all similar. That's the problem. That is my problem. You know, Trump, as far as we know, has not had sex with all of his sisters, you know, all these kind of extraordinarily over the top kind of awful stories about Caligula. But there was a kind of showmanship and I suppose the display, the, the, the performative aspect of Caligula's reign. I suppose, like I say, I hate answering the question. Mary which is.
- [42:13]
A
Which is.
- [42:15]
B
Which is why we've had to have a very long conversation that's taken us to the point of even beginning to begin to admit that it's possible vaguely to answer it, but then only then, in these kind of very symbolic terms, which I think, you know, I'm gonna steal your answer. But first I have to learn how to pronounce that man's name properly.
- [42:34]
A
Should we practice Elagabalus? Elagabalus, he's your man. And I suppose he shows, you know, you've won me over a little bit. I mean, mostly this is a really stupid comparison, but they're just little things that can sometimes make you think differently. Not just about the American president, but about Roman Empress.
- [42:57]
B
And it's all about how you deal with power. And that is always a super interesting question.
- [43:03]
A
And that's what Roman emperors teach you.
- [43:05]
B
Yeah, they sure do.
- [43:06]
A
Thanks for listening to Instant Classics. If you've got questions, comments, or anything else you want to share, we'd really love to hear it.
- [43:15]
B
Let us know your thoughts on email@instantclassicspodmail.com or on our socials.
- [43:23]
A
If you want ad free listening and access to the Instant Classics Book Club, please subscribe to the podcast wherever you get yours. And why not leave us a rating or review too. It really helps more people find the show.
- [43:41]
B
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