What Was a Roman Emperor -Paul Veyne

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DOI: 10.1177/03921921030503001

2003 50: 3Diogenes Paul Veyne

What was a Roman Emperor? Emperor, Therefore a God

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What Was a Roman Emperor?Emperor, Therefore a God

Paul Veyne

The rule of the Caesars, which for 500 years held sway over an empire of 5 millionsquare kilometres of land, today distributed among 30 states, was very differentfrom the monarchies, such as the medieval and modern ones that are more familiarto us. Before the Revolution French kings inherited a kingdom that was their family’sproperty; this fiction concerning family and inheritance was calmly accepted andperpetuated with astonishing ease. Roman emperors, on the other hand, had a high-risk job; they did not occupy the throne as its owner but merely as the appointee of the community, which tasked them with governing the Republic, in the same way, Iam informed,1 as the caliphs were appointees of the community of the devout andwith the same bloody conflicts each time the ruler changed.

Imperial power was delegated power, a mission entrusted to an individual theo-

retically chosen or accepted by the Roman people. Thus the succession of Caesarsseems to be ‘a continuous chain of delegates’.2 For this reason there was discontinu-ity between emperors, as there was between magistrates who succeeded one anotherin the same post. In theory at least, the measures adopted by one leader remainedvalid after his death only if his successor ratified them; Mommsen concludes that inthis respect emperors were not kings. And despite the fact that dynastic successionwas common practice, an emperor did not automatically succeed his father by in-herited right: he succeeded him in his post,3 provided he was expressly invested.

In a significant passage4 J. Béranger writes that ‘the Empire may be compared toa succession of great patriots who take on responsibility for public affairs, pass it onquite naturally to their heir presumptive, or else win in a hard-fought battle the right

to protect their fellow citizens and the Roman Empire’. This was truer than ever inthe third century, the period of the soldier emperors, but we only have to think of thefirst sentence of Augustus’s political testament: ‘when I was 19, on my own initiativeand with my own resources I raised an army and liberated the Republic’. If he hadthe means to rise to the top, any committed citizen could aspire to become emperor

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in order to ensure the security of the community, provided he belonged to the sena-torial nobility, the clarissimi, and was not of Greek or later German5 origin.

This doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which remained current until theend of the Byzantine empire, meant that the throne belonged to no one, neither an

individual nor a dynasty. The Romans’ notorious hatred for the word ‘king’ is thereto prove it; Romans were not slaves to a master like the Greek and oriental peoplesthey had conquered. The consequence of this system was that, at each change of ruler, there was a risk of civil war; peaceful times, such as the ‘golden age’ of thecentury of the Antonines, were the exception rather than the rule. When there was amajor crisis and the Empire needed candidates for the saviour role, as was the casein the middle of the third century, 17 emperors followed one another, 14 of themwere assassinated and there were around 40 usurpers, that is, unlucky candidateswho were therefore executed. Two of the Empire’s wealthiest trading settlements,Lyon and Palmyra, owed their downfall to battles for the throne.

Why all this blood? Because an emperor was seen as the people’s delegate. This

was merely ideology, a fiction, since in fact this appointee had succeeded his fatheror had seized the throne and the people were as we shall see later; but what was notideology was that an automatic rule of accession to the throne that made the choiceof successor compulsory never became established; a rule of this kind would haveoffended against the all-powerful idea of the sovereignty of the people and madeRome a kingdom. Thus all the people and the Senate could do was to legitimatesuccessful coups.

However, a second subconscious idea was the fear of civil war at each succession;so it was enthusiastically accepted that the least costly solution, which was alsothe most ‘natural’, should be adopted: a descendant of the reigning emperor shouldfollow his father or relative in his position. For the notion of family remained clear;

as a panegyrist wrote, ‘a useless son is more willingly tolerated as a successor thanan ill-chosen stranger [non-family member]’. There is no case of an emperor rulingout his son as successor to the throne. One of the duties of every emperor was toprepare for the peaceful handover of his throne; and the least controversial choice hecould make, a choice that few rivals would dare oppose, was to name his son (whichwas how a ‘mad Caesar’ Commodus succeeded Marcus Aurelius) or to adopt one,since adoption was as obvious a bond as blood ties. During one of the worst years inimperial history Galba hurriedly adopted Piso, Otho prepared to adopt his nephewand Vitellius presented his son to his soldiers. If, to everyone’s relief, the incumbentemperor managed to hand over power to his offspring without a hitch, this was con-sidered the completion of a successful reign.6

So, though the emperor was chosen by the people and the Senate, he neverthelesshanded power down to his son, and people and Senate fully accepted it. And this isunderstandable. Rome was a thoroughly aristocratic society and the imperial insti-tution was in part shaped by that aristocracy and its sense of family succession.Under the Republic the son already inherited the political clients of his father, orrather his family, his gens; this was how a young unknown, Octavius Augustus,inherited supporters and veterans from his adoptive father Julius Caesar and becamethe first emperor. Lucan wrote: ‘As one generation followed another the family of theCaesars put a sword to our throat’. It was impossible to imagine an emperor without

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his family, his ‘house’, the domus divina. Popular opinion understood this quite wellsince it attached importance to the emperor’s origins; the Julio-Claudian family hadheld the affection of the Romans in Rome and the imperial guard, while the fourth-century Christian dynasty held the loyalty of its army.

On three occasions, with the Julio-Claudians, the Severi and the Constantiniandynasty, political history became confused with a family’s history, its internal rival-ries and its quarrels over the succession. Of 12 Julio-Claudian empresses whose fateis known, only one escaped death or exile. It was accepted (‘just as the postulates of geometry are accepted’, wrote Plutarch) that in the reigning family the murder of close relatives was legitimate in order to ensure the safety of the throne; a notionwhose application stretches from Britannicus’s murder to the slaughter of relativesthat followed Constantine’s death, the ‘promiscuous massacre’ among Christianswhich Gibbon refers to.

Indeed succession to the throne was not a principle of public law but an aristo-cratic practice accepted by public opinion. Unlike the situation in the Middle Ages or

pre-revolutionary France, there was no dynastic institution that made the throne theproperty of a particular family, which remained the same and was the object of everyone’s loyalty. It was not as emperor that a leader handed the purple down tohis son but as a member of a ‘house’, a gens; so that each time an emperor was over-thrown a new gens emerged from the wings with a new leader who attempted tohand down his power to his own descendants.

And so the succession from father to son was agreed upon but still had to beratified by the Roman people in the same way as the takeover of power over hislegions by a general. How did this principle of the sovereignty of the people workout in practice? How did a man become emperor? In order to understand this wehave to give up looking for public law, rules or a legal basis; there were only power

relations and success, with shifts of support and submission covered over, in thewake of victory, by the fiction of consensus among all the citizens. Mommsen him-self writes that the Caesar system was ‘permanent revolution’.7 Indeed the words‘legitimate ruler’ were not used in Rome and would have sounded strange.

Here I shall follow Egon Flaig’s theory.8 This is how it all begins: the rulingemperor designates his son, a palace plot puts forward the son of a prefect of thepraetorian guard, a meeting of army chiefs hastily chooses a successor to an emperorwho has just died in battle or, more often, an army designates its leader by hailinghim with the title imperator. Thus the soldiers have played their part in the consensusto come, and the other two constituent groups, the Senate and the Roman people, areinvited to back them. The Senate has no legal power to approve this choice; it can

only in its turn support the future consensus by acclaiming the candidate as impera-tor and august, and recommending that the consuls have him granted full powers bythe rump assembly of the people of the city of Rome; it can also refuse to go alongwith the army. If the Senate chooses to support the army, the Roman people aretheoretically not obliged to follow; in fact a show of a popular election is part of theconsensus and gives the new master detailed powers; the people of Rome unani-mously vote to grant the proconsular imperium, tribunician power, the office ofpontifex maximus, etc.

Thus in practice the agreement of the Senate and the army created an emperor.

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However, none of these events, the army’s then the Senate’s acclaim, the people’svote, had any genuinely legal standing; they were steps in a sham general consensus,that mystical consensus universorum that alone represented true legitimacy. After a‘bad’ emperor’s fall no one would say that he had seized power illegally or without

the Senate’s approval, but that he had not been acclaimed and recognized by generalconsensus. The Senate was not the judge of legitimacy; it could have an emperorappointed only when a candidate was already in the ring and this is a decisive factthat has not been noted.9 Furthermore, unlike the armies the Senate never took theinitiative by putting forward its own candidate; it was probably afraid that it wouldnot find support, which would damage its prestige.

It is clear that this consensus was merely the silent or impotent acceptance of acoup de force; thus in Rome itself ceremonies in the emperor’s honour, a solemnentrance, unanimous votes, pre-arranged popular acclamations in the Circusattempted to bridge the gulf between the ideology of consensus and the silent orprotesting majority. From the reign of Augustus to the end of the western and

Byzantine Empires, there were ceremonies during which the emperor would kneel before the Roman people gathered in the Circus in Rome and blow them kisses.Despite Juvenal’s panem et circenses the Roman populace had held on to the memoryof their official role and their claim to legitimacy; they frequently intervened in thechoice or defence of a candidate, sometimes with weapons at the ready.

The armies’ importance was to grow still greater in the fourth century whenemperors were created by a new group of leaders, the army commanders. Theyelected the new emperor, this election by a specialist committee was ratified by theSenate and the chorus of inhabitants of the Empire naturally agreed. St Jerome com-pares this to the election of bishops by the priests and deacons. Angela Pabst writesthat at that period the presumed consensus of all the citizens turned into the pre-

sumed consensus of all the soldiers, although imperial rank was seen as the highestrank in the officer hierarchy.

And so we can agree with Tacitus in concluding that the institution of emperorwas based on the lie that emperors were freely chosen and legally confirmed. In fact,starting from the creation of the system on the death of Augustus, his designatedsuccessor Tiberius already had the Empire under his control; the four weeks duringwhich he pretended to hesitate and consult the Senate were never anything otherthan the familiar charade of refusing power, designed to demonstrate that theemperor was merely an appointee. But on the other hand this ideology was so farfrom being a fiction that in four centuries two-thirds of the emperors died a violentdeath, whereas regicide was extremely rare throughout the Christian Middle Ages.

The emperor had been mandated to ensure the security of the Republic, so mal-contents could always claim he had not fulfilled his mission. On pain of death everyemperor had to continue to earn the consensus that got him appointed. Unlike thekings he was never the unconcerned possessor of his power, guaranteed to remainalive and on his throne. A pre-revolutionary king could have his misfortunes, justlike a landowner whose estate is ravaged by hail, and his subjects would be sympa-thetic; however, an emperor conquered by barbarians was not an unfortunate ruler

but an incompetent who had to be replaced.Under the Empire the word Republic10 was constantly used and this was not a

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hypocritical fiction. In pre-revolutionary France everyone served the king; an em-peror, on the other hand, served the Republic. He did not rule for his own glory; heruled like a king but for the Romans’ glory; his conquests and victories, celebrated

by the coins minted, redounded solely to the glory of the Romans or the state, gloriaRomanorum

or gloria rei publicae.

In the wording on coins and in panegyrists’ writings,an emperor’s virtue does not lie in being great or good but in ‘saving’ or ‘restoring’the Republic.

The principle of the sovereignty of the people remained in force until the end of the Byzantine Empire. According to the panegyrists, the emperor was the Republic’schampion, it was in his care and safekeeping, he was ‘born for the good of theRepublic’, in the wording of his title right up to the fourth century. The emperor wason guard, on sentry duty, in statio; he was looking out for everyone’s security, look-ing warily around, as in the famous portrait of Caracalla.

The imperial system did not maintain its republican front through a fiction butwith the help of a compromise; the emperor could not abolish the Republic, nor did

he want to, because he needed it: without the senatorial order, the consuls, all themagistrates who provided its spine, the Empire would have collapsed. Furthermore,the imperial system was preferred by the majority of the nobles: it set the rules of thegame for the competition involving their career ambitions, whereas the Republichad ended in an anarchic struggle for tyranny between a few leaders. In short theimperial system (with one exception, to be dealt with later) depended on the senato-rial nobility, at least till the third century. In addition, the senatorial families were apower to be reckoned with; they had retained their wealth and influence on theirclientele of notables and peasants.11 The nobility’s real importance should not be

judged by the fairly weak political role played by the Senate. In Marxist parlance itcould be said that the imperial system was simply the instrument by which one class

dominated – the senatorial oligarchy. This oligarchy was to remain the ruling classfor a long time since it was they who governed through the emperors, who wereforced to pay the closest attention to their presence. Indeed a compromise hadinitially been signed between the nobility and the system’s founder, which wastailored for the political situation of the time and the stature of the new ruler,Augustus, and this was continued by his successors. Unfortunately it was a botchedcompromise that was to result in continuous conflict, since it was a contradiction forthe emperor to be both all-powerful and a mere representative.

Indeed the emperor was all-powerful. His power was the most absolute, completeand unrestricted possible, undivided and unaccountable. Only self-restraint limitedthis absolute power. This is explained by the Roman concept of power, imperium, the

complete and absolute power of an officer on the battlefield, who had the power of life and death over his men and who did not distinguish between insubordinationand crime. With the imperial system this power was given to one man instead of

being shared between several magistrates. The emperor decided whether to makepeace or war, imposed taxes and undertook expenditure as he wished. Nothing wasoutside his domain (he was master of public ceremonies and religious observance)and no other power restricted his. The emperor could legislate by going through theSenate, but he could also issue an edict or a simple decree that had the same forceas a law and was included in the body of Roman law, since every decision the


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emperor made was legal. He consulted the Senate only at his convenience and gotfrom it what he wanted; and so in the end the emperor’s opinion seemed to be thesource of law rather than the senatus consultum that gave it legal force. It was veryquickly understood that he decided or could decide everything so every time a prob-

lem arose he was asked to get involved; for instance, when there was a gap in legalprovision (the legal protection of legacies was not guaranteed), appeal was made tothe paternal, beneficent power of Augustus to close the loophole. The emperor hadthe right of life and death over all his subjects; he could have a senator condemnedto death by getting the Senate to convict him, but he could also have him executedwithout this judgment, since any man’s life, even an eques or a senator, was withinhis discretion; when an emperor such as Caligula, Nero or Hadrian had senatorsexiled or executed, these tyrannical acts were perfectly legal decisions. At the begin-ning of his reign each new emperor made a speech before the senators promising notto have them put to death tyrannically and not to believe informers (in 458 a puppetemperor, Majorian, was still saying the same thing to the Senate).

Thus the imperial system was absolutist, but based on delegation of authority; ithad a contradiction at its heart and would always give rise to problems. ProfessorWallace-Hadrill writes that the emperor was both citizen and king: he alone held realpower while pretending to be a responsible servant of the state, and this ambivalencewas the very essence of the system.12 A quotation from Tocqueville will suffice:13 ‘Towant the state’s representative both to remain armed with wide powers and also to

be elected is in my view to wish two contradictory things’. It is no less contradictoryto want one man to be both all-powerful and the equal of his peers: a natural inclina-tion of the mind caused people to exalt him; the ceremonial, imperial cult and sacredcharacter of images of the emperor quickly set the emperors apart from the rest.The official form of address when writing to the emperor was as follows: ‘Signed

So-and-so, who is devoted to His Divinity and Majesty’, devotus numini majestatiqueejus.

The emperors were no less conscious than their subjects of this ambivalence.Between citizen and ruler, good and bad emperor, the gap was narrow and could berapidly crossed. A prisoner of his contradictory position, Tiberius could tolerateneither adulation nor freedom of speech; he loyally tried to apply the Augustan com-promise but never managed to get the wary Senate to participate actively; he endedhis reign in solitude and deadly ‘suspicionitis’. Throughout the disturbing Hadrian’sreign the Senate trembled. Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the last two centuries’emperors were odd figures, on one hand lost in a role that was too complex andon the other tipping over into neurosis, hesitating between simple humanity and

tyranny or eccentricity. This is why the imperial system never managed to becomesimply self-evident to all; five centuries after Augustus there were intellectualschafing against the imperial system just as Tacitus, Epictetus and Juvenal had doneand earlier still the writer of fables Phaedrus.14

The contradiction we have been discussing explains the Senate’s paralysis underthe Empire. The conflict between emperor and Senate was not a conflict between twopowers. The reason is that, with an all-powerful emperor, the Senate could not havea significant political role and that, even more, it did not wish to:15 this role wouldhave been dangerous and incompatible with its dignity. It did not wish to be what it

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theoretically was, advisor to the emperor, who in any case had his own advisors.Indeed, unlike the King’s Council at Versailles, the Senate did not consist of peoplewhose function was limited to their role as advisors to the monarch; they formed aprivileged caste which had its own character, ideology and class interests. Unlike the

senior imperial administrators, or procurators, who provided a personal service tothe emperor who had appointed them, a senatorial magistrate did not serve thereigning leader or the crown, but the state and the great name of his family; a ‘madCaesar’ who insulted a senator insulted the Republic.16 These aristocrats could notfreely advise a bad emperor, who could make them pay with their heads for theirunbiased advice, nor could they be dignified advisors to a good emperor who could,if he wished, ignore their advice.

The solution to these contradictions was that the Senate made no decisions itself and yet imperial policy was compatible with its views. A good emperor was not onewho would consult the Senate on macro policy, on whether it would be politic toconquer Dacia or retreat from Mesopotamia, but an emperor who spontaneously

pursued the Senate’s policies without asking for the Senate’s opinion. Pliny put itaccurately: a good leader approves and condemns the same things as the Senate. Topick up on a distinction that Raymond Aron liked, the senatorial nobility was a rul-ing class, an elite whose wishes the leader had to follow (and if he did not he risked

being overthrown), but not a governing class that itself took part in government.And we can glimpse in the Senate a wary, suspicious attitude, complex politicalmanoeuvring, that may be behind many attempts to usurp the emperor.

These were the terms of the compromise: the nobility let the emperor govern andin exchange the emperor treated the nobles as his peers without putting on theairs of a king, while for their part the nobles treated him like a king. In fact bademperors like Domitian showed as much respect for the Senate as the good ones and

in exchange the senators’ adulation was as effusive for the good emperors as for the bad; a senator who gave Trajan’s panegyric addressed ‘the best of leaders’ as if hewere a superior, praising him for addressing the senators as equals. As he said withunintended irony, Trajan is a good emperor who ordered us to be free and, since heordered it, so we shall.17

This possible conflict between emperor and Senate was no more about prece-dence, vanity, mere symbols, than about power-sharing; under good leaders thenoble chamber was scarcely more important than under bad ones.18 It was the inter-est of the ruling class that was at stake, a political not an economic interest, whichsensed a threat if the leader assumed the ways of a king or a living god. Of courseevery senator respected monarchical ceremonial and each noble house took care to

maintain a committee within the household that was responsible for the worship of the emperors;19 but the difference was that a good leader allowed himself to beadored20 by his grateful subjects (the cult of living emperors arose spontaneously),whereas a tyrant like Caligula forced them to adore him. So if the emperor began toact like a king or a god, destroying the compromise, the nobility saw a threat toits interest, which was to remain the ruling class. For in fact this imperial pre-sumptuousness, if not a direct threat, was at the very least what our strategists call a‘message of a threat’, implying that no one would with impunity attempt to rule ademigod. It was like when Stalin was hailed as a genius. So if the leader placed him-


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self above the silent authority of the Senate, the nobility would no longer implicitlycontrol the situation. This was the nub of the conflict.

So let us imagine that an emperor should call himself, or let himself be called,‘master and god’ in order to feel he was the sole master and evade senatorial control.

Or else that he should be so jumpy that his false position vis-a-vis the Senate madehim uncomfortable. Or more simply that he should mistrust the ruling class and justifiably fear that he might be overthrown at any moment by another ‘usurper’: inthat case he would fall victim to raging ‘suspicionitis’, which Seneca calls ‘publicmadness’. The round of Senate ‘purges’, judicial murders and forced suicides would

begin; under Tiberius, Claudius and Domitian there was a Terror and then againthree centuries on; ‘false suspicions of lèse-majesté have always been a commonscourge’, said the intelligent and truthful writer Ammianus Marcellinus.

There were three reasons for this. The idea of an opposition to the ruler, HisMajesty’s loyal opposition, was unthinkable. According to the Roman conception of power, or imperium, the people chose a leader, but once the leader was appointed

they held their tongue and obeyed: any opposition was seen as high treason and itwas possible to commit treason not only by one’s acts but simply by one’s thoughts,words, conversations, or just gestures21 and even dreams.22 And for any case of trea-son the only punishment was the death penalty; the physical elimination of politicalopponents was the rule.

The second reason was that there was something corrupt in the senatorialenvironment that was a law unto itself; rivalries, jealousies, everyone watchingeveryone else, peers informing on one another and the most blatant23 domesticspying were commonplace; ‘danger was all around’, a contemporary wrote. In addi-tion the Empire, with its political police and its grasses, was what we call a policestate24 where, under the best leaders, people avoided talking politics at the table.25

But as soon as the emperor stopped governing according to the Senate’s wishes, afew senators or army chiefs started to stir things up. Then informing on peers would

become the way to advancement for the informers, since emperors naturallyreserved posts as magistrates or priests for those who proved their loyalty to him inthat way. To quote Sir Ronald Symes,26 if we knew that period better, private ambi-tions and hatreds would probably be uncovered behind many of these betrayals,which carried on the republican tradition of political vendettas. Tacitus andAmmianus Marcellinus are full of those rivalries between senior dignitaries whoseconsequence was to strengthen the power of the supreme ruler, as was also the casewith Nazism, since the final decision came down solely to the emperor’s will. Thus

jungle law among senators, the emperor’s ‘suspicionitis’ and the consolidation of the

regime reinforced one another.The third reason for the ‘purges’ of senators was the political psychology of the

Roman ruling class; beneath their serious demeanour and their starched togas thesenobles had adventurous unstable spirits, contrary to legend. All emperors needed to

be wary of everyone and especially of their confidant, their grand vizir, Sejanus orPlautian. There were non-stop attempts to usurp them, two during the mandate of Antoninus Pius even. All that had to happen was that a local uprising proclaimedsome poor devil emperor willy-nilly and he, finding himself committed, realized hehad no other option but to plunge in. We can understand the frequency of these

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attempts in which adventurers risked their lives, as well as those of their wives andchildren, who were executed with them: in pre-revolutionary France, kings and theirsubjects belonged to two different species, men were born kings and could not

become king just because they wanted to. But the emperor was a mere appointee,

anyone could aspire to the throne. This restless atmosphere and the reigningsovereign’s lack of legitimacy, combined with the absence of rules for the succession,made political instability the dominant characteristic of Roman imperial history as itgalloped along.

In the third and fourth centuries the emperors no longer needed to puff them-selves up as a form of threat (they were accompanied by their fearsome belt-bearers,soldiers and administrators), but there was still instability and ‘suspicionitis’ as well.In the early third century, with Septimius Severus, who ‘relied on the strength of hissoldiers more than the approval of the nobles, his natural allies’, a decisive page wasturned in people’s minds and the Senate gradually slid down to the position of a sortof Academy which the emperors, out of respect for the national tradition, continued

to treat with deference. In the portrait mentioned earlier of Caracalla as a sentry, theemperor no longer has the serene, calm, imperturbable expression of a member of the best society: he has a mission, that of a guard on the alert, watching over theEmpire. Henceforth the Empire would consist of the emperor, like a shepherd, thesoldiers, like guard-dogs, and the flock, which the other two are responsible forguarding, as the emperor Julian lucidly expressed it; as for the Senate, it was ignored.‘Make the soldiers rich and to hell with the rest’, was the advice Caracalla hadreceived from his dying father; the patriotic emperors, who rose from the rankshaving been born at the bottom of the social ladder, and who saved the Empireduring the crisis of the third century, were as spectacularly and deservedly pro-moted as Napoleon’s marshals, according to Peter Brown. ‘A mere squaddie of

humble origins who reached the summit of the military hierarchy’, said AmmianusMarcellinus of one of the two chiefs-of-staff and an advisor to Constantius II.

Since he was no longer the nobility’s leader, the emperor became master of all hissubjects, hence the famous act of 212 that by a stroke of the pen raised all theEmpire’s inhabitants (except slaves) to the rank of Roman citizens. Historical bas-reliefs and imperial portraits illustrate this politico-social change with a revealingchange of style.27 Finally around 263 a celebrated decree from Gallian prohibited thesenatorial order from taking up high command in the military and restricted thisto equestrian order alone – often commoners promoted to the order – consequently

barring senators from the throne itself: after him the only emperor from a senatorial background was one Tacitus. However, civil positions remained open to the

old nobility. So eventually a kind of ‘Napoleonic’ nobility of senior administrators, both civilian and military, was formed, all of them promoted to senatorial rank(clarissimi), although three-quarters of them did not have a seat in the Senate.

Now we come to a crucial fact that is not connected to institutions or society orpower relations, but what we must call subconscious rules that unwittingly guideand restrain our behaviour. That is the fact that the role of emperor did not haveany rules and so remained undefined. Before the third century, when the soldier-emperors personally led the armies, there was in Rome no traditional imperial rolethat leaders could unconsciously follow and that restricted their bad behaviour. The


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kings of the Ancien Régime learnt this kind of role from the cradle and were guided by an unspoken tradition that limited the arbitrary nature of absolute monarchies;there were certain things that were unthinkable for a king and that was that. In Romeon the other hand each new ruler took on a role that was as vague as it was vast. To

quote Jochen Bleicken, the leadership did not have the equivalent of the AncienRégime’s unwritten ‘fundamental laws’. It was probably the notion of power asimperium that created this kind of vacuum around itself; this explains Nero, Caligulaand other capricious sultan figures, whereas the Ancien Régime did not have any‘mad Caesars’; in a similar way the notion excluded the Senate from participating ingovernment.

A king would not need to try as hard as Marcus Aurelius did (according to hispersonal diary) not to ‘turn into a Caesar’. But when you have an imperium, an un-constrained omnipotence, it is tempting to give in to all your whims. The emperorswere continually at risk of moving from affability towards the senators to thehaughtiness of oriental potentates; it was frequently said that once upon the throne

the most peaceable of men was often transformed into a despot. We can easily imag-ine where that temptation came from: for the mass of the population the emperorwas not a representative but a master, a being who was by his very nature superiorto his subjects; and the emperor was always likely to share that flattering view of hisperson.

The emperors did not live in a restrictive environment that removed the tempta-tion from them, quite the reverse: the imperial court only encouraged their megalo-mania, their superbia. Indeed the ‘court’ around them had nothing but the name incommon with the royal courts of the Ancien Régime,28 in fact it was the opposite of them. A king surrounded by his courtiers, his nobles, lived among his peers, mem-

bers of the ruling class with whom he had to make peace and before whom he had

continually to keep up appearances. The emperors, on the other hand, were notsurrounded by senators; all they did was invite some to dine. They lived among theirinferiors: their servants, chamberlains, eunuchs, friends and also freedmen andsecretaries – in short, their ministry, which was probably housed in the House of Tiberius under the present-day Farnese Gardens – all of them people who were theirdependants and encouraged their excesses or eccentricities, which meant they madethemselves indispensable to their master. So at certain periods the political scene wasreduced to the dimensions of an arena for a psychodrama.

No restrictive entourage and no traditional role: there was nothing to hold backsome emperors on the slippery slope to tyranny, megalomania or at the very least‘royal whims’, nor to stop them interpreting the imperial role somewhat oddly; the

principle of separation that we hold dear – a public figure must not mix his personallife and his position – was not prominent. Nero was an artist on the throne; with alltheir sincerity Constantine, in his law-making and his speeches, and Julian, in theworks he published, speak like men with an interior life who are on the throne.

In every monarchy the ruler’s health and family events such as births, marriagesand mourning, are also public events; sacrifices were offered throughout the Empirewhenever the emperor fell ill. But, more than that, many of the ruler’s subjects felta genuine affection for him as a person; they were affected by everything that hap-pened to him as they would have been with a family member. The Roman people

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came to beg Tiberius not to give in to slanders circulating about Agrippina the Elderor intervened violently on behalf of Octavia when she was rejected by Nero; afterdiscovering Messalina’s adultery Claudius himself came to promise his men, theimperial guard, that he would not remarry, ‘since marriage did not agree with him’.

Thus an emperor could be tempted to abuse the public position he enjoyed to extendits privileges to his other characteristics, provided they were respectable: his artistictalents or his personal convictions, whether they were philosophical as with MarcusAurelius (Christian apologists appealed publicly to this ruler as a philosopher) or

Julian, or whether they were religious.Using this pious excuse or on an aristocratic whim, Hadrian initiated the divine

or funerary cult of the slave Antinoüs throughout the east. Nor did Heliogabalushide his piety away in the private sphere; he made his cult of the Sun the mostimportant of the public cults. Constantine was the most reserved. Far from taking onthe conversion of the Empire to Christianity,29 he did only two things: publicly hechose tolerance; privately he chose Christianity as the emperor’s personal religion

and therefore one deserving of considerable respect, no more and no less. And thisfalls outside our distinction between public and private. He made his personal con-victions clear in international relations; writing to the shah of Persia as from one con-science to another, he expressed his horror of animal sacrifices. This may explainConstantine’s pragmatism in the area of religion: he was conscious of having intro-duced as if by ‘royal whim’ what was to become a state religion after his death. Andit was a religion on which this ‘outsider bishop’, as he called himself, stamped hisseal of authority: it was his.

By contrast Domitian’s tyranny was not a matter of the emperor’s subjective beliefs but rather a certain conception of the imperial tasks, which he saw as duties.Three things about him are well known: he allowed himself to be called ‘master and

god’, he defined himself as a ‘perpetual censor’, a position that he had invented forhimself and that he made into a kind of coat of arms on the reverse of his coins, andfinally he had made it his speciality to impose sexual morality, as Miriam Griffin30

writes; a vestal virgin was put to death for that. In my view these three things boildown to just one; they constitute a type of power that is novel, in the West at least:like the Chinese and Japanese empires, which were similarly moralistic, Domitianmeasured the extent of his power over his subjects by their private morals. Respectfor morality, both private and civic, was often considered to be the foundation-stoneof society. But in practice private morality was confused with sexual morality: killingor stealing were public offences. So if the emperor’s power went as far as his subjects’

beds, Domitian was a better emperor than all his predecessors: he was the only one

who ruled over everything, for the public good.Finally we come to the genuine ‘mad Caesars’. With them we are dealing, not

with those ham actors people see them as, but with a sublime interpretation of theemperor’s role. According to them the master of the world is by his very nature asuperior being to humanity. Not only does he have a brilliant foreign policy(Caligula, Nero and Commodus all claimed this), he has an abundance of talents. Soif he takes up singing, poetry, the circus or the arena (prestigious activities at thattime) and decides to appear in public, he will be revealed as the best performer, the

best charioteer, the best gladiator in his empire; and indeed this is what two


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emperors, Nero and Commodus, did when they were under 20 years of age. In ourtime the prince of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, who was not exactly naïve, alsohad an abundance of talents; he was the best writer, the best journalist and the bestfilm-director in his kingdom. He founded a film festival in Phnom Penh at which he

received the top prize every year. Since he was of a superior nature, the emperor waslike a god compared to his subjects, just as a shepherd is of a higher nature on thescale of being than the animals in his flock. And so Caligula demanded to be treatedas a being endowed with a divine nature. Commodus, ‘a truly great man possessedof every virtue’, transformed himself into a living image of Hercules with thedemigod’s club and lionskin. This was the politics of greatness. At that period it wasnot the nation that was great but the ruler: knowing that their ruler was magnificenthad to be enough to make his subjects happy. And this led to the great utopia of thetime, which aroused many people’s enthusiasm (among them the young poet Lucan,whom we can probably consider sincere): this unprecedented magnificence madethe current reign a golden age. In ancient times it was princes, pharaohs or caliphs,

more often than students, who put imagination on the throne.Such a utopia was not entirely inappropriate, it merely carried to extremes theidea of the emperor common among the mass of the population, the citizens andprovincials to whom we are about to turn. In their eyes the emperor did not resem-

ble a representative: he was the richest, most powerful man in the world. An aston-ishing passage from Philo31 describes what the popular feeling was on Caligula’saccession: everyone was full of admiration for the heir to so much gold in ingots andcoins, so many soldiers, horsemen and sailors. People greeted him wildly when heentered a town, women bystanders fell into a trance.

This feeling for the ruler does not make a distinction between omnipotence andthe man who wields it: the man is as great as his position, which is integral with his

nature. So people bowed to the individual, his family, his whims. But conversely thisveneration for the individual was automatically felt for all those who succeeded himin the position, whoever they were. And so the emperors who were venerated in thisway were not charismatic leaders in the precise sense of the word, that is exceptionalfigures, in fact they were the opposite; they were respected and loved for their powerand not for the fascination that a few of them may have held for their subjects. Toquote Fustel de Coulanges, it was not that unthinking enthusiasm that certaingenerations harbour for their great men; the ruler might be an extremely averageman who did not inspire anyone and still be loved, even honoured as a divine being.‘He was not a god by virtue of his personal merit, he was a god because he was theemperor.’32

That was not all: as well as their feelings the people also had their reasons. A keypassage from Josephus33 shows us that opinion had shifted and the regime fitted inwith the popular will: in the average Roman’s eyes, unlike a crowd of senators, aruler did not reduce politics to personal ambitions. The Senate had been responsiblefor the terrible civil wars at the end of the Republic. The people’s spontaneous sup-port for monarchy made the revival of the Republic impossible at the death of Augustus and then Caligula: without popular approval the transition was too riskyand opened the door to opportunists. The population of the Empire was monarchistthrough a kind of antiparliamentarianism; the power of the many was always torn

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between self-interested rivalries, whereas a monarch was disinterested, a father, hispower was patriarchal. Thus, in the monarchical way, everything an emperor didwas seen as a blessing, including the most banal administrative formality, likinggranting a veteran his right to retire. The many requests addressed to the emperor,

who was the supreme judge and law-giver, often concern unimportant matters;Fergus Millar writes that this shows the idea the people had of him: the emperor wasthe father of his subjects and the father’s word was the last word in law and justice.

For these monarchist masses and the Greeks, the emperor was a monarch, abasileus. The bond between this monarch and his subjects was expressed in the oathof allegiance to the ruler’s person (and not to the Republic and its laws). Indeedevery year all the inhabitants of the Empire, Romans and provincials, swore an oathto the emperor; each person swore that in all things he would embrace the emperor’sand his family’s cause, defend them with his life and his children’s lives, opposethose they considered their enemies and denounce any act, wish or word that might

be inimical to them. I do not claim that this oath was enough to sway the attitude

of the masses, but it could only have been imposed on a population that was well-disposed towards monarchy. It had nothing in common with Roman clientelism: thiswas a political pact that committed loyal subjects unconditionally to a ruling familywhich they were duty bound to die for.

It is the same monarchical feeling that the cult of the emperor expresses in its ownway. This cult was nothing more than hyperbolic language and the hyperbolechimed with contemporary ‘discourse’ concerning the gods, but it neverthelesssprang from a living source, love for the ruler and admiration for his stature. No onetook the hyperbole literally since it was impossible, then as now, genuinely to con-sider a man to be a god, a being who will never die. Educated men shrugged theirshoulders and the people were not fooled either: as St Augustine said, it was adula-

tion and not belief. A decisive argument for this is that there is not a single ex-vototo the divinity of the emperors: when people really needed supernatural aid, for a

birth, a hazardous journey or a sickness, they called on a genuine god. In privateletters the heading is usually placed under the invocation to some divinity who isnever the emperor. The objection has been raised that in the past people did notthink as we do, but what is claimed can easily be stood on its head: if they really had

been thought of as gods, the deified emperors would not have been referred to as‘the god Augustus’ or ‘the god Hadrian’ when people simply said ‘Apollo’ and not‘the god Apollo’; granting an emperor isotheoi timai, ‘honours equal to those of thegods’, was definitely not the same as granting him the honours of the gods.34 It iseven less true that people saw the emperors as ‘divine men’, exceptional beings like

Apollonius of Tyana or Jesus of Nazareth. The thinking of the past should be soughtelsewhere: the word ‘god’ did not have the same meaning in pagan antiquity as forChristians; to pagans it meant a being on a higher plane than mortals, but not tran-scendent like the giant Being of the monotheisms (one detail will suffice: everyancient god was either male or female). Therefore calling a man a god was hyperbole

but not nonsense. Furthermore this hyperbole was so conscious of being hyperbolethat it was kept within reasonable limits; the emperor was indeed called god butonly at a distance, when he was not present, never to his face. His cult’s sacrificeswere not offered to the ruler in person – not even when that ruler was Caligula – but


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to a god for the ruler’s safety. In his palace the emperor was not a living god, not atall; we are not in China: the imperial palace was almost the only place in the worldwhere the cult of the emperor did not exist.

The two keys to the cult of the emperor were popular feeling that the master of

the world was of greater stature than other men and also love of the ruler; the deifi-cation of the emperors is the hyperbole of the language of love. This love was a psy-chological reaction that is predictable in any accepted relationship of dependence onone individual; it was not a spontaneous affect of choice but a feeling induced by thesubject’s condition.35 Thus we can state, with as much certainty as we can claim thatthe sky was blue, that such a love existed in the Roman Empire.

We know the extent of love of the king under the French Ancien Régime. 36 WhenLouis XV was ill, a contemporary wrote, ‘you could truly have found around a thou-sand people in the capital mad enough to sacrifice their lives to save the king’s’.37

When Caligula was ill, there were Romans who staked their lives on a cure; a trib-une of the people had promised his in exchange for that of the ailing Augustus.

Objects in use in daily life, from silver tableware to cake moulds, were often deco-rated with images exalting the emperor and his family. It is impossible to cast doubton the element of sincerity in the many epigraphic texts in which attachment to theemperor is expressed, any more than we can doubt, for example, that other collec-tive emotion, European patriotism a century ago.

Though all that is understood, thought is not a stone: love for the emperor was notmonolithic like a dog’s attachment to its master; a thread of scepticism and a drop of suspicion of bad faith ran beneath it. Under the Ancien Régime the royal image was‘preserved’ because people convinced themselves that his ministers, not the king,were responsible. The dual image of the emperor can be found everywhere. He wasa divine being for pagans, a sacred one for Christians, to be approached only on

one’s knees, and he was a ruler who should display affability and simplicity; eventhe stiff-necked Constantius II prided himself on his civility. It was difficult to align

both these roles; Julian, who was too much of a philosopher, went too far; his booksresponded to his subjects’ mocking wisecracks as if he was addressing equals, thesimplicity of his conduct was praised by some and criticized by others.

In short the idea people had of the emperor was contradictory: on the one handthe fabulously wealthy and omnipotent master of their dreams and on the other aman just like any other. On one hand the emperor was a giant who was loved, likethe king of French folksong; on the other he was the government, and our bar-roomchat does not have a good word to say for that, if only because we have to renderunto Caesar the tax due. There was the same dual image in Egypt, where the

pharaoh was both a living god and a potentate to whom popular tales gave a dis-respectful or even ridiculous role.38 I shall draw this point to a close with a demysti-fying quotation from Epictetus:39 farmers and sailors curse Zeus when the weather is

bad and we too continually criticize the emperor; the emperor knows this, but healso knows that ‘if he punished all those who curse him, he would empty his empireof people’.

We have seen that a natural mental inclination40 meant that the ruler was seen asa being of a superior species and unique of his kind (this psychological reaction is theultimate explanation for the move from the Republic to the Empire). The omnipotent

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delegated magistrate, that champion of the community, also became a leader bynature who reigned because he was called a lion, was surrounded by great luxury

just as a lion is by his mane, and aroused respect, admiration, love and devotion. Itis no good repeating that this traditional reactionary image, which applies to all the

rulers who followed one another, is different from the personal charisma of anexceptional man, different as well from the supreme decision-making power that isgranted to some presidents of republics in constitutional law.41 So we find here MaxWeber’s famous tripartite division: traditional power (the kind we are discussing,which we are going to assume is ethological), modern institutional power, charis-matic power.

Seen through his subjects’ eyes, the emperor thus conformed to the idea that apotentate’s subjects had had of their ruler across millennia and societies. It is thismonarchist sentiment through the ages that we must attempt to analyse since it wasthe inspiration for the regime of the Caesars, which was established and maintained

because of it.

The long-standing and widespread idea people have had of a monarch is a seriesof paradoxes:

1. There is a man, the king, who is unique by his very nature; there can be onlyone leader, who is a person made of flesh and blood (the idea of power sharedamong several individuals is an abstraction from a higher culture).

2. That individual is the master because of the superiority of his nature, he issuperior to his subjects. Superior in what and because of what? The question cannot

be put: he is superior and that is that, he has a higher rank, a greater stature thanthem, and it is not necessary to detail by what quality and in what domain thatsuperiority is seen; in particular it is not a question of a political talent in the area of

government. That is the raw pre-rational fact that monarchy theorists have vainlyattempted to justify and that also explains why a king whose mediocrity everyonerecognizes still remains king.

3. He is leader absolutely; though it is true that he in fact occupies the top of ahierarchical ladder of which he is the highest rung, that rung is different in charac-ter from the lower rungs.

4. He is master without a shadow of a doubt, since he bears that title. The senseof reality does not operate here, the reality of his power is not questioned, no oneasks whether it is not more apparent than real, whether the grand vizir is not morepowerful than him, etc.

5. The king and his subjects do not live alongside one another, but their relation-

ship is a face-to-face one: they all know he exists and what happens to him concernsthem. They feel a disinterested emotion for him; if he is victorious, his glory givesthem personal pleasure. Not to respect that superior being would be a blasphemyworthy of punishment. He is in the spotlight in front of this audience, the actions andthoughts of such a great being are naturally on show for all to see and they interesteveryone.

6. He is master because of his position not his actions. The king is recognized assuch by his subjects, who venerate him, but his power is not measured by the influ-ence his has on their lives, since these lives are ruled more by civil society, family,


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patron, closer authorities. The king is a resplendent image to be feared, suspendedabove his people, rather than a reality experienced by everyone in their day-to-daylives.

That image does not proceed from reality (which is very different), but automatic-ally imposes itself, arises fully armed in people’s minds, where it appears from whoknows where. Thus it can exist alongside, in conflict or in compromise with anothervision of the leader that is more realistic and ready to recognize that the current kingis just a humble man or that his ministers are tricking him. For, as we have seen, theimage of the sovereign is twofold, and probably was at every period: a lion, a mereman. And in the end, of the two images, the one that is archaic, the lion, is psychic-ally opaque and does not have the ‘rational’ character of a regulated relationship; soit can be linked with an equally opaque fact, a ‘natural’ one, the family, the gens:everywhere the hereditary principle emerges in the image of the king, even in Rome,even in socialist North Korea.

The monarchist sentiment has disappeared almost everywhere in the present-dayworld, but it played a prominent role for a long time; nowadays, in the West andelsewhere, there are just a few relics left. What is surprising is the cohesion of theimage, complex though it is, its frequent occurrence and the fact that it was longtaken for granted: it lasted for thousands of years by being the only one. It does notowe its appearance to the unlikely coming together of the same factors in each of theinnumerable societies where we find it. Indeed it cannot be explained by social inter-ests (such as the interest of the ruling senatorial class) or by the past of the societyunder consideration (in the way that imperial absolutism owes much to the old ideaof imperium) or by some banal emotional reaction (love induced by dependence, forinstance). It seems to belong less to a given society than a basic archaic impulse that

is or was common to the human race, to its ethology. Just as inequality between thesexes is found in the most diverse societies. Thus it appears that the imagination mayhave certain preferred tendencies.

The different living species each have their particular hierarchical organization;they also have various ways of organizing the relationship between the sexes; theylive in groups or not. The evolution of human ethology has its own timescale whichis very slow,42 slower still than Fernand Braudel’s longue durée (long term). Recentevents, such as the gradual disappearance of the royal image, the American andFrench Revolutions, or the feminist movement, may be isolated phenomena sympto-matic of certain changes that are taking place in the ethology of the human race.

Paul VeyneCollège de France

Translated from the French by Jean Burrell

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Notes

1. The analogy between the system of emperors and that of caliphs is a close one: see G. Dagron,Empereur et prêtre, étude sur le ‘césaropapisme’ byzantin, Paris, Gallimard 1996, pp. 70–3.

2. Dagron, op. cit., p. 72.

3. Ibid., p. 70, cf. 72.4. J. Béranger, Recherches sur l’aspect idéologique du principat, Basel, Schweizerische Beiträge zur

Altertumswissenschaft, 1953, p. 72.5. An unwritten law excluded from the throne any man from the Greek civilization: out of 100

emperors or usurpers whose origins are known or suspected, not one is from a Greek background.In the fourth and fifth centuries when the western part of the Empire was in fact a German pro-tectorate, another unwritten law prevented the all-powerful generals of German origin from ascend-ing to the throne, so they created puppet emperors to rule in their shadow.

6. Dagron, op. cit., pp. 42–3.7. Staatsrecht, II (2: 1133).8. Egon Flaig, Den Kaiser herausfordern, Frankfurt and New York, Campus Verlag, 1992, p. 559.9. Flaig, op. cit., p. 126.

10. The word had two meanings: the public interest (preventing a barbarian invasion was serving theRepublic) and the traditional institutions, Senate, consulate, etc., which were like the spelling of thename Roman, the face of Rome.

11. Tacitus, Histories, II, 72: ‘in Istria there were still inherited clients of the old Crassus family, theircountry estates and the influence that went with their name’. In 69 an ex-officer of the imperial guard brought with him into Vespasian’s party his native town of Fréjus, which was completely devoted tohim ‘because he was the town’s champion and it hoped he would gain power in the future’ ( Histories,III, 43).

12. A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Civilis princes: between citizen and king’, in Journal of Roman Studies 72 (1982:32–48). P. Veyne, Le Pain et le cirque, Paris, Editions du Seuil 1976, p. 718: ‘the imperial system was based on an absurdity: although he was sovereign by subjective right, the emperor was created byhis subjects; could they respect their creature unconditionally?’

13. Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, I, 130.

14. Fables, I, 2 (3), 30 (the frogs complain to Jupiter about their wicked leader): ‘citizens, bear your pres-ent misfortune, the god told them, for fear a worse one should befall you’. II, 16, 1: ‘by changing theirleader the middling citizens (cives pauperes) only change masters’.

15. Veyne, Le Pain et le cirque, p. 635, quoted by Flaig, op. cit., p. 122, n. 94: ‘zur Entscheidung nicht nurunfähig, sondern auch unwillig’.

16. Seneca, De beneficiis, II, 12: Caligula held out his foot to a senator to be kissed; ‘is that not tramplingthe Republic underfoot?’

17. Pliny the Younger, Trajan’s Panegyricus, LIV, 5; and LXVI, 4.18. Pliny mentions the Senate’s ‘idleness’ under the tyrant Domitian (letter VIII, 14, 8–9); but under the

best of leaders, Trajan, he also writes (III, 20, 12) that ‘everything depends on the whim of one manwho, in the general interest, has assumed all positions, all tasks; however, by a beneficial mitigation,a few rivulets flowing from that generous source run down to us’. This is very different from the

Panegyricus.19. Tacitus, Annals, I, 73.20. But, in order to mark himself off from the tyrants, it was also appropriate that he should refuse some

of the divine honours his subjects granted him. This was another aspect of the farce of refusingpower. Nero, who was an atypical tyrant (he did not have himself made a god), would occasionallyrefuse divine honours.

21. There is an astounding anecdote in Seneca, De beneficiis, III, 26, or a terribly vulgar one in the first of The Lives of Lucan, 4.

22. Tacitus, Annals, XI, 4; Ammianus Marcellinus, XV, 3, 5 (the senior police officer Mercurius, ‘count of dreams’) and XIX, 12.


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23. There is a true-life spy story anecdote in Tacitus, Annals, IV, 69.24. L. Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms, I, pp. 256–8. Use by the police of soldiers in plain clothes who

would provoke people into speaking ill of the emperor (Epictetus, IV, 13, 5) and of courtesans (Pliny,Natural History, XXX, 15); some of Vitellius’s soldiers crept into Rome to spy on public opinion;everyone kept quiet, everyone was afraid (Tacitus, Histories, I, 85).

25. Martial, X, 48, 21, under Trajan.26. R. Syme, Tacitus, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963, p. 422, n. 6.27. In 202 the reliefs on the arch of the Severi in the Forum represented the biggest stylistic break in the

whole of Roman art; as Rodenwaldt has demonstrated, these reliefs reproduced – or rather were askilful pastiche of – the paintings in popular style that were exhibited in triumphs to show thepeople how the war had proceeded. We might imagine that, in order to glorify Napoleon as anemperor close to the people, the reliefs that decorate the Arc de Triomphe at the Etoile in Paris werereproductions or condescending pastiches of images d’Epinal (simple country genre prints); see ErnstKissinger, Byzantine Art in the Making, Harvard, 1977 (1995), pp. 10–13. In official reliefs the academicstyle of the century of the Antonines was followed by what Eugenia Strong called a ‘Flemish tapes-try style’. In my view this stylistic break has not been sufficiently taken account of and its politicalsignificance has been misunderstood. The change was probably an initiative of the artist himself rather than an order from the emperor. Henceforth official bas-reliefs followed a separate path (forinstance, on the arch of Constantine in the Roman Forum): they remained faithful to this style, whichwas designed to be, and considered itself to be, popular, not without a slightly haughty condescen-sion, in contrast to the classical , academic Hellenizing style of the first two centuries that continuedto be the style the aristocracy used for the bas-reliefs on sarcophagi.

28. There was no court life or court festivals at the palace. The emperor in his palace was not surrounded by the senators as a king was by his nobles. Far from having a royal style of life, he lived like anyother aristocrat: each morning he was greeted by his crowd of clients and he invited senators andequestrians to dine. He had ‘friends’, ‘companions’ or ‘counts’, comites, but did they live at thepalace? It is very doubtful; he had his freedmen, but the most important of them lived elsewhere intheir splendid mansions (domus).

29. A conversion he admitted he wished for but did not feel he had the right to impose (Eusebius, Life of Constantine, II, 56 and 60).

30. In the new Cambridge Ancient History, XI, The High Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,2000, p. 79.

31. Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Gaium, 9–11.32. Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, I, La Gaule romaine, Paris,

Hachette 1900, p. 191.33. Antiquitates Iudaicae, XIX, 3, 228.34. Similarly the Byzantine emperors were only isapostoloi, ‘equal to the apostles’. So they were not true

apostles.35. So this love is one of the affects intended to help individuals fit in with their world, allowing them

to ‘conquer themselves rather than Fortune’ (as Descartes said) and to judge the grapes too green.Ideologies that are designed to deceive others are unimportant compared to those that are designedto let people make a virtue of necessity. On this fit between reality and what we think of it, see Jon

Elster, Le Laboureur et ses enfants: deux essais sur les limites de la rationalité , French translation, Paris,Editions de Minuit 1987; Psychologie politique: Veyne, Zinovie, Tocqueville, Paris, Editions de Minuit1990; L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1987,and, for the limits to this theory, J.-P. Poitou, La Dissonance cognitive, Paris, Armand Colin 1974; D.Kahnemann, P. Slovic and A. Tversky, Judgement under Uncertainty, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1982.

36. Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi: idées et croyances politiques en France, XIIIe–XVe siècles, Paris,Gallimard 1994, p. 458: ‘The study of love as a political virtue has not yet been carried out’; ‘The feel-ing of love for our kings seemed natural’, writes Maine de Biran in 1814; ‘this love was a religiousfeeling like divine love; it was a sort of worship that elevated the soul and, like honour, could com-

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mand every sort of sacrifice of personal interest, even life’; and he deplores the fact that young men born after 1789 have never experienced this feeling and cannot understand it: they equate it, hewrites, with self-interested calculating, part of the career plan ( Journal intime, Valette and Monbrun(eds), Paris, Plon 1927, I, p. 78).

37. Quoted by Sainte-Beuve, ‘Relation inédite de la dernière maladie de Louis XV’, in his Portraits

littéraires, III.38. G. Posener, De la divinité du pharaon, Cahiers de la Société Asiatique, XV, 1960.39. Diatribai, III, 4, 8.40. This ethological inclination is recognized by the most classical of thinkers, but rationalized as func-

tional because of its natural purpose: discussing the English constitution, Bagehot wrote that themonarch existed in order to make the community comprehensible to the people.

41. In the organization of modern societies there may be an individual, a president or a dictator, at theapex of the hierarchy who is the only one with the power to make the major decisions, such as press-ing the button to unleash nuclear weapons (Raymond Aron, Etudes politiques, Paris, Gallimard 1972,p. 191). But it would be another rationalization to explain the ‘mythical’ image of the monarch on the basis of this fact.

42. J.-M. Schaeffer in the journal Communications, no. 72 (2002: 110, n. 6): ‘The human race has a bicephalous evolutionary destiny governed by both the slow pace of genetic evolution (or deviation)and the rapid pace of cultural evolution’.


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What Was a Roman Emperor -Paul Veyne

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