Matt Elton: Your new book covers a swathe of the history of ancient Rome, from Julius Caesar to Septimius Severus and beyond, but starts by introducing a less familiar figure. Who is he, and why did you lead with him?
Mary Beard: The book kicks off with the story of a teenager from Syria who came to the Roman throne in AD 218 and who was assassinated in 222. Known as Elagabalus [officially Marcus Aurelius Antoninus], he certainly wasn't one of Rome's greatest hits, but he is an emperor around whom the most extravagant stories have collected. If you think Nero or Caligula were over the top, you ain't seen nothing until you've looked at Elagabalus! We're told that when he invited people to dinner, he showered them with rose petals – with so many petals that his guests were smothered and died. He is said to have been the earliest known user of the whoopee cushion in western history: he would have his slaves go around and let the air out of dinner guests' cushions so that they ended up on the floor. He's also reputed to have married a Vestal Virgin [a priestess sworn to chastity] and made a human sacrifice. In short, Nero was a pussycat in comparison.
I start the book with Elagabalus because the point about such stories isn't whether or not they're true. (My guess is that they're not, but were invented after Elagabalus's time to besmirch his memory.) My pitch is that, in a way, it doesn't matter if they are literally true, because they're true in another sense: they represent Roman fears about what the worst kind of emperor would be like. They're saying that you never know where you are with a
