Beard: There was a lot of nostalgia among the elite for the Republic. But it was mostly no more than that. We like to think that the old elite would have been actively working to undermine the system of one-man rule, but they didn’t. They conspired against individual emperors, but not against the system of one-man rule itself. After the mid-first century C.E. (at the end of the rule of Caligula), we have no evidence for any publicly expressed desire at Rome to return to the Republic. It’s a regime built on collaboration.
Guida: Did citizens have any means of holding the powerful to account?
Beard: There was no longer any electoral system of all the citizens to hold the emperor to account, but the venues of popular entertainment were places where the general public could very clearly express their discontent. It’s no substitute for real power, but it was clearly quite frightening for the emperors. The Circus Maximus (where the chariot races happened) could hold over 200,000 spectators, perhaps 250,000, bigger than any modern sports stadium. When the crowd demanded changes there, emperors were wise to give in.
Guida: When Augustus cast a new imperial scheme, he did so, you said, “in the words and slogans and ideas of the old.” How do you separate rhetoric from the evolution, and reshaping, of power? What rules or norms that previously constrained power — perhaps particularly with the Senate? — were discarded or redefined, and how?
Beard: That’s exactly Augustus’ point: You can’t separate rhetoric from the reshaping of power. So far as the Senate was concerned, in some ways its power increased under the emperors. Its decrees had used to be merely advisory (“authoritative”). From Augustus on, they had the force of law.
But that is rather overshadowed by other factors, pulling in different ways. So, for example, you could paint the imperial regime as a military dictatorship. The emperor controls the army (for the first time all Roman soldiers were under a single commander). But an awful lot of power between emperor and Senate was negotiated face to face, in a dance of rhetoric and manners. In this the emperor was always the boss, but he could be exposed.
