Avey, and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from La Trobe University.

I'm your host, Riannon Evans, and with me today is classicist, author and Cambridge University

Professor Mary Beard.

She's the author of many popular and respected

works, including her newest book, Emperor of Rome, which explores the power and practices of

the rulers of ancient Rome. This brings me to episodes CCXXVII, Imperial Dining. The simple act of dinner took on a new dimension for the emperors.

In a place where every meal could be a performance, an emperor used the chance to reward

and impress, intimidate and strike fear, and sometimes all at once.

Having dinner with the emperor was always a great honour, but sometimes you were risking your life.

Here's Mary Beard.

Dinners for me are really fascinating, Roman imperial dinners, because in some ways, when we read about them in Roman writers,

they do live up to the whole Hollywood image, you know, that overconsumption

recipes made out of the most extraordinary, and we would say totally repulsive ingredients,

you know, all sorts of things stuffed into pigs' bladders that we would never

fancy stuffing. What's interesting is that we and the Romans share that sense that when

the emperor sat down to dinner, it was over the top. Now, I suppose that's not all that different from what we

imagine in modern monarchies, really, that the royals always eat fantastically rich,

lavish things that are way outside our price range. And it's probably not true. And in some ways, in Rome, it wasn't true either.

I think that emperors and people who write about emperors in the ancient world,

they're kind of invested in the idea that the emperor eats differently from normal ordinary people.

And I'm sure he makes a show of doing that occasionally.

I'm sure that you could go to dinners.

...