The Spectator combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12 week subscription in print and online,

and get a £20 £20 £1 Amazon gift voucher absolutely free.

Go to spectator.com.uk slash summer.

Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator,

and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the eminent classicist Mary Beard, whose new book is

Emperor of Rome. Now, welcome Mary. By the title, one might think this was a kind of Seller and Yateman's Suetonius-type

Kings and Things history, but it's not.

What are you trying to do with this?

Yeah, you might think that Beard had gone back on her, you know,

well-known propensity for looking at the underclass and had decided to invest instead in

posh white men. Well, in part, that's true. But it's, I think it's different from what you

might think, for two reasons, honestly. One is that it's not a biography of any emperor or empress. What the book is

trying to say is, look, you know, there's some great biographies out there if you want,

but probably, in my view, the best way of understanding what's going on in the Roman Empire at the top is not to think about the wickedness of demission or the sensible policies of Vespasian or whatever.

It's to say, look, emperors are more like each other than they are different.

The stories of virtue and vice are largely

concocted after they died. And we get a lot further in saying, look, what did emperors do?

What was the job? Because they all did the same job. They lived in the same place. They had the

same kind of staff. So can we see them as a group? And actually, that's

sort of what one Emperor Marcus Aurelius suggested when he said, he looked back over his predecessors

and said, do you know, same play, different cast. Well, I suppose my motto is that. So in one way,

...