When I was teaching Roman history at the University of Queensland in 2013, I became frustrated with the traditional biographical approach to writing about Roman emperors. There was an endless stream of books retelling the stories of individual rulers, such as Caligula and Constantine. Very often these biographies aimed to rehabilitate Rome’s rulers by dismissing the lurid and fantastical tales told about them in the ancient sources.
Modern biographers had good reasons to be sceptical about these stories because the same content appeared repeatedly regardless of the emperor or the era. Many a young ruler was said to have disguised himself before going out for a night on the town; imperial women were suspected of malign influence behind the throne; both emperors and empresses were thought to have murdered their fathers, mothers, and lovers.
The sheer number of similar tales led me to consider a new way forward. Instead of trying to dismiss these tales in the hope of writing a more accurate biography of one individual emperor, what if we harnessed them as evidence for what Romans thought about their rulers?
Word on the street
I began my research by collecting the different stories about Roman emperors found in ancient histories and biographies but quickly became unsatisfied. What if these tales only conveyed the views of elite authors? How was I going to reconstruct what people thought on the streets of Rome and Pompeii?
It was at this point that I decided to change tack and focus on how Romans talked about their emperors. Anthropologists and sociologists have demonstrated that rumour and gossip play important roles in revealing human mentalities.
Rumours develop as a way of making sense of situations about which there is no reliable information or when the information that is received is not considered trustworthy. Gossip, by contrast, is evaluative social talk about an individual, focusing on their character, actions, and appearance. It not only acts as a form of social glue to bind groups together but also establishes community expectations about appropriate behaviour.
Let me give you some examples to show how these theories work in practice. The unexpected death of a young, healthy emperor might be explained by a rumour that he had been poisoned by his wife, whereas people might gossip about an overweight ruler’s lifestyle. In both cases, the form of the rumour and gossip indicates popular mentalities—the poisoning rumour reveals a fear of powerful women, while the gossip about the emperor’s weight shows disdain at the unseemly nature of excessive consumption.
The merit of examining rumour and gossip together is that they collectively shed light on the full range of the human imagination, from our hopes and fears to our values and morals.
The challenges of historical research
This new approach still posed challenges for the historian of ancient Rome. Modern anthropologists investigating rumour and gossip go and live among the communities that are the subject of their research, recording and transcribing precisely what people say to each other. But I could not travel back in time to the first century CE and listen to the voices of people as they sat in their taverns or theatres.
I therefore took up the challenge of searching through the sources for specific evidence of rumour and gossip circulating orally. Some of this came from elite authors, such as Suetonius, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio, who recounted what they had heard from their relatives about the behaviour of emperors. In his discussion of why the emperor Caligula decided to build a bridge across the Bay of Baiae, Suetonius writes:
When I was a boy, I used to hear my grandfather telling the story, which came to him from courtiers very close to the emperor, about the motivations for the bridge.
Suetonius went on to recount what he had heard: the emperor Tiberius’s astrologer had apparently declared that it was no more likely that Caligula would become emperor than he would ride over the Bay of Baiae on horseback—and so he did. I decided I could incorporate this anecdote into my book because Suetonius clearly documents the oral transactions which led to him recording the rumour in his own Life of Caligula.
What about the world beyond the palace walls? Here I turned to the numerous songs and chants which were sung by the populace in Rome and Constantinople to find out what aspects of imperial behaviour were the subject of gossip. For example, Tiberius was greeted with this choice ditty about his cruelty:
The man scorns wine, because he now has a thirst for gore;
He drinks that as greedily as he imbibed unmixed wine before.
Popular views about imperial behaviour were even written down as graffiti on the walls of houses and public buildings, reflecting what Romans were talking about at the time. This is how we know that some people in Pompeii thought of Nero as a poisoner, while churchgoers in Cappadocia condemned the Christian emperor Valens as a heretic.
Why does this matter?
The Romans were often merciless in the way they talked about their rulers—baldness and body hair, sexual positions and partners, and inebriation and indolence were all fair game for gossip and laughter. Rumours tended to cluster at the other end of the spectrum, revealing the Romans’ fears of harsh new taxes, panic about civil war, or cruel and unusual punishments.
As I brought all this material together for the first time, I concluded that this talk was powerful evidence for political debate that took place beyond institutions such as the emperor’s council or the senate house. An emperor’s sexual behaviour might initially seem to be a frivolous topic, but if he did not produce a son to succeed him, it might lead to civil war. Most Romans never met their emperor in person, but their conversations show that his actions always mattered to them. Nor was such talk toothless. As the historian Tacitus wrote: ‘Nero was dislodged by reports and rumours rather than by warfare.’
Behind Caesar’s Back: Rumor, Gossip, and the Making of the Roman Emperors is out now with Yale University Press.
