Palatine - An Alternative History of the Caesars with Peter Stothard

Hello and welcome to World History Encyclopedia. My name is Kelly and today I'm joined by author and journalist Peter Stothard. Peter was editor of the Times and of the Times Literary Supplement. He's an author of ancient history and memoirs and his previous books include The Last Assassin, The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar, Alexandria, The Last Knights of Cleopatra, and On the Spartacus Road, A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy. But today though, we are joined by Peter to chat all about his new book Palatine, An Alternative History of the Caesars, published by Oxford University Press. Well thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited to talk to you about your new book. So why don't we start off by you telling us what your new book is all about. This is a book that is the the view of an important period of Roman history that the Roman historian didn't want us to see. Most of the historians of ancient Rome were essentially quite a traditional conservative upper class types and when the Roman Empire emerged from the old system where the aristocrats had done very nicely, it produced a whole lot of powerful people. The power in Rome moved from the forum everybody knows about where people make great speeches and were competing for votes, inside effectively a single house. That single house was on the Palatine Hill and became the Palatine. The Palatine is the name that became afterwards used for every palace that there ever was. Palatine was the first palace. But inside that house, a totally new set of people had power. So a lot of Romans didn't take much notice of the views of enslaved people in any way and then suddenly they found that inside this house of power, the Palatine, there were some very very influential slaves and also a lot of even more influential ex-slaves who were doing the jobs that previously they'd have thought they should have been doing. Because it was a house and a home, there were a lot of very powerful women doing things that nobody quite knew what they were doing. Maybe they were exaggerating, maybe they weren't and they were quite sure exactly what was going on. But what people realised was that something was changing here in terms of who controlled what was going on. These people, these slaves, ex-slaves, the women, the cooks, the food tasters, the guards, all these people who tend to be sort of patronised in traditional history because the Romans were writing the history and didn't like it, actually were extremely important people suddenly. It's worth, I think, looking at this period, this longish period of the heirs of Julius Caesar, from Augustus to Nero and then the chaos that happened after that, to look at it through the eyes of these courtiers, these people who were looked down on and were considered... The main character in my book, a man called Aulus Vitellius, was really denigrated through whole history just for being fat and a glutton and a kind of general bad guy. Now, I'm not saying he was a... No part of my book is to say that he was a great guy or that his father was a great guy or that they were all wonderful. But it's worth looking at them again, not through the eyes of someone who is committed to thinking that they're rubbish. Yeah, no, I think that's incredible that you're coming to these very well-known figures potentially from a completely different angle. You're looking at influential figures, higher figures, emperors that we are obviously very aware of, but you're coming to them from a different point of view. How did you get that sort of information? What's available to you from these new points of view? At the end of this period of the Caesars, after Nero, by the time that Nero was dead, virtually everybody who was an heir of Julius Caesar, who was even half plausible to be an emperor, had already been killed. And so there weren't really any old Caesars left. And so when Nero's advisors and staff, who were rather less effective than some of the advisors and staff of the earlier emperors, all Nero wanted them to do really was to clap when he performed and when he sang. So that wasn't much use when there was a revolt turned up in Gaul. There were a lot of soldiers marching towards you. You find you had this very good Praetorian guard of acrobats and dancers and people who thought that your singing voice was terrific. So Nero was forced to commit suicide and after that it was pretty much open season and there were four emperors in one year. Now it happened that one of those emperors, the Emperor Metellius, was the son and grandson of a courtier family. So my aim in Palatine is to trace the history of the Caesars, which is why it's called an alternative history of the Caesars, through this family of bureaucrats, courtiers, flatterers, gluttons, call them what you like, who ended up briefly with one of theirs, completely unexpectedly. All of a sudden Metellius was probably the last person that anybody expected to become emperor, particularly Aulus Vitellius. His mother had a particularly dim view of his prospects of ever doing anything life at all, which is unusual for Roman mothers because they were normally very keen on advancing their sons. Vitellius's mother thought that this was a really bad idea. But we do know a bit about Vitellius. Once he became a Roman emperor, you got a biography by Suetonius and people started taking a note of what you were doing, so the historians do write about you. Because his father was an extremely influential courtier, particularly in the reign of Claudius, we do know quite a bit about him too. We can piece together the story of this family, which was very different from the grand families of Rome, but who was very, very important during the time of the Caesars. How brilliant. It's almost like a piece that hasn't yet been fitted into this grand knowledge of the early emperors. Why did you decide to write this particular book in this alternative history of the Caesars? I thought this was a story that needed to be told with some sort of relevance to our own time. If you look at your own time in Britain, perhaps more than in America, but the notion of the downwardly mobile aristocrats, the incoming newcomers from abroad, the immigrants, people from different cultures who were looked down on, and then they turn out to be extremely powerful. What was the real legacy of Rome? We look at the aqueducts and we read the poetry and people still study the moral examples of Roman behaviour, normally very individualistic, almost always male behaviour. That's what we think of as the legacy of Rome. But in many ways, the birth of Western bureaucracy was as important a legacy of Rome as any other. And this bureaucracy was born on the Palatine Hill. And it's cast with a kind of chorus line in politics, some of whom occasionally, very briefly became stars, but even when they weren't stars, were very important for keeping the show on the road. So you were doing research on all these different people, but they all sound very unique. Did you have a favourite? All Is To Tell Is his father, this man, Lucis To Tell Is, is a rather amazing character because he was essentially a professional flatterer. And there were another lot of people who were looked down on. There's a lot about flattery and gluttony in this book. These were two crimes from the point of view of many people writing about politics at the time and since. Gluttony meant lack of self-control, and the Emperor Vitellius was a famous glutton. And you have to ask yourself, well, I'm sure he wasn't a particularly nice guy. You say a favourite guy, probably the son wasn't exactly a favourite. On the other hand, when you're calling someone fat, it's almost kind of fat shaming, really. Is it because they actually were fat or just because you had some other reason for saying you didn't like them? And the father, who I don't think was fat, I think he probably was father thin, but he was famous as a flatterer. And he was the guy who, when Messalina, who was Claudius's wife, needed everybody to say how wonderful she was, carried her slipper around and would occasionally kiss it. And he was the one who, when the Emperor Caligula said, I'm talking to the moon, can you see me talking to the moon? Caligula believed, or may have believed, that he was the kind of god, or at least he used that to test people. Very clever thing for Caligula to say to Vitellius. Most people would fail this test and say, yes, I can see you talking to the moon, at that point Caligula could say, well, who else is there? And then laugh when the guy had dug himself into a deep hole. Or if he said he didn't see Caligula talking to the moon, Caligula would get very cross and say, well, are you suggesting I'm not a god? But Lucius Vitellius was a very smart flatterer. And he came up with the answer, I know, I can't see you talking to the moon, sir, because only gods could see other gods. This was a very smart response and meant that he was much better flatterer than the other ones who often ended up in rather unpleasant places, having very nasty things done to them. So Vitellius was a man of extremely quick wit, who was attacked because he was a flatterer, but flattery was really important in the court in order to make it work. And his son, Aulus Vitellius, the emperor, was, say, fact-shamed, probably was a terrible glutton and he does extraordinary stories indeed about his food. But I think it's worth asking if you're writing a book and really trying to see what actually happened. Why did they think he was a glutton? Was he really so different from everybody else? And if he was different, why was he different? And if he wasn't that different, well, why are we shaming him rather than other people? All these are based on the notion that, say, flattery and gluttony are just two of the things all of us, I reckon, you can recognise in any kind of bureaucracy, you know, that eating to excess and saying things that you don't believe to people who are superior to you are quite important to making the place work. And if you're going to understand how the thing works, what his stories are supposed to do, this was worth investigating. Absolutely. So now everyone knows when they're reading your book to expect flattery and gluttony as the two main things running through it. Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like it would have been a lot of fun doing research for this particular book. Did you find, as you're working through the research, anything particularly surprising or fascinating that you didn't know before? I think it's worth saying that the research for ancient history is slightly different than, say, research for modern history. Research in ancient history rarely means going through, but never really means going through archives that people haven't looked at before. We do know a lot about this period of that, but none of it is new. I mean, occasionally you discover an inscription or something on a tombstone or something, rarely very important, actually. The point about, we call it research, is looking at the material that we have and trying to look behind the material and also looking at it a different way than people have looked at it before. Not just for the sake of novelty, but because everybody brings their own prejudices to the sources that you've got, the research that you've got. They know what they're looking for. Many people investigated Roman history in order to defend the British Empire. The Romans had a very successful empire. We had a very successful empire. It was a good idea to have a bit of Roman discipline to be employed in the British Empire, and that's why it was worth studying. They were good people and they attacked barbarians and they generally went tramped around taking things from other people. A lot of people studied Roman history to justify precisely doing that. There are lots of other reasons, good reasons and less good reasons. I was just trying to apply what I hope is a modern sensibility to a story so that you see it in a fresh way. Brilliant. I love that. Okay, so probably the last question that I have is, what do you think people should know about either the topic as a whole or your book more specifically? Well, I hope when they've read it, everybody has said that it's a good read and that you will get a take on a period of history that you thought you knew or thought you knew some of, even if it's only from movies and a bit of Shakespeare and perhaps Robert Graves. I mean, there are people who've done this, big figures who've looked at this period. No one would deny that. But I hope that you people will see it in a different way and see that the legacy of Rome isn't quite as simple as they thought it was and the aspects of their own lives at our own times are just as much part of the legacy of ancient Rome as some of the Victorian values and traditional ideas that possibly put them off studying Roman history in the first place. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Peter, for joining me today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. If anyone wants to purchase the book, you'll be able to find a link down below for Oxford University Press. Yeah, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much, Kelly. This video was brought to you by World History Encyclopedia. For more great articles and interactive content, head to our website via the link below. If you like my sweater, you can find this design and a bunch more in our shop at worldhistory.store or you can find a link for it down below. 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