Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

aligned his forms of interaction with the senate according to proto-republican
norms and values: freedom of speech; strict limits to adulatio; recognition
of the value of republican office which emperor and other aristocrats could
hold or aspire to, especially the consulship; investment in a private status –
as if an ordinary citizen – in dress and appearance. From an emperor’s point
of view, balancing ritual elevation with ritual humility – to be part of the
society, not above society – was entirely functional: ‘An emperor whom ritual
and ceremonial raised above the level of human society, whose power was
represented symbolically as deriving from “outside”, from the gods, owed
nothing to the internal structure of the society he ruled. To act, by contrast,
as a member of that society, as the peer of its most elevated members, was
(symbolically) to associate autocratic power with the social structure. Civility
both reinforced the social hierarchy by demonstrating imperial respect for it,
and strengthened the autocracy by linking it with the social structure.’ 19 Not
all emperors felt necessarily obliged to try to confirm to this image (their
reigns often came to an abrupt end...); and as we shall see in Section 5 below,
different emperors had different notions of what ‘civility’ consisted in.
Consideration of the underlying ‘structure’ of the imperial system also
helps to put our sources into perspective – enabling us to read them as highly
rhetorical and personally and politically committed views on, rather than
entirely accurate representations of, historical realities. Just taking our imperial
sources at face value results in the kind of history one gets in the (highly
engrossing and actively emetic) BBC-series Horrible Histories, where the ‘Rotten
Romans’ feature prominently – and Nero gets the final riff in the ‘Roman
Emperor’s Song – Who’s Bad?’, topping the pops against classic competition:
the apparently certifiable sociopaths Caligula (emperor 37–41), Elagabalus
(218–222), and Commodus (180–192). 20 But the composition of literature by
members of the ruling élite was never a neutral activity; rather, it was itself
implicated in the imperial configuration of power, in the jostling for position,
in exercises of self-promotion: Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius wrote (mainly) for
fellow aristocrats about a shared world dominated by the emperor – and used
their works to define their own status, position, and prestige within it.
Rhetorical myth-making is rampant in Roman historical writing. Most
notoriously, our sources show an avowed interest in portraying emperors
who for one reason or other fell out of favour as mentally deranged. In many
19 Wallace-Hadrill (1982) 47.
20 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Nh-zSMzqo. For an equivalent in adult
entertainment check out History Channel’s Caligula: 1400 Days of Terror.