1. Loving An Emperor

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. To know what it means to be Roman, you need to look beyond the sweating gladiators and the stark Shakespearean togas. There are fresh stories to be told and other lives we can piece together from scattered clues and new discoveries. I'm Mary Beard. And in Being Roman, I'll bring you the stories of six fascinating people who lived at the height of Rome's power, from the father of modern medicine to a slave on Hadrian's Wall.

In this episode of Being Roman, we look behind the steely facade of a Roman emperor to find what seems to be a naive and curiously anxious young man. Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome between 161 and 180 CE. I guess most Romans would have thought of him as a war leader. campaigning relentlessly against Germanic tribes pushing their way into Roman territory. Today, he's best known as the Philosopher Emperor, whose thoughts on life and death still sell in their thousands.

It's that intriguing combination of brains and brawn that gives his famous bronze statue overlooking Rome such power. This is quite the most famous image of Marcus Aurelius that there is. Bronze figure, handsome, bearded, sitting on his equally handsome and supersized horse. And I'm not the only person here to be admiring him. There are several tour groups doing what I'm doing, sitting and looking.

Michelangelo moved him here to be a great centrepiece for Michelangelo's design, square on the Capitoline Hill. He's calm. He's serious. he's sitting there almost commanding that horse by the force of his personality and he's for every inch the ancestor Richard Harris in Gladiator, the movie, the Marcus Aurelius who wanted to make Russell Crowe his heir, not Joaquin Phoenix, or if you're a bit older.

He's the ancestor of Alec Guinness in the fall of the Roman Empire. And what he exudes is that sense of a perfect, calm, well-intentioned ruler of the world. Of all the emperors, Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the one we feel we can get closest to.

He wasn't just a general on horseback, he was also a writer and thinker, and some of what he wrote has actually survived to speak to us today. Most famously... his philosophical notes and jottings, which now go under the title Meditations, and are still a 21st century bestseller. to be found on the bedside tables of President Bill Clinton and golfer Rory McIlroy. See that you don't become too imperial and that you are not stained with the purple, for that does happen.

Make sure that you remain simple, good, uncorruptible, dignified, straightforward, a friend of justice, God-fearing, kind, affectionate, resolute in doing your duty. Struggle to stay being the kind of person as philosophy wanted to make you. Life is short. There is just a single fruit of life on earth. A righteous disposition and actions undertaken for the common good.

In his own words, we hear his thoughts on leadership, on death, on morality. He tells us what it should mean to be Roman. And we don't have quite that kind of reflection from any other Roman emperor.

But here's the fascinating thing. In the last few years, scholars and archaeologists have made a series of discoveries and offered new interpretations that give us another view of Marcus Aurelius. They give us a chance to meet the young man before he became a war leader or a philosopher, as he takes lessons in how to be emperor from his tutor Fronto.

and from his adoptive father, Emperor Antoninus Pius. We can sit down beside him and listen in and we can actually visit one of the places where he spent his summer holidays. Wow, this is the most amazing secret garden. We're just an hour away from central Rome, up in the foothills. We've come into an abandoned farmhouse.

it's all overgrown the farmhouse looks as if it's about to fall down but underneath it is the roman villa where marcus aurelius you know one of the most famous roman emperors used to spend part of his holidays And I'm here with Lisa Fentress, who recently excavated this place. Is this how it's always been when you've been here, Lisa? No, it used to be rather beautifully kept, and there was a little hole.

that when we first saw it we could take the cover off and inside the little hole was a marble floor and so we knew exactly where and how deep. we would find the Roman Roman. So you came here partly to find the villa that everybody had known for Hundreds of years, actually, had been the villa of Marcus Aurelius and his imperial adopted father, Antoninus Pius. We're in the middle of the second century CE here. This was very well known.

as were of course the letter that Marcellius wrote to his tutor Fronto from the villa describing his stay. It was like a weekend in the country with detail. We set out for the hunt we did some daring deeds and we heard the boars have been captured by report at least because we didn't actually manage to see any I Slept in a bit because I've got a touch of a cold, but it seems to have settled down

So, in the morning I read some of Cato's treaties on agriculture and did some writing. Not as terribly as yesterday, thank God. After I had looked after my throat, I went to my father and stood next to him while he offered a sacrifice. Then... After the morning meal, we concentrated in gathering grapes and really sweated. We came home at midday and I studied for a while, but not very well. Then I had a long chat with Mummy while she sat on the bed.

In the middle of all that, the gong sounded to say that my father had gone to bathe. After the bath, we dined in the great pressing room and we had fun listening to the yokels bantering with each other while they worked.

This is the first time I've been here and I hadn't quite pictured it being so stunningly gorgeous. But I had read the letters that the young imperial prince, he's what is in his 20s, talking about what he does. and suddenly this makes it all the more vivid he's come out here he's doing a bit of He's doing his lessons, he's writing back to his tutor about what he's been reading. He's having a bit of desultory hunting, but he doesn't seem very good at the hunting. Obviously on that hill up there.

where he was and we used to look at it and imagine him going up after the boar. Yeah, that's the shade. It's midday and it's really hot. Back here... you have the space where the emperor dined. So this is us. We're in the imperial space enjoying the spectacle of the slaves treading our grapes.

But we've done a bit of picking ourselves. So in a sense, the idea is we're all in it together. And this is not the emperor as the ruler of the Roman world on horseback. This is the emperor who is... part of the agricultural community and processes he's the good farmer but he's got actually another role here remember that he did that sacrifice in the morning and then he cuts the grapes

And then we have this scene, and in fact we found another little place where he probably sacrificed. He is starting the harvest of the grapes for the whole area, for Latium, and he's... performing a ceremonial role. And the importance of the winery has to do with the fact that he's also a priest. It's how Marcus, you know, when he comes here and he's talking to his mummy and going hunting and reading his books, he isn't yet emperor, he's learning to be emperor.

He's following his father and in his footsteps, you know. OK, this is how we sacrifice, this is how we cut the grapes, this is how we enjoy the dancing slaves on the wine who insult each other, who are doing a whole sort of performance spectacle. And probably all the...

Grand people in the neighbourhood are banqueting on the terraces outside. But it's turning the image of the emperor upside down for us because, you know, you think, well, you have to learn to be emperor. Well, you've got to learn about military tactics and you've got to learn about... urban ceremonial and building, actually you also have to learn about how to be a good farmer. Because so many of your subjects are rural people.

I'm so curious to see whether the marble bricks of the pressing floor are still here. Let's just look in the barn. Yeah, there they are. You see that huge pile? the remains of the pressing floor and it's little bricks of aegean marble very beautiful it's a greek marble yeah So they're not even just using local marble. This is so top of the range that they're using imported marble. We had 12 different marbles just in the winery. God knows what went on in the palace.

there's a bit of marie antoinette here you know this is about a performance no that there is the performance i'm not denying i'm saying that the performance had a serious side as well all right whereas marie antoinette and the milkmaids was it just just performance This individual, Marcus Aurelius, he's going to be a Roman emperor. He's now kind of the designated heir. He's the prince. And you can put him in his habitat. It links.

that letters the person to the place and i must say i am suffering from nostalgia for this place not being abandoned for it being filled with british and american and italian students and it all happening, and now it's a sort of jungle. Again. A jungle again. Again. A place of ghosts, really. Yeah, slave ghosts, emperor ghosts. Digger ghosts. Digger ghosts.

The ghost of Marcus is so present at his father's winery because of the vivid accounts of life here that he himself wrote to his tutor. But that's only one of a whole cache of letters written between the soon-to-be emperor and Fronto. They're personal, they're often intimate, and they're humming with life.

My sister suddenly had such a terrible pain in her private parts that it was awful to look at her. Then my mother, in her panic, without thinking, banged her side against the corner of a wall. It was an injury that gave her and us a terrible upset. Then when it came to me, I went to turn in and found a scorpion in my bed. I managed to kill it before lying down on top of it.

Amy Richland from the University of California, Los Angeles, is writing a book on these letters. She's fascinated both by the Marcus Aurelius that emerges from them and by the character of his tutor. Marcus Cornelius Franto came from Sirta in North Africa, like a lot of Romans in this period. who were wealthy and could afford it. He moved to the capital city to undertake a career as an orator, and he rose rapidly to become the preeminent orator of his day.

He was then chosen by the royal family to be Marcus Aurelius' tutor when Marcus was 18 years old and Franto was in his early 40s, a dangerous time in a man's life. So here we have this evidently very charismatic, very attractive man set to teach the young future emperor. I've sent you a practice exercise for a speech.

It's a serious theme. Imagine that a consul of the Roman people has taken off his toga and put on fighting gear. And at the festival of the goddess Minerva, he has killed a lion in the full view of everyone. He has been accused of misconduct before the authorities. Draft a defence for him and develop it. It will take a lot of work to make that seem credible. It seems to me a really implausible exercise.

I would certainly have preferred one, like I asked for. Marcus's homework is a common theme of the letters. But, like most teenagers, he finds it hard to focus. Teacher and pupil soon drift into exchanges on their family life and their numerous medical complaints. But how do these letters survive? Well, that itself is an extraordinary story. They were rediscovered in 1815 by an Italian librarian called Angelo Mai. They had at some point been copied onto a manuscript.

But they must have fallen out of fashion and no one could have wanted to read them. Because in the 7th century, the manuscript was recycled. The original letters... were washed off and then the manuscript was reused for church documents. Now, Mai spotted the traces of the original letters underneath. treated the manuscript with chemicals, which did actually reveal some of what had first been written there. The things that they talked about in the letters were very, very disappointing.

to the 19th century world that was rocked by May's discovery. They were hoping for politics, for court inside news. And instead, what they got was the letters between an 18-year-old boy who had a crush on his teacher and his teacher, who was very odd teaching Marcus Aurelius, who was... clearly from these letters the most charming the most playful young man oh do you think so i mean i find him when i read these letters you know them much better than me but i find him

Over-juvenile, you know, when he talks about sitting down and having a nice cuddle-up on the couch with his mummy, I think, hang on, you're 21, mate. You have to think about how he was brought up. His mother was his only surviving relative, really, and the two of them were then bundled off to live with Antoninus Pius, whom he refers to as his father. Well, this father had another wife.

So Marcus Aurelius and his mother were like castaways almost within the royal house. Yes, he was certainly immature.

The scholars of the 19th century didn't get the strong, wise Marcus Aurelius that they'd expected and craved from these letters. But it wasn't just his boyishness that upset them. Make sure you write to me and tell me if you have started the grape harvest and if you've taken a whole pile of books to the villa. And this too. Do you miss me? But that's a stupid question because of course you do.

So if you do miss me and you do love me, you'll write to me often to give me a boost and cheer me up. I render up an accounting of my day to my sweetest teacher. If I could long for him more, I'd gladly waste away a tiny bit more. Will you keep well for me, Fronto, wherever you are? My honeyest honey, my love, my pleasure. What is it with me and you? I love someone and he's not here. Now, this letter has been quoted many, many times amongst the few people who write about Fronto. And almost...

Always, they leave out the last sentence. So remind us what the last sentence is again. Read that out to us. My honeyest honey, my love, my pleasure. What is it with me and you? I love someone and he's not here. It is just too overtly homoerotic for most of those early readers to take. Yes. I want to pin you down a bit more on this because...

There's a whole spectrum of ways of interpreting those kind of remarks in the letters. One is that they are having active, practical homoerotic relationship. Another is that there's a kind of... sexualised dalliance between them, which is very much flirtatious, but on the page probably more than between the sheets. The other is that... Actually, if we had more letters between elite Romans in the 2nd century CE, we'd find that this was a rather kind of...

almost cliched way of writing to each other, a bit like Victorian ladies did in Britain in the 19th century. Where do you stand on that? Actually, we do have a control group from exactly this period. That's the Vindalanda letters. So we have letters, actual private letters that were written between. people of the officer class in this period. And in terms of the closings of letters where words like dearest and sweetest and so on are used, they're used, but not to the extent that

Marcus and Franto do it. So I'm still pushing you. So what do I think the relationship was? I think it probably got as far as kissing, but no further. And kissing could be... Polite, because people kissed each other in greeting. But it seems to have been heavily emotionally charged between the two of them. And in a couple of late letters after, basically, it seems that Marcus has dropped him.

Franto writes a couple of long and very sad letters, in one of which he says, your kiss, what is sweeter to me than your kiss? All my pleasure, all my delight is in. The scent of your kiss, that's talking about scent in connection with kissing is conventionally erotic. You know, this is, this isn't just a kiss of greeting. Let us speak of better things. I love all who cherish you. I love the gods who watch over you. I love life because of you. I love literature together with you. And above all,

I glocked myself with love for you. So what should we make of Marcus Aurelius? He's a writer on philosophy. He's a successful military leader. He's a flirty teenage boy. Back at his country estate just outside Rome, I sat down with archaeologist Lisa Fentress to see if we really could get inside the head of the emperor. Lisa, what strikes me most about Marcus Aurelius is he's an emperor that we can almost feel that we can get to know.

and that we're getting to know more about him all the time. That's partly because of the meditations, it's partly because of the letters with his tutor, Fronto, and partly because we can put him back in his natural habitat. Do you think that's an illusion? Do you think we can get to know these figures? The meditations is a very structured discourse. The letters are spontaneous.

So you're seeing the way he's presenting himself to his tutor, but he adores his tutor. And the one about his stay here ends with... Farewell, my fronto, wherever you are. Most sweet, my love, my delight. How do I fare with you? I love you, though you're not here. The fact is, though, that...

Not many people know the letters between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto. The meditations are still... you know a massive bestseller you know you look on the amazon ratings for marcus aurelius meditations and i tell you he usually does better than beard you know so i and i'm sometimes quite pleased with that idea i think that's That's just desserts, isn't it? The Roman emperor still outsells the historian of the Roman world. But I've always found them actually a bit disappointing.

I wonder how many people who buy them because they kind of come with a Roman emperor's sort of signature on them. I wonder how many people read. Bill Clinton was supposed to have kept the meditations of Marcus Aurelius on his bedside table. He wouldn't say that, wouldn't he? Talk about performance. The emperor is still giving advice to the leader of the Western world 2,000 years later, I suppose, is the idea. But do you get anything out of them? I think, frankly, they're a bit clichéd.

I re-read them before I started this and didn't get anything out of them. I mean, just, yeah, sure, whatever. I'm going to sort of parody this a bit and I'll get into trouble with... all the people who'll be listening who love Marcus Aurelius but you know he says things like oh always think of the future before you tread down a risky path gosh

never thought of that before do you know they go absolutely beautifully with this statue there is on a horseback the great bronze roman emperor looking as good as it gets and It's the same piece of performance as the meditations. I think for me, though, what's odd about that statue, or what jolts me about it, is I absolutely agree. You look at it there and it is the...

perfect, thinking, avuncular emperor. Just the kind of guy you could imagine writing down his thoughts at night, because he may well have written the meditations while he was on military campaign, in fact. And...

It's a Roman landmark. It's what people in Rome have looked at for centuries. It's always been on public display. It's a brilliant work of art. And then you look at that raised hoof of the horse that he's... riding on and then you look at other roman statues and you think 99 he was trampling a barbarian and i never thought that i never thought that Suddenly, you think this Pacific guy, thoughtful, philosophical emperor who wants to help his people and wants to keep him...

touch with the land and the earth and all the things an emperor is supposed to be doing. The other thing an emperor is supposed to be doing is crushing barbarians. Exactly. And somehow that doesn't fit so easily with the brother. cliched common sense of the meditations. Or the Letters de Fronto. Yeah, the Letters de Fronto are so different though. You have so much enthusiasm in them. They're so boyish.

It makes me wonder, though. I mean, I find it very hard to pin Marcus Aurelius down, honestly. When I come to his country villa, I think I feel a bit close to him. It's the problem you have with all these guys. I mean, one minute you look at them and you think, yeah, I can see what makes you tick. I get a sense of you as a human being. You feel quite modern. And then I look at the other things that you're doing.

And you feel, I think, you're utterly remote. You're alien. And it's the puzzle for me. And I think it's a puzzle which I find... really intriguing is how to put those two sides together. The barbarian crusher with the nice guy who's thinking carefully about not getting above himself. The good farmer keeps out the wolves. So the metaphor of the good farmer, here I am, I'm the good emperor, I keep out the barbarians. I think though he's probably been damn lucky.

And if you look at particularly some of his famous predecessors who are very much cardboard cutouts, Caligula or Nero, you know, the usual monsters. I kind of think when I read Marcus Aurelius and I read the letters and I think... If we could do that with Nero, he might look much more interestingly complicated than he does. Nero spent his teenage years learning to sing.

He had all kinds of musical enthusiasms. But he was a performer. But he was a performer. And maybe, in the end, what the emperor has to be is a performer. And the tricky thing is, knowing... Whether he's just a performer or whether you're seeing the real thing. And that was always the problem with Nero. And in a way, when I'm thinking about Marcus Aurelius performing as a member of the team at the villa when the grapes are being treaded, trod, I think...

Is it more than performance? And of course that's the double bind of being an emperor. In some ways it's all performance.

In the next episode of Being Roman, we plunge into the chaos of a brutal civil war to meet a young woman seeking vengeance for the murder of her parents and the exile of her husband. Hello, my name's Greg Jenner. I am the host of You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.

And I just wanted to say that if you like laughing, if you like learning, if you like history, or if you hated history at school, well, we are the show for you. Yes, every episode I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different... So if that sounds like fun, you can check out our back catalogue and our new series on BBC Sounds. Just type in you're dead to me and hit subscribe. Thank you. Bye.

Hi, I'm Andy Staples from Andy and Ari on three and another five-star quarterback just entered the transfer portal. That's what college football is now a nonstop adventure and we cover it every day. at Andy and Arianne3, whether it's the transfer portal, the college football playoff, the coaching carousel, you name it. And guess what? It doesn't stop even when the season ends.

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