38 The New York Review
Mothers and Emperors
Josephine Quinn
Domina :
The Women Who Made
Imperial Rome
by Guy de la Bédoyère.
Yale University Press, 385 pp., $35.00
For ninety-nine years a single family
ruled Rome. Five of its members in
turn controlled the government and
the army. But this was not a monarchy:
none ruled by right, and the institutions
of the old Roman republic remained in
place—the consuls, the Senate, even
the elections.
This peculiar regime owed its origins
to one remarkable man. Gaius Octavius
Thurinus was just a teenager when he
abandoned the quiet life of the Roman
landed gentry in 44 BCE to take up
arms against the assassins of his great-
uncle Julius Caesar, who had adopted
him in his will. For the next thirteen
years he fought Caesar’s enemies and
then his own. He took advantage of his
adoptive father’s posthumous deifica-
tion to assume a new name: Imperator
Caesar Divi Filius—“General Caesar,
son of a god.” And finally, in 31 BCE,
when he was thirty-one, he defeated
the combined fleet of Mark Antony
and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium
to win control of the Roman Empire.
He governed the Roman state for
forty-six years through a series of fa-
miliar Republican appointments, but
outside their traditional restrictions.
At first he served continuously as con-
sul, by tradition a one-year post. After
eight years he vacated that office but
retained the powers of a tribune of the
plebs, which allowed him to veto in the
interests of the Roman people any leg-
islation, election, or administrative ac-
tion. At the same time, he transformed
Rome’s conscript citizen militia into
a standing professional army, which
he controlled, since the Senate had
granted him military powers through-
out the empire greater than those of
any other commander. The term he
used to describe his anomalous posi-
tion was Princeps, or “First Man,” and
in 27 BCE the Senate awarded him
the title Augustus, “consecrated,” the
name by which he is known today.
Dictatorship is one thing, dynasty
quite another. The Romans had forci-
bly expelled their monarchy in the sixth
century BCE and could not stomach its
return. Athough Augustus enthusiasti-
cally promoted family members to po-
sitions of political and military power,
he publicly denied any dynastic ambi-
tions. Perhaps he was telling the truth:
succession planning is not the only pos-
sible explanation for the preferment of
one’s own family. Even on his deathbed
in 14 CE, he was said to have been dis-
cussing a variety of senators as possible
successors. But with his demise, and
after a show of great reluctance, his
stepson Tiberius took power.
Tiberius was by then an experienced
general and politician in his mid-fifties,
but he had in the past shown hesitation
about a career in public life. While in
his thirties, he even withdrew entirely
to Rhodes for several years, before re-
turning to Rome to be adopted by Au-
gustus and to take up formal powers
very close to his. And when he became
Princeps in his own right, his enthusi-
asm failed again. He neglected affairs
of state, relied on treason legislation
to silence dissent, and retired again for
the last eleven of his twenty-three years
in power to a private villa on Capri fa-
mous for the size of its pornography
collection as well as for the “flocks” of
boys and girls kept on hand to cater to
his unusual tastes.
His successor was his great-nephew
Caligula, a young man of twenty-four
with little experience of politics or war.
At first he was popular, and he bolstered
his position with lavish games and tax
reform. But he quickly became better
known for sexual intrigue, capricious
executions, and a fondness for wear-
ing women’s shoes. More worryingly,
he displayed premature pretensions to
divinity, building a temple to his own
spirit, with a giant cult statue of himself
that was dressed every day in outfits
to match his own. After less than four
years he was assassinated along with his
fourth wife and only child, a daughter.
The accession of his uncle Claudius
was a surprise. The fifty-year-old was
widely assumed to be weak of mind as
well as body, part of the proof being
his substantial corpus of scholarly
works, including a twenty-volume his-
tory of the Etruscans. He nonethe-
less governed for thirteen years, and
well enough to be formally deified on
his death, the first time this had hap-
pened since Augustus. He renovated
the empire’s infrastructure of ports,
roads, and aqueducts, enlarged it with
the conquest of parts of Britain, and in-
troduced to the Roman alphabet three
new letters, which did not survive him.
The final member of the family torule was Claudius’s teenage stepson and
great-nephew Nero, whose thirteen-
year reign was marked by successful
wars on the fringes of the empire and
cultural investment at its center. Later
historians linger somewhat unfairly on
Nero’s appearances as a singer, which it
was said spectators faked death to es-
cape; his participation in the Olympic
Games, where he won every event he
entered including the ten-horse chariot
race, despite having been thrown from
his chariot and retiring from the track;
and the rumor that he set fire to Rome
and then sang of the fall of Troy as he
watched it burn. More reliable reports
have him ending the familial succes-
sion by kicking to death his second
wife, Poppaea, best known for bathing
in the milk of she-donkeys, along with
their unborn child. Conspiracy and re-
volt marked the final years of his reign,
and his family’s hold on Rome ended
with his suicide in 68 CE during a mili-
tary coup.The real question is not why this dy-
nasty ended, but how it happened to
rule at all. It is hard to overstate how
unusual it was. Powerful political fami-
lies are of course common, from the
Borgias to the Kennedys, and were
already a well-established tradition in
Rome. But hereditary dictatorship is
rare in supposed republics, ancient or
modern. Libya seemed on the path to it
before Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow,
the Assads have so far managed two
generations in the Syrian Arab Repub-
lic, but the only close modern parallelfor Rome’s multigenerational family
autocracy in a country that claims ex-
plicitly to be a republic is the Demo-
cratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Again the story begins with a young
man abandoning provincial life in his
late teens for military resistance: in
Kim Song Ju’s case against Japanese
imperialism, during which he acquired
a new name, Il Sung, a star or the sun.
With the defeat of Japan in 1945, when
he was thirty-three, he returned to the
Soviet-controlled territory of North
Korea to build an army and lead his
country to independence in 1948. Of-
ficially known as the Great Leader, he
also filled more conventional offices,
serving for more than two decades as
premier as well as supreme commander
of the army. He gave up the premier-
ship in 1972 and was awarded the newly
created office of president by the Su-
preme People’s Assembly. After his
death he was named eternal president.
Again a family succession wasn’t part
of the advertised plan. Kim Il Sung was
still writing disapprovingly of dynastic
rule in the autobiography he published
in the final years of his life, although
he had awarded family members po-
litical honors and positions throughout
his years in power. His eldest son, Kim
Jong Il, seemed at first reluctant to par-
ticipate, disappearing from public life
for a period in the 1970s, when he was
in his thirties. In 1980 he returned to
assume a series of positions in the par-
ty’s Politburo, Secretariat, and Military
Commission; in 1991 he was promoted
to commander of the army, and after
his father’s death in 1994 he became
general secretary of the Korean Work-
ers’ Party and Dear Leader. He still
preferred the company of entertainers
to politicians, and amassed a famously
large film collection while neglecting
the economic problems that brought
famine to North Korea in the 1990s.
After he died in 2011, the party named
him general secretary for eternity.
His son and successor, Kim Jong Un,
was a young man in his twenties with
far less experience than his father, but
he quickly made his mark as a forceful
and creative politician, amid persistent
rumors of family rivalries and political
killings. The parallels between Kim
Jong Un and Caligula are, of course,
only suggestive. The Supreme Leader,
as he is known, has already ruled for
longer than his Roman counterpart,
and unlike him has not yet appointed
a horse to a priesthood or deified his
sister, although Kim Yo Jong did join
her brother for diplomatic talks with
both South Korea and the US. And one
uncle at least, Jang Song-thaek, lost his
chance to succeed him in 2013, when
he was executed by firing squad for
treason.
The comparison with North Korea
not only highlights the exceptional na-
ture of the Roman dynastic experiment
but can help to explain its success: what
these two isolated examples of dynas-
tic republics share may well be what
makes them work. In neither case is
the authoritarian nature of the regime
disguised, with citizens taking oaths of
allegiance to the dictator, but in both
his power also rests largely on a cult of
personality. This involves supernatural
elements—according to later officialAgrippina crowning her son Nero emperor of Rome, 54 CE; relief from the Sebasteion,
an excavated temple in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, in present-day TurkeyCarole^Raddato/Aphrodisias^ Museum,^ Turkey