•”When an emperor died, or was overthrown, one option commonly taken to accommodate the new regime was to re-carve or 'adjust' the marble portraits of the old man on the throne to fit the features of his successor. There might have been various reasons for this, whether saving the money that a brand-new sculpture would have cost, or a desire literally to obliterate the features of the predecessor. But the underlying message was that it took only a few hits with a chisel to turn one emperor into another.”

•”…the crises generated by the empire sometimes required more radical solutions. If you wanted, say, to clear the Mediterranean Sea of 'pirates' (a word that had something of the ring of 'terrorists' to an ancient ear), you had to give authority and resources to a single commander on a potentially long-term basis, in a way that fundamentally flouted the temporary, power-sharing principles of traditional Roman office-holding. The empire, in other words, gradually destroyed the distinctive structures of government that had brought it into existence in the first place, paving the way for one-man rule. The empire created the emperors, not the other way around.”

•”Augustus himself is reported to have boasted that he found Rome a ‘city of brick' and left (some of) it a city of marble. But these architectural developments were often part of a more significant project, to reconfigure the cityscape around the idea of the emperor, to make his presence seem inevitable, even 'natural’”.

•”The fact is that the city of Rome itself was strikingly demilitarized even by the current standards of Western capitals…[In nationalizing the army,] the idea was not to improve employment practice. It was to bind the troops to the emperor and the state, and also to loosen their links with individual generals.”

•”Destabilizing double-think was embedded in one-man rule at Rome from the very beginning, and in such catch phrases as civilitas.
For the story about the senator who asked Tiberius to 'please vote first' was highlighting more than the hypocrisy of one particular emperor. It was puncturing the very notion of civilitas, and exposing the fact that - whatever his parade of participation alongside his fellow senators - no emperor could ever be 'one of us’”.

•”But there was no expectation that imperial power would necessarily be transferred by direct bloodline and, in many cases, there was no biological heir. my stress on biological is crucial here. For the mainstay of imperial succession was always a system of adoption, which allowed a wider choice of heir beyond the emperor’s family, while still presenting the transmission of power in family terms.”

•”Much of [the emperor’s] posthumous reputation was always determined - and overdetermined - by their success, and by the sometimes messy circumstances of the succession.”

•”More often it was dwarfs and the disabled, including those who were deaf or blind, who performed at the emperor's table, as was 'fashionable’ centuries later in European courts. Treated as figures of curiosity, or of 'fun’, they now seem to us the victims of a peculiarly distasteful joke. But what was their point? In part, they too were doing an important job in the hierarchy of dining. The anomalous bodies of these marginal, déclassé characters were helping to define the bodies of those they 'entertained' - emperor, king or courtiers - as perfect by contrast.”

•”It is a rich story of cultural conflict and the ambivalences of civilization. Whose side are we on? The cannibal whose home has been invaded, or the leader who resourcefully saves his crew's lives? What lies between the supposed 'barbarity' of Polyphemus and the Greek ‘civilization' of Odysseus? And it was a great visual conceit to use an actual cave to recreate the mythical cave of the story. But for those looking at this scene from their island triclinium, there was even more to it than that. Central to the myth of Odysseus and Polyphemus are precisely those questions about host and guest that were raised by so many stories of imperial dining. For this was a tale that exposed the risks of hospitality, in which murder was on the menu, the food was tainted, and in which the drink ended up destroying the host himself, who was as vulnerable as he was deadly. It was the mythical dinner party from hell.”

•”These houses both gave their owners a good view and put them prominently on display. But the Palatine also had important mythical and historical associations. It was here that the founder Romulus was supposed to have established the first settlement on the site of Rome […] But the aristocratic houses were gone, and most of the hill was occupied by a single palace.
In one of the most vivid marks of the new political order, the emperor - thanks to strategic purchases, expropriation, theft, or merely a 'hostile environment' - had pushed the old aristocracy out of its traditional, prestige quarters. The symbolism of the change was obvious, but it was also gradual. But the palace, in the terms we now understand it, was not built overnight.”

•”The emperor’s slaves did not form a single homogenous category. Some would have appeared less unequal than others […] The advancement of the slave depended on nothing more systematic than the emperor’s whim. in someways, the imperial household was less a new style of administration, more a traditional Roman private household writ very large.”

•”Part of the problem was the practical double bind in which the emperor found himself. He needed staff to carry out the administrative tasks that running the empire demanded. The senatorial elite were happy enough to govern a province, or command a legion in the old way; but paper-pushing in the palace, at the emperor's beck and call, was quite different. Besides, allowing the elite to establish themselves behind the scenes in the back rooms of power must have seemed an all too obvious way of providing an inside track for rivals to the throne. Ex-slaves offered a traditional and convenient solution, within a hierarchy of service and obedience. (It is significant that among the virtues that Pliny saw celebrated on Pallas's tombstone were 'his duty and loyalty to his masters', which were not the virtues paraded by your average senator.) Yet the inevitable consequence was to give a few ex-slaves a power of sorts over those of far higher social status […] These attacks on senior imperial Friedman are a mark of one of the pressure points of the topsy-turvy world of one-man rule, the elite anxiety that (in their view) the ‘natural’ order of society had been upturned by autocracy. One big question was: who at court was the slave of whom? Had the freeborn elite been turned into slaves of (ex-) slaves?”

•”Autocracy, in other words, had opened up a visible space for a few women in the civic and symbolic landscape of Rome, which was now no longer male-only. This was one of the biggest revolutions brought about by one-man rule at Rome. […]
For within the ruling house, the female relatives of the emperor both helped to guarantee succession and simultaneously threatened to disrupt it. Adultery, and the disloyalty that came with it, was always waiting to happen.
In one sense then, as with the fears about the prominence of ex-slaves, what underlies these stories was not so much concerns about the women themselves as concerns about the emperor, whose power was always potentially undermined by their sex, sexuality and scheming.”

•”The basic rule of the government of the empire was that the buck stopped with the emperor himself. He was deluged with requests, for advice, approval and action, not only from the likes of Pliny, but from local communities and individual men and women all over the Roman world. No grudge, grievance, problem or law case was in theory too trivial to send in his direction. Wherever he was, in Rome or on the move, he might find himself surrounded by people wanting something from him - whether a leg up on the military career ladder, the return of a lost inheritance, or the reversal of some land-grab by the neighbouring town. One of the reasons reported for the large casualty figures in an earthquake that rocked the town of Antioch (modern Antakya in Turkey) in 115 CE was that Trajan was staying there, using it as the HQ for an eastern war, and the place was full of people with their lawsuits and begging letters.”

•”There were also the little pieces of papyrus (libelli in Latin) that were pressed into his hands, when he presided over public greetings' at the palace, or as he was carried through the streets, or showed up in some provincial town. This was how ordinary people usually approached him. Each libellus contained a request of some sort, and a brief imperial response was written underneath and then pinned up on a public noticeboard for the hopeful petitioner to inspect, before getting a witnessed copy and taking it home.”

•”The Chinese empire had proportionately 20 times more senior administrators than did Rome.”

•”The Roman empire was a sprawling and puzzling economic system' (and certainly not a system in the modern economic sense). It was, in part, highly connected, almost proto-global. There was a rudimentary common currency across the Roman world. There were also some commodities, especially pottery, that spread across the Roman world from Scotland to the Sahara in an early example of mass production. And there are some powerful hints at the scale of industrial output and of the long-distance transport networks. […] Even that is overshadowed by recent scientific analysis of deep bores into the Greenland ice cap, which show traces of the pollution produced by Roman mining operations, many of them in Spain, that were not equalled until the industrial revolution.
Yet the majority of the inhabitants of the empire remained small-scale subsistence farmers and most of the production was still local or domestic. There were very few technological innovations to underpin any industrial ‘progress’. There were even fewer financial institutions.”

•”So the emperor did not just rule the Roman world, he and his family owned quite a lot of it - and the revenues from these properties, in rent and in agricultural or industrial products, were a major source of imperial income. They also gave the emperor and his 'team'a different kind of presence across the empire.”

•”It was warfare more than anything else - sightseeing, wanderlust, fact-finding or public relations - that took emperors outside Italy. One of their formal titles, imperator (from which our word 'emperor' derives) literally means ‘military commander'. And images of rulers in battle guise were found everywhere in Rome and across the Roman world.
According to Roman logic, a good emperor was by definition a good general. One of the easiest ways of undermining the ruler's status was to ridicule his abilities in the field.”

•”The empire, in the sense of overseas conquered territory, had largely been formed hundreds of years earlier, between the third and first centuries BCE, long before one-man rule. The last really large tracts of land - including Egypt - had been added to it early in the reign of Augustus. Augustus is supposed to have decided on no further imperial expansion. He even left explicit written advice for Tiberius, his heir, that 'the empire should be restricted to its existing boundaries.’
He was hardly advocating pacifism. There was always glory to be won by resisting threats from outside the empire. Kudos might come too from squashing insurrection and rebellion within Roman territory. The 'boundaries' of the empire were never the simple lines that appear on modern maps. They were much more fluid, with Roman imperial power and control extending in practice far beyond the limits of the official provinces, often across frontier zones rather than linear frontiers.”

•”There is little sign of military policy for the medium or long term, still less of a ‘grand strategy’ empire. […] Most day-to-day military operations empire-wide were reactive. Like so many other decisions in the imperial administration, decisions involving the army were taken, largely by provincial governors, or by commanders of units in the field, in response to trouble as and when it arose, or in pursuit of very local initiatives. […] In so far as the emperor and his advisors (whoever they were) had any kind of hands-on control it was for the most part indirect.”

•”The emperors parade of their commitment to warfare was not merely part of an attempt to gain, or grab, military glory for themselves. It was also designed to put them on the same side as their soldiers.
The emperor's nightmare was that the force of the army would be turned against him.”

•”Julius Caesar […{ was not only the first living Roman to have his head displayed on coins minted in the city, and so to break with the old Republican tradition that allowed only gods, mythical heroes and the long dead onto the coinage.”

•”If you had walked around the city of Rome in the SOS BCE, you would hardly have seen the image of a woman who was not a goddess or mythical heroine. A hundred years later you could not have avoided seeing statues of the emperor's female relatives. The visual world had been transformed.”

•”In modern terms, this was a world not only of official 'image management’, but of the emperor's face on the ancient equivalent of fridge magnets, mass-produced mugs and tote bags, making him part of the domestic, day-to-day routine. Unlike some royal souvenirs now, these images cannot possibly have been spread from the centre, with a uniform design, as many, or most, of the public portraits in bronze or marble were. The imperial administration had neither the manpower nor the will to control how the emperor appeared in ordinary homes. They can only have been the result of local initiative, produced by small-scale businessmen with an eye to a profitable trade (people must actually have wanted to buy these things), and indirectly based - second- or third-hand, copies of copies of copies - on the central model.”

•”For in Rome there was never a division between 'church' and 'state’, and religion was not founded on personal devotion, individual faith or tenets of 'belief'. It was founded instead on the simple axiom that Rome's military and political success depended on the gods being properly worshipped. Or, to put it the other way round, if they were not properly worshipped, the state would be in danger.
Personal piety hardly came into it.
[…This] suggests an underlying logic behind what would eventually become the persecution - or 'punishment’ , to give it a Roman perspective - of the Christians. There must have been a lurking fear among the authorities that wholesale Christian rejection of the traditional gods would put the state in peril. More generally, however, the axiomatic connection of politics and religion provides a context in which the links between the emperor and the gods would not seem so contrived and cynical as they almost inevitably do to us.”

•”The truth was that in the first two centuries CE most people in the Roman empire would never have a Christian. And any violence against them was local and sporadic.”

•”Across the empire, many thousands of people, enslaved and free, worked for the emperor and his court, some terribly exploited, rebellious and discontented, others happy enough, or even proud, to be doing what they were doing. It is an uncomfortable fact that, throughout history, autocracy - tyranny, dictatorship or whatever we call it - has depended on people at all levels who accept it, who adjust to it, or even find it a comfortable system under which to live. It is not violence or the secret police, it is collaboration and cooperation - knowing or naive, well-meaning or not - that keep autocracy going.”

•”Autocracy, it suggests, upturns the ‘natural’ order of things and replaces reality with sham, undermining your trust in what you think you see.”