Most Roman rulers spent longer at their desks than at the dinner table. They were expected to work at the job, to be seen to exercise practical power, to respond to petitions, to adjudicate disputes throughout the empire and to give verdicts in tricky legal cases, right down to those that from the outside (though not to the parties involved, no

What eventually did stop Pompey was a rival, in the shape of Julius Caesar, a member of an old patrician family, with a political programme in the radical tradition of the Gracchi and eventually with ambitions that led directly to one-man rule.

Even the consuls did not go back to the beginning of the new regime. Livy hints that the highest official in the state, and the one whose job it was to bang the nail into the Temple of Jupiter each year, was originally called the chief praetor, although the word ‘praetor’ was later used for a junior official below the consuls.

3. A ‘world full of gods’ is Keith Hopkins’s phrase in his engagingly quirky study of Roman religions, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999).

Julius Caesar, for example, was the first living person whose head featured on a coin minted in Rome.

Archaeology, tyranny – and rape

The stone transported from Mons Claudianus is an unusual case of the movement of goods around the Roman world. It was largely in the hands of the imperial administration, backed up by soldiers; and is hard not to suspect that it was intended in part as a display of Rome’s ability to pull off the virtually impossible – a reductio ad absurdum of

This historical scepticism is healthy. But it misses the bigger point: that whatever the views of Suetonius and other ancient writers, the qualities and characters of the individual emperors did not matter very much to most inhabitants of the empire, or to the essential structure of Roman history and its major developments.

Was it Domitian or was it Hadrian who wryly observed that no one would believe there was a plot against an emperor until he was found dead? Maybe both of them did. Maybe Domitian coined it and Hadrian repeated it. Or maybe it was a convenient cliché about the dangers of high rank that could be put into the mouth of almost any ruler.