One of the motives for the rescue expedition was the retrieval of the ship’s rich cargo. This included a magnificent Roman carved cameo depicting the Emperor Constantine and his wife in a chariot drawn by centaurs trampling the emperor’s enemies. This gem had supposedly arrived in Europe in the thirteenth century following the sack of Constantinople and had passed through the hands of numerous owners, including the artist Peter Paul Rubens, before being purchased by a group of speculators who thought there might be profit to be made in selling the cameo to the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, whose court was known for its wealth and extravagance. The cameo was on its way to the Mughal court when it was shipwrecked.

This bit of Australian historical trivia doesn’t appear in Mary Beard’s book, but it wouldn’t be out of place in this work, which discusses our fascination with the figure of the Roman emperor and the various ways in which artists in different historical periods have chosen to depict them. As this book shows, there is nothing particularly unusual about the cargo of the Batavia.

For centuries, Roman emperors have appeared in paintings, sculptures, wallpaper, tapestries, and ceramics. Images of Roman emperors have decorated every conceivable object, from imperial thrones and the bronze doors of the Vatican to boxer shorts and chocolates. Indeed, the trade in images of Roman emperors was so widespread and ubiquitous that it feels odd that there was only one image of an emperor on board the Batavia.

This book owes its origins to the series of A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts that Beard gave in Washington in 2011. Through a string of carefully chosen case studies, Beard examines the diverse motivations of both patrons and artists in depicting the lives of Roman emperors and those surrounding them. She is forensic in exposing how shameless we are in wanting to associate ancient objects with imperial rulers, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. She explores not only how the assorted depictions reflect preconceptions about ancient Rome, but also how the images address the contemporary concerns of their audience. In this way, the Roman emperors became a mirror not only for princes but for anyone who gazed into their eyes or at their often surprisingly jowly necks.

Not all emperors are created equal. The third century CE is full of entirely forgettable emperors. Many of them are famous primarily for the brevity of their reigns. Does anyone have strong feelings about the reigns of Trebonianus Gallus and Volusian (251–53 CE)? Augustus and Nero, on the other hand, remain names to conjure with.

As the title of this book implies, twelve emperors stand out from the pack. Part of the secret to their success lies in having the right biographer. Beard brings out well the strengths of their main biographer, Suetonius, whose biographical sketches of the first twelve Roman emperors, the eponymous Twelve Caesars, would provide the inspiration for the numerous authors and artists discussed in this book. Latinists have tended to be a bit sniffy about Suetonius’s prose style, often comparing him unfavourably with historians like Tacitus. Yet, as this book demonstrates, his mix of wide-ranging anecdotes, gossip, telling details, and, most importantly, physical descriptions of his subjects would prove a potent one. A scholar like Varro may know all the finer points of Latin grammar it takes to compose a sentence, but Suetonius knows what it takes to retell a story.

Part of the appeal of Suetonius’s biographies was his ability to take his readers into the private lives of the imperial family. There was much prestige to be gained by showing intimate familiarity with the lives and loves of the emperor. In a monarchical form of government, power is reflected by proximity. In the Roman Republic, you could tell the importance of an individual by the magistracy that he held. Under the Roman Empire, in which the emperor held absolute power, it was more important if you knew what would make Augustus laugh or the foodstuff that would win him over to your cause (hint: al dente asparagus or green figs). At least, that was the fiction in which both emperor and his biographers colluded.

A by-product of the heightened attention paid to proximity to the Emperor was the increased importance (either real or imagined) that this accorded the women of the imperial household. As Beard points out, there was never an official title of ‘empress’, but that did not stop Romans or the generations after them from imagining the influence wielded – sometimes for good, but more often for ill – by the wives, daughters, and lovers of the emperor. Artists embraced these ‘mothers, matriarchs, victims, and whores’. In the shocking tales of the scandalous life of Claudius’s wife Messalina, Aubrey Beardsley could find a vehicle for all his anxieties about the ardent sexuality of women of the fin-de-siècle. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres devoted at least one hundred drawings and three paintings to exploring the cool, calculating nature of Augustus’s wife, Livia. Few artists seem to have been able to resist the dramatic tensions of the Freudian car crash that was Nero’s relationship with his mother.

Beard is a consummate reader of images. One of her great strengths is the way she is constantly alive to the potential for images to misbehave. Trying to make a Roman emperor stay ‘on message’ is a tricky business. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. You may offer up an image of Julius Caesar as a ‘worthy’ suitable for imitation. Others will see only a despot ripe for the assassin’s knife. Beard shows how artists such as Mantegna or the designers behind the magnificent Flemish tapestries that decorated the court of Henry VIII were able to exploit this ambiguity, thereby creating works that could speak equally to both Charles I and to the man who signed his death warrant: Oliver Cromwell.

This book not only tells us a lot about what we know (or rather think we know) about Roman emperors, but also, more importantly, why they mattered in the past and why they matter today. It is a clever, witty, thought-provoking book. As Augustus would say, you should rush out and buy it ‘with more speed than you can cook asparagus’ (celerius quam asparagi cocuntur – from Suetonius’s Life of Augustus).