Emperors are leaders above all others. They are the highest monarch – in honor and rank they surpass kings. Empires, in turn, are political units that typically extend over large swaths of land. Usually they are created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries.
Mary Beard, the English classicist widely acknowledged as a supremely accomplished expert on ancient Roman civilization, is fascinated by emperors. In her book, Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, she explores our enduring fascination with emperors, especially those who ruled ancient Rome. “It is almost two millennia,” Beard writes, since Rome ceased to be the capital of an empire, “but even now – in the West at least – almost everyone recognizes the name and sometimes even the look, of Julius Caesar or Nero.”
Beard’s special interest is in the depiction of emperors in art. For emperors are shown not only in paintings and sculptures, but everywhere, and in every medium, from silver to wax. “They have been turned into inkwells and candlesticks. They feature on tapestries, in pop-up decorations at Renaissance festivals, and even on the backs of a notable set of sixteenth-century dining chairs.” Nor is this sort of art available only to the elite, to nobility or to the wealthy. Rather it is equal opportunity art, faces of emperors, heads of emperors, as available to the lower and the middle as to the upper class.
For this trend that became fashion if not fixation, Julius Caesar was largely responsible. It was this Caesar who sought to engineer the replication of his image hundreds of times over. Beard notes that never had any other ruler been so intent on having his likeness so frequently reproduced, specifically to promote his omni-presence and omni-power. Think of Julius Caesar as a supreme self-promoter, hellbent on having himself depicted in every temple in Rome and in every city in the Roman world.
Given the origin story of the emperor in art, no surprise that the origin story of the emperor in semantics is similar. The words emperor, Caesar, czar (tsar), and Kaiser all have the same source: the first Roman emperor, Imperator Caesar Augustus. Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, later took “Caesar” as part of his own official name. Since subsequent Roman emperors did the same, over time “Caesar” came to mean emperor of Rome, and “Caesar” came similarly to mean ruler both in other places and in other languages.
But it’s one thing for leaders who are emperors to insert their languages as their likenesses into our lives. It’s quite another thing for us to permit leaders who are emperors to insert their languages as their likenesses into our lives. For that matter, it’s yet another thing for us to permit leaders to anoint themselves emperors in the first place.
Freud said we have a “thirst for authority.” While this is not accurate all the time, it is accurate some of the time. It does apply to some people in some circumstances – which explains our enduring fascination with emperors, with strongmen. Even if some of us loathe what others of us like.