Mary Beard Looks at Trump and Can't Not Think of Ancient Rome

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/opinion/mary-beard-trump-ancient-rome.html

Mary Beard Looks at Trump and Can’t Not Think of Ancient Rome
July 3, 2026
By Mary Beard and John Guida

Professor Beard is a scholar of ancient Rome. Mr. Guida is an editor in Times Opinion.

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Mary Beard: There are strong similarities between Rome and many later political systems, not only the modern United States. The emperor has to be seen, has to leave his mark, has to outbid earlier emperors. So Trump’s arch is planned to be a tiny bit higher than any other arch in the world. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, still standing in Rome, was designed to be a tiny bit taller than the earlier Trajan’s Column.

One thing that strikes me is the habit of changing your mind. It is easy to take that as mere vacillation — why can’t the president just make his mind up about tariffs, Greenland or whatever? But it is a classic tactic of the power play of autocrats. Mind-changing is a form of control. It means that everyone, including your own advisers, have to keep listening to you, have to keep adjusting to your new view. There is a wonderful story along those lines told of the emperor Caligula, who in the first century C.E. decides to invade Britain, gets to the shores of the Channel, then says he has changed his mind, has his soldiers collect some seashells and goes back home. That’s power.

In general, the supposed characteristics of “good” emperors remained remarkably constant throughout the first centuries of imperial rule. They were generous, but not extravagant; they scored notable military victories; they erected buildings for the good of the community; and they were hospitable to the elite (nice, simple suppers up at the palace). “Bad” emperors were the reverse.

The basic principle of Rome was that you could become Roman. That was an idea that went back to the myths of Rome’s origins. One mythical founder of the city, Aeneas, was a refugee from Troy; the other more famous mythical founder, Romulus, made Rome an “asylum” welcoming all-comers. One of the central factors here is that you didn’t have to do much to express your Romanness (there’s no saluting the flag). And crucially it was always assumed that a Roman could have two “homes”: Rome and wherever their ancestors came from. The orator Cicero, for example, was Roman and from the little town of Arpinum.

Coinage was crucial in Roman perception of imperial power. Julius Caesar was the first leader in the West in 44 B.C.E. (just before his assassination) to have his living head systematically on the coinage (plenty of the dead were portrayed on earlier coinage, but not the living). It was controversial, seen as a marker of excessive power, but it became absolutely standard after him. Even Brutus, one of his assassins, had his own head on coins a couple of years later.

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Dame Winifred Mary Beard (born 1 January 1955[1]) is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge.[2] She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard