Hail to the chiefs

Historian Mary Beard draws on ancient sources and educated guesswork to define what it took to be a Caesar.

- Sarah Laing

Everyone dies, even emperors of Rome And as Augustus's health worsened in the summer of 14CE, the first emperor of Rome knew his time had come and he should make ready to join the gods on Mt Olympus.

The ancient writer Suetonius records that, after relaxing for a few days on the exclusive island of Capri and partying on board a boat in the Bay of Naples - the emperor and his entourage were the original 1% - the 75-year-old ruler of most of the known world retired to his deathbed at his father's old home in Nola, now a suburb of modern Naples. Settling himself on a couch in the very room his paterfamilias had breathed his last, Augustus requested his hair be combed, his sagging jaw straightened and that some old friends join him in his last hours.

He had, it turned out, a question for them: had he, the mighty Augustus, imperator, caesar and ruler of the greatest empire the world had yet known, "played his part in the comedy of life properly", he wondered, before adding two lines of verse in Greek: "since the play has gone down well, give us a clap/ and send us away with applause".

Whether his friends gave their dying caesar an ovation is not recorded, but that wasn't really the point of the great man's question.