The Wrong Caesars

As a dozen Renaissance gilded silver treasures, the Aldobrandini Tazze or Twelve Caesars, go on show at Waddesdon Manor, Professor Mary Beard unscrews the puzzle of how the Roman emperors and dishes got mixed up

- Mary Beard

It was in the autumn of 2010 that I first came face-to-face with one of the so-called Aldobrandini Tazze. I was a few months into a new research project on images of the Twelve Caesars in Renaissance and later art, and I already had a sense of the importance of this extraordinary set of 16th-century silverware.

Here was a Renaissance re-creation of those first 12 Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) (1) to Domitian (AD 51–96) (2), a portrait gallery of dynasts in miniature, their names clearly inscribed at their feet. But even more interesting for me, each dynast was attached to a dish decorated with four intricately chased scenes illustrating his reign, every episode taken from the biographies written by C Suetonius Tranquillus ( circa AD 70–130). Suetonius, as we now usually call him, was the Roman writer who, through his set of 12 Lives (De vita Caesarum, known as The Twelve Caesars, a set of 12 biographies of Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors of the Roman Empire) bequeathed to the world the very idea of the Twelve Caesars, as well as some of the most memorable and lurid anecdotes about them. The tazze have a good claim to be the earliest surviving systematic attempt to illustrate Suetonius’ text.

I had also picked up some hints about the intriguing complexity of the story of the