Celebrity in the Ancient World

There is no word in either Greek or Latin that describes an individual who achieves public recognition during his or her lifetime, even though celebrity seems to have been a coveted status. This was noted in the first century CE by the Younger Pliny, who inquired in one of his letters, ‘Should I not take pleasure in the celebrity of my name?’ Our word ‘celebrity’ derives from the Latin celebritas, meaning in a general sense ‘reputation’ or ‘renown’. Instead both languages focus on the concept of fame (from the Latin word fama, cognate with the verb ‘to speak’), an enduring characteristic that outlived a person’s demise.

It says much about the nature of celebrity in the ancient world that a philosopher could be the subject of such public interest as to feature in a play – even if, as Socrates later claimed at his trial, his dramatis persona bore little resemblance to its historical counterpart. The fact remains that Socrates was one of the best-known Athenians of his day. Largely this was due to his visibility – he ‘hung out’ in the agora or market place – but it may also have had something to do with his striking physical appearance, which his contemporaries compared to that of a snub-nosed, bald and ugly Silenus. Beauty is useful in the path to stardom. But so, too, is its opposite.

In the Greco-Roman world, the means of promoting stardom was extremely limited. Access to the most effective mechanisms was limited to the political class, to kings and above all to emperors. As the visible and outward expression of the pursuit of honour, it largely remained the prerogative of élite males. Relatively few would have been recognizable to the public at large. Celebrities did not constitute a class apart from the common run of mankind nor share a common lifestyle. Though a Roman dictator like Sulla might fraternise with actors and an emperor like Justinian might fall in love with an actress, these occurrences never posed a threat to the stability of the social hierarchy, as did the rise of working-class celebrities such as Twiggy to the British establishment in the 1960s.

In the period of the Greek city-state, few individuals gained recognition beyond its borders. However, in the Hellenistic world that was brought to birth by the conquests of Alexander, celebrity’s scope extended. Despite some significant exceptions – Socrates being one of the most obvious – it helped to travel.

The desire for star status is undoubtedly one of the most powerful spurs to human excellence, and lies at the very root of our literary tradition, going back beyond classical Greece. The eponymous hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king c.2700-2500 BC, is a man engrossed by the desire for immortal fame, which he naively conflated with immortality itself. The theme of the epic is to demonstrate the futility of such a quest. In the end Gilgamesh had to accept that fame for fame’s sake is self-destructive, especially when uninformed by a sense of life’s limitations.

A similar message permeates Greek epic, even though the Homeric heroes, like their Sumerian antecedents, were consumed with the desire to win ‘imperishable glory’. Glory was their raison d’être; the military campaign merely provides them with a field in which to exhibit their prowess. Faced with the choice between living a long but undistinguished life and achieving imperishable glory but dying young, the Achilles of the Iliad chooses the latter. When we meet him in Hades in the Odyssey, however, he has an eternity to regret his decision. ‘I should rather be working for a dirt-poor farmer who scrapes a living than be lord of all the hosts of the dead,’ he says to Odysseus who tries to console him for his choice. There is no more powerful endorsement of the value of life (and the futility of fame) in all of Western literature.

In the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas, a hero of a very different stamp, was stopped in his tracks when about to seek a ‘beautiful death’ in battle by being reminded of his obligations to the living: his elderly father, wife and young son. Unlike Achilles, Aeneas made the critical discovery that we are here for others as well as for ourselves.

In the Homeric world, celebrity was the prerogative of the high-born and largely confined to those who were outstanding in battle. In the Archaic period of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, victory in athletic competitions became another avenue by which men of talent could achieve celebrity. When they returned home they were fêted in much the same way as athletes are today. Victors in the Olympic Games had the right to erect statues at Olympia, though only those who had won three events or more were permitted to reproduce their physical likeness. Such was the status and celebrity achieved by star athletes that one outstanding victor in the pancration (a combination of boxing, judo and all-in wrestling), called Dorieus, was freed by the Athenians after being captured at sea in the Peloponnesian War because he was a Panhellenic victor, while the statue of another such victor, named Theagenes of Thasos, stood next to that of Alexander the Great at Olympia. A man of extraordinary stamina and fitness himself, Alexander was evidently proud to be put on a pedestal beside such a figure.

Even after Athens became a democracy, leading aristocrats continued to vie for public attention. The absence of organised political parties meant that their personalities played a disproportionate part in the shaping of public policy. The Athenian who came closest to establishing a (literal) cult of celebrity was Themistocles, who persuaded his fellow-citizens to build a fleet to counter the threat of a Persian invasion. When that threat materialised in 480 BC, he proposed that an oracle recommending that they ‘trust in their wooden walls’ be interpreted not as a reference to the wooden palisade surrounding the Acropolis, but as an allusion to the stout timbers of their new fleet. His advice prevailed and the Athenians, with a contingent of other Greek states, won a spectacular naval victory at Salamis. Shortly after, according to Themistocles’ biographer Plutarch, he established a sanctuary in honour of Artemis Aristoboule (‘Of the first-rate advice’), on the grounds that ‘he  had given first-rate advice to the Athenians and Greeks’. It constituted, one might say, a shrine to amour propre – a characteristic of celebrities throughout the ages.

Themistocles is also one of the very few Athenian politicians whose portrait has survived, albeit in a Roman copy. There is no extant example of any portrait sculpture of that date, but the supposition that Themistocles commissioned the original fits the profile of a man whom Plutarch characterised as being ‘carried away by his desire for reputation’. Further, he increased his popularity by learning the names of all his fellow-citizens – a trick that has stood politicians in good stead throughout the ages.

Celebrity is an amalgam of talent, lifestyle, charisma and sex appeal. The Athenian who came closest to scoring in all these categories was the late fifth-century politician and general Alcibiades. He lived life on the fast track – in more ways than one. On one occasion he entered seven chariots at the Olympic Games and won first, second and fourth prize. (The chariot race was the most prestigious Olympic event to win, as well as the most costly to enter.) He was also one of the first public figures to claim that his private life was the subject of malicious gossip. When he paid an outrageous sum of money for a dog, his friends told him that everyone was complaining about his extravagance. ‘That’s exactly what I want,’ he replied. ‘It’ll stop them saying worse things about me.’

Alcibiades attracted attention by wearing a long purple cloak that trailed down to his ankles. Reputable Athenians regarded this practice with loathing and indignation. He was outrageously camp, in a society that looked askance at the least manifestation of a fashion statement, and he courted further controversy by decorating his shield with the unwarlike device of Eros, personification of love, wielding a thunderbolt – a witty and irreverent counterpart to the assortment of gorgons, lions, bulls and boars favoured by the majority, and perhaps as well a jibe at Zeus, traditionally associated with the thunderbolt.

Yet for all his frivolity and self-absorption, it is impossible to tell the story of late-fifth-century Athens without assigning Alcibiades a pre-eminent place, largely because his fellow-citizens, along with their enemies the Spartans, proved fatally vulnerable to the magnetic appeal of his personality. For better or worse our celebrity-crazed culture owes much to his pioneering example.

With the rise of Macedon in the second half of the fourth century BC, celebrity status took on a whole new meaning. Faced with the challenge of making himself recognisable to the heterogeneous subjects of a vast empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Punjab, Alexander the Great commissioned Lysippus to sculpt his portrait, which he then had copied and disseminated throughout the empire. Seeking to project his campaign against Persia as a re-run of the Trojan War, he instructed the sculptor to depict him as the reincarnation of Achilles. To what extent the portrait type represents a faithful likeness to the sitter is impossible to tell, but it proved an effective instrument of self-promotion; so effective in fact that Alexander’s career and personality remain to this day indissolubly bound up with the image that it projected of a restless and dynamic personality.

On the death of Alexander it took nearly half a century for three stable monarchies to emerge from his former empire. Once his successors had adopted the title of king, they began to mint coins with their portrait heads stamped in profile. This now became the most effective way of promoting the celebrity of individuals, since coins circulated at virtually all levels of society and reached the furthest geographical limits.

From the fourth century BC, show-business began to offer star status to a handful of gifted actors who amassed large fortunes and were painted by leading artists. One allegedly earned a talent – a vast sum by the standards of the day – for a single performance in a competition. Like Hollywood stars, they tended to become typecast. Timotheus of Zacynthus was particularly celebrated for his rendition of the suicide of Ajax from Sophocles’ play of that name. It became, so to speak, his signature tune and was no doubt requested at all performances.

Some Roman actors also achieved considerable celebrity. Quintus Roscius Gallus, the outstanding comic actor of his generation, became so famous that Cicero demanded, ‘Who is so boorish or so insensitive as to be unaffected by Roscius’ death?’ His reputation as an actor remained unrivalled throughout antiquity. It revived in the Renaissance, when his name came to symbolise any highly gifted actor.

By contrast, those working in the visual arts attracted little notice. Even some of the very greatest, such as the Greek sculptors Pheidias and Praxiteles, are little more than names to us, while the very identity of others has not survived, as in the case of the architect of the Pantheon in Rome. Our concept of the artist as creative genius, plagued by doubt and self-criticism, would have had little resonance in antiquity.

Given the importance attached to public visibility in the ancient world, it is hardly surprising that its opposite, the fear of oblivion, was invoked as a posthumous punishment. In 356 BC the otherwise wholly insignificant Herostratus set fire to the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus – one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – allegedly for no better reason than to win notoriety. The Ephesians retaliated by making it a crime to mention his name, though they were not able to expunge his memory from the historical record. Similarly the Roman Senate took steps to obliterate all trace of those judged to be public enemies – a practice known as damnatio memoriae. This included erasing the condemned man’s name from inscriptions and prohibiting his family from bestowing his praenomen or first name on his descendants.

Star status in the Roman world was most closely identified with military glory. The highest accolade was the award of a triumph. Pompey the Great was awarded three and Julius Caesar racked up four – in part by ‘triumphing’ over his fellow citizens in the Civil War (49-45 BC). Not without reason, a slave stood in the triumphal chariot whispering ‘Remember you are mortal,’ as the triumphator rode through the streets of Rome at the head of his army: the Romans understood the psychological dangers of stardom.

Aspirants for public office sought to draw attention to themselves in the hustings by wearing bleached togas. Yet the cult of celebrity contributed to the breakdown of the Roman Republic. At the top of the pole, men like Sulla, Pompey and Caesar were as much, if not more, interested in the respect they earned as in what they could do for Rome. Caesar tried to cloak his preoccupation with his public image by terming it dignitas, a word roughly corresponding to ‘dignity’. In many ways, however, he was the worst offender. It was in large measure to preserve his precious dignitas that he initiated the Civil War against Pompey. Certainly no Roman before him had so assiduously cultivated his public image, or paid more attention to his personal appearance. He wore a loose fitting belt and sported flashy rings – an early instance of creative accessorising. His biographer Suetonius alleged that none of the honours that were heaped upon him pleased him more than the entitlement to wear a laurel wreath at all times, since this enabled him to disguise his baldness. 

He was also the first Roman to grasp the extent to which mass appeal might serve as a political asset, which he courted in part by staging gladiatorial contests. At the beginning of his career he sponsored 320 pairs of gladiators, decked out in silver armour, who fought to the death in the Forum. Rome had seen nothing like it and it made him an overnight celebrity. He also minted coins as a way of self-advertisement. Even his decision to dismiss his bodyguard about a month before his murder may have been prompted in part by a desire to enhance the aura of his personality by suggesting that he was immortal. He had long since ceased to derive satisfaction from the company of his peers and may have sought to fill the emotional void by feeding on the adulation of the Roman mob.

The Emperor Augustus was arguably the greatest superstar of the ancient world and the Principate that he established in 27 BC served as an institutional model for his successors. Not the least reason for its success was that it channelled public attention towards the person of the emperor, who thus became, quite simply, the most famous man alive. Additionally his adoptive father Julius Caesar had been consecrated a god in 42 BC, and this enabled him to style himself ‘son of the deified’. Like Alexander, Augustus commissioned a stereotypical portrait that was reproduced throughout the Empire. From 20 BC, his head began to appear on coins. Given the quantity in circulation, the number of images of Augustus can be estimated in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. He also indulged in subliminal self-advertising by commissioning Virgil’s national Roman epic, the Aeneid, which depicts the Principate as the logical consequence of Aeneas’ mission to found the Roman race. 

The most glamorous profession in the ancient world, and, equally, the only one available to those from the dregs of society, was that of gladiator. Like bullfighters, their cultural descendants, gladiators were famed for their alleged sexual potency. They were the closest to a modern pop idol that the ancient world produced – objects of fantasy to women of all social status. ‘Celadus the Thracian makes all the girls sigh,’ says one of many graffiti about gladiators at Pompeii. In a tirade against the profession the satirist Juvenal poured scorn upon a senator’s wife who eloped with a gladiator. ‘What was the attraction?’ he demanded. ‘The fellow was a physical wreck. Ah, but he was a gladiator. That’s what she preferred to children, country, sister and husband.’

The arena and the circus provided the context where the term ‘fan’ is perhaps most applicable. It was chariot-racing, however, that attracted the bigger crowds. Juvenal tells us that fans queued overnight for a seat in the Circus Maximus, thought to have been capable of holding 250,000 spectators. The elder Pliny records that when a charioteer called Felix was cremated, one fan was so devastated that he threw himself onto the pyre. Such stars were big earners. A certain Publius Aelius Gutta Calpurnianus won in prize money almost half of what a teacher could earn in a year. Some things, it seems, never change.

Given the sheer size of the audience, the palm of popular celebrity must go to the expert killer and expert charioteer. Both activities attracted spectators from all stations of life. For some, the thrills and spills afforded an escape from the sordid reality of everyday life, for others it was an opportunity to gamble; for those of a sadistic tendency it was the prospect of witnessing death and carnage that mesmerised; still others, men and women alike, were sexually aroused, and perhaps at times also philosophically uplifted, by the drama played out before their eyes.

Marlene Dietrich once boasted, ‘Glamour is what I sell. It’s my stock in trade’. Glamour, however, was a concept for which the Greeks and Romans had no word. It was virtually impossible to praise a woman for her beauty without impugning her chastity. In Homer women are celebrated for their ankles and cheeks, not for their legs and breasts. When Odysseus, washed up naked on the shore of Scheria, wished to pay the beautiful princess Nausikaa a compliment, he was reduced to comparing her to a laurel tree that he once saw growing on the island of Delos. Anything more explicit would have been grossly offensive. Though female as well as male beauty contests occasionally featured alongside the athletic contests that were so popular in the Greek world, they would have been rather prim affairs.

At the end of a speech which the historian Thucydides put into the mouth of Pericles on behalf of the Athenian war dead, the statesman observed that the highest glory for a woman is to be spoken of neither in praise nor in blame. Ironically, the only woman living in fifth-century Athens about whose life we know anything was Pericles’ common-law wife Aspasia, the subject of malicious gossip. Aspasia achieved celebrity status because she was a foreigner who hobnobbed with leading intellectuals. Had she been an Athenian, her intellectual gifts would never have risen to the surface to become the cause of scandalous provocation.

Almost the only profession available to women in the Greek world that bestowed celebrity upon its practitioners was prostitution. According to Herodotus a Thracian girl called Rhodopis became so celebrated that ‘every Greek was familiar with her name’. (As Rhodopis translates as ‘Rosy Cheeks’, it was probably her professional name.) She plied her trade in Egypt and amassed such a fortune that in later times she was reputed to have paid for the erection of one of the pyramids – an absurd anachronism as Herodotus points out, but indicative all the same of the scale of her reputation.

The woman who came closest to achieving star status was Cleopatra VII. It is appropriate therefore that Elizabeth Taylor, who played the part of the Queen in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s blockbuster Cleopatra (1963), is arguably her most famous interpreter. Her real-life counterpart seems to have been a consummate self-promoter and exhibitionist, and no doubt had a wardrobe to die for. Whether she was also drop-dead gorgeous, however, seems rather doubtful. Certainly the coins that she minted depict a woman of average looks. Possibly her attractions were more intellectual than physical, which is what Plutarch suggests. At any rate her celebrity seems to have been due primarily to the fact that she slept with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony – the two most powerful men of her day – and that she was credited with being extremely ambitious.  She was, in other words, as much an object of scandal as of celebrity. In this she closely resembles her legendary counterpart Dido, whose steamy affair with Aeneas keeps the gossip-mills in Carthage grinding away in Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid.

Equally celebrated was the one-time actress Theodora, who rose from the gutter to become the wife of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century ce. Like so many prominent and successful women, Theodora’s meteoric rise aroused deep resentment. Procopius, who gave an account of her life in his Secret History, reported that it was her custom to lie naked on the floor of the theatre while geese picked at grains of barley sprinkled over her private parts. His leering description was intended to serve as a pious homily on the lasciviousness of female performers in particular and of women in general. The historian Edward Gibbon was equally salacious, observing that ‘her venal charms were abandoned to a promiscuous crowd of citizens and strangers’ – a roundabout way of describing her as a nymphomaniac. He also eloquently paraphrased Procopius to the effect that ‘after exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of Nature’ – for not providing her with an extra orifice.

Yet of all the celebrities from antiquity, none more dramatically re-invented herself than Theodora. Once she married Justinian, she became the model of wifely devotion.

In response to a recent questionnaire that a New York high-school circulated asking, ‘What do you hope to be?’, two-thirds of the respondents replied, ‘a celebrity’. In antiquity, by contrast, celebrity was either the fitting reward of a lifetime of exceptional achievement or simply an accident of birth. In the absence of paparazzi, word-of-mouth remained the primary vehicle for promoting it, though more sophisticated and subtle methods were employed by those with wealth and political ambition.

Modern society indiscriminately showers celebrity status on footballers, media tarts, rock stars, murderers and popes. We have only to indulge in a cheap publicity stunt to have our faces plastered across the front page of every newspaper in the country. Both in Britain and in the USA, reality television game shows pander to our endless fascination with what it means to be famous, rather than with what it takes, or should take, to achieve fame. In the ancient world, stardom retained its mystique as an indefeasibly undemocratic commodity.