USA 250: President Jackson and the Emperor’s Tomb
6/18/202651 min
Last year, Mary spent nine months in Washington D.C. During this time, she became interested in visual iconography and real objects of Ancient Greece and Rome on display in the city’s museums and streets. In this episode, she tells Charlotte about her fascination with a sarcophagus in the Smithsonian collection, which was believed once to have held the remains of Emperor Alexander Severus.
In the 1830s, a US navy commander based in the Mediterranean ‘acquired’ the sarcophagus in Lebanon and sent it back home with the suggestion it could be used as a tomb for President Andrew Jackson. This forced the question: was it appropriate for an American president to be buried in a Roman sarcophagus? On one hand, the USA liked to position itself as the inheritor of Roman values. On the other, Severus, who became Emperor after his cousin Elagabalus (a favourite of the show) was bumped off, was a despot, even if a comparatively benign one. The problem was heightened by the fact Jackson was frequently accused of acting like a ‘Caesar’. The conundrum of the sarcophagus went right to the height of the tensions - then as now - in the USA’s idolisation of Ancient Rome.
As Mary reveals, there are many twists and turns to this story, which ends - bizarrely enough - with Peter Fonda’s Harley-Davison from the film Easy Rider. How are the two connected? Listen to find out!
Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:
Mary wrote about this sarcophagus a few years back in the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/a-tomb-not-fit-for-a-president-11634356860 (it’s pay-walled, but the free bit gives you a great picture of a couple admiring it); and it was the object that book-ended her Twelve Caesars: Images of power from the ancient world to the modern (Princeton UP, pb, 2023).
See also, from the Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/andrew-jackson-populist-even-deathbed-180962124/
The Roman archaeology of the sarcophagus: J B Ward Perkins, “Four Garland Sarcophagi in America”, in the journal Archaeology for 1958.
Andrew Jackson (and his Caesarism) features in the first chapter of Margaret Malamud’s Ancient Rome and Modern America (Wily Blackwell, 2009)
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMary Beard· Host0:00
If you visit downtown Washington, DC today, you'll find it full of columns, lookalike Roman temples, full of classical pediments and sculptures. It's a very Roman sort of place.
Charlotte Higgins· Host0:13
Except that all of this stuff is actually 19th and 20th century replica Roman. You don't see real ancient things on display in the museums there unless you look incredibly hard. I mean, Washington is probably the museum capital of the world. It's got 100, at least 100 museums in it. But you really have to search to find any real classical antiquities.
Mary Beard· Host0:41
There are a few ancient sculptures in the National Gallery, uh, and there are some great late Roman Byzantine works of art in the Dumbarton Oaks museum. But bizarrely, your best bet for finding Roman things might be to visit the Museum of the Bible.
Charlotte Higgins· Host0:59
But all is not quite as it seems. The fact is that there is plenty of real ancient stuff in DC, although most of it, including a really good collection of ancient Greek pottery, is tucked away in museum storage or lurking in even more surprising places.
Mary Beard· Host1:18
Next time in this series on America and Rome, we'll be looking at some of Washington's replica Roman architecture, what you can already see, and even more of it