I am back in the 'Land of my Fathers' as Welsh people call Wales. This small corner of the British Isles has produced several notables during the last two thousand years in the arts, politics and other walks of life. Hari Twdr (King Henry VII, father of Henry VIII), Lloyd George (prime minister) and T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) are among the most famous (1).

I have had the privilege of meeting several of history's notables this year. All were famous or great men of their times, all achieved great things in their lifetimes, all left great legacies. Did I mention all of them are dead? On my frequent trips to Great Britain this year I have been fortunate to go to three crowd-pulling mega-exhibitions in London: The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army (2) and Hadrian: Empire and Conflict (3) under the wonderful glass dome at the British Museum; and Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaoh (4) down the Thames at the spectacular O2 Dome. I also saw the impressive award-winning movie Mongol (5) about the young life of Genghis Khan at a local and surprisingly well attended theatre in Austin, Texas.

In writing this piece, I was interested to explore why it is we view some men as 'famous' (or 'infamous') and others 'great'. I think it is easy to determine who is famous and infamous. The word 'infamy' means 'evil fame or reputation'. Harder is to define what makes one person famous or great. Why are the Macedonian Alexander or the Russian Peter called 'The Great' but FDR or Winston Churchill are not?

Separated in time by thousands of years and place by thousands of miles, what struck me were the similarities of these very different individuals I met this year: their skills in building or sustaining empires; the great cultural and artistic achievements that flourished under their rule; and their shared trait of autocracy – absolute rule by single individual. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's dramatic history play, Cassius complains that the Roman dictator has become so vainglorious and powerful that he

“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves” (6).

Curiously, democracies do not produce men called 'the great'. Frank Delano Roosevelt or Winston Churchill The Great? Apparently not.

History often seems to read like a catalogue of famous and great men and their lives. (Their secretaries and servants or wives seem to have less appeal, even though their 'what the butler saw' versions of events are often the primary sources for information on the lives of the famous and infamous). Let's take a look at the lives of the dead men I met this year to see if the answer to my question can be found there.

First, to Egypt. Three thousand years ago, the 9-year old pharaoh Tutankhamun (born 1341BCE) started his reign well. The monotheistic religion of the sun god Aten worshipped by his antecedents, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, was overturned under his reign and the old gods were restored. As King of Lower and Upper Egypt, he inherited an established empire, but this teenage regent nevertheless took up his bronze sword and mace and led his army in his war chariot to victory against the Hittites and Nubians. He lived a short life. His death in 1323BCE has perplexed historians. Was he murdered by his general or first minister? Was he mortally wounded in battle? Or was it an unfortunate but fatal fall from a chariot during a hunting expedition? What his burial lacked in scale of building was more than made up for by the contents. The tomb in the Valley of the Kings, discovered in the 1920s by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, revealed astonishing treasures that captured the imagination of the public in far away Britain and America. I had first seen these as a child when they first arrived in London thirty-five years ago. Many years later as an adult, and with a deeper appreciation for ancient things, I was able to stand again and study again the gold that had adorned his body, with its inlays of lapus lazuli; the wood and ivory figurines of the pharaoh; and the wooden boxes that carried prized artifacts. The craftsmanship was exquisite and all the more impressive for the fact that the artisans had only copper tools to work with. When I turned the corner of a darkened room at the Dome, I was enthralled by a wooden mannequin of the pharaoh: illuminated by spotlight, the large dark eyes of this youth stared out seductively across the ages, contrasting with his unblemished tanned skin. I was struck by the precision of the angled joints in a box carried on two poles: they were as good as anything done with a machine tool today. The treasure hints at what could have been. The god-king died too young to make a big impact on Egyptian society. What can a boy do in a man's world, after all? Overall, it seems King Tut was more famous than great.

Next to China. The First Emperor featured at the British Museum (3) was Shihuangdi. Born Ying Zheng in 259BCE, he was a native of Qin, of which he became king at the age of 12. An ambitious and ruthless young man, he embarked on an aggressive campaign of annexation of his neighbours' lands. By age 38 he had created one of the world's great empires. After completing his conquests, he declared himself Qin Shihuangdi, First August Divine Emperor of the Qin, after whom the nation of China was named Shihuangdi imposed standardisation that saw sweeping reforms in all walks of life that created a single nation out of many. His dialect became the first language of his empire, a round coin with a square hole in the centre used by the Qin became the national currency, and Qin law became the universal legal code. His tastes were nothing if not megalomaniacal. Under him, the 1,500-mile long Great Wall (or 5,000 Great Walls, depending on your definition) of China was erected. It is rumoured that the structure was built at such speed that injured workmen who fell in or died on the job were sealed into the wall. The so-called Terracotta Army, whose 7,000-plus life-size and lifelike figures still astonish modern visitors to Xian, was constructed to guard his equally gigantic tomb complex and protect him in the afterlife. Completing such gargantuan projects suggests great talents in organisation and methods as much as industrial and technical prowess, all this in a pre-industrial society. The exhibition revealed the extensive factory system that was put in place to create the terracotta figures, occupying vast numbers of people in servitude for many years. Some authors characterise Shihuangdi as a great leader, a Chinese Alexander The Great who unified the regions of China, becoming the progenitor of the oldest continuous human civilisation. Others see him as a dictator, an ancient Josef Stalin, an imperialist of the worst kind, sweeping away the freedoms and trampling on the cultures of his neighbours, subjugating them to a national template that did not tolerate variation. Even after his death in 210BCE, his reputation still inspires fear in China today: there is a legend that if his pyramid tomb is opened, his evil spirit will be free once again to roam the world, a prospect even the largely atheist Communist state is still unwilling to risk. The tomb remains unexcavated. Shihuangdi might be infamous, but I think a case could be made that he was genuinely great.

Some three hundred years later, at the port city of Selinus in southern Turkey on August 7, 117CE the popular Emperor Trajan (who had been declared, Optimus, 'The Best') died. It was then declared that he had adopted Publius Aelius Hadrianus – Hadrian – as his heir and five days later he ascended the curule chair to become imperator and ruler of the Roman world. By then the Roman Empire included Egypt among its many domains. By that era, the pyramids had been tourist attractions for a twenty centuries. Roman merchants plied their trade across Eurasia as far as China. Like Shihuangdi, Hadrian was also a builder of walls and great buildings. His more modest 72-mile long Hadrian's Wall survives in large sections in northern England, clinging dramatically to the rugged landscape of Cumbria and Northumberland. It is testament to a policy of consolidation, not expansion. In Rome, the Pantheon can still boast the largest free-standing dome even after nineteen-hundred years. At his opulent fantasy villa at Tivoli, Hadrian's eclectic taste in art and sculpture is on display, even in its ruined state. The bearded Spanish-born emperor was much travelled and spent more years away from Rome than in it. Also like Shihuangdi, Hadrian could be capable of belligerence. The British Museum displayed fragments of letters from Shimeon Bar Kochba who sought to, and for three years succeeded, in creating a free Jewish state. Hadrian's response was a 'shock and awe' campaign, a massive military deployment that systematically destroyed the rebels and led to the Jewish diaspora that some would argue has haunted the ages. Nothwithstanding his military record, history has largely been kind to the memory of Hadrian. Only a fragment survives of a single page of his autobiography. He was buried in a purpose-built mausoleum, the Castel Sant' Angelo, which still stands, though much modified by later builders, by the Tiber, but his remains have disappeared. Perhaps it was his enthusiasm for Hellenic culture, seen through modern eyes as a marker of a sensibility for the finer plastic arts, that resonated with modern biographers and writers of ancient history. While his romance with Antinous, a teenage boy, perplexes modern sensibilities - but was not seen as unusual in Hadrian's day – nevertheless it reveals if not a man with a complex personality, at least one capable of love. Compared to Shihuangdi or King Tut, Hadrian is an altogether more accessible figure. Hadrian seems more like a Cosimo de' Medici of Renaissance Florence, than a Benito Mussolini of the last century. Was Hadrian great? The Romans themselves were reluctant to use the word great (magnus) with their rulers. Julius Caesar's heir and adopted son, Octavian, who transformed the broken republic into what we recognise as the Roman Empire, was granted in his lifetime the unprecedented title Augustus, which meant something like reverred. He was never addressed as Magnus. Compared to Augustus, Hadrian was famous, but not great.

Twelfth century medieval Europeans feared the terror of the east, the man known to history as Genghis Khan. Born Temujin in 1162CE, he had a remarkably humble youth. As a child he found the love of his life, Börte, depicted touchingly in the film by Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan, and later fathered several children by her. Cheated out of his father's inheritance by disloyal followers, he lived a life on the run and in poverty and showed great resilience and strength of character. Unlike the other great men discussed here, Genghis was leader of a migrant people who traversed the Steppes and founded no great cities, left no towering monuments in marble. Their empire at its zenith was twice the size of the Roman. Of course, not all peoples encompassed by his empire were pleased to be subjects and a great many viewed Genghis Khan as a tyrant. He died in 1227CE and was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia – the site is unknown. Yet they left no great buildings, yet their proud culture survives among modern Mongols. A written account of his life is contained in The Secret History of the Mongols, written after Khan's death (7). Genghis must have had great personal charisma, strength of character, and a reputation for derring-do perhaps like the young Winston Churchill.

Why do we remain fascinated by Shihuangdi, Tutankhamun, Hadrian and Genghis Khan? Volumes have been written in their lives and TV continues to broadcast documentaries about them. First there's the appeal of power. Each man was an absolute ruler. Each was in some way a warlord or conqueror. Curiously, sustainers or defenders of empire do not seem to earn the title 'great' - it is assumed to be part of the job. We are intrigued by powerful people: witness the obsessive interest by the media in the race for the next president of the United States. Our history is often taught as a list of kings and queens, autocrats and dictators, emperors and presidents. In England, we are taught history through the prism of the royal lineage, from William the Bastard, more commonly called the Conqueror of 1066 fame, through the Plantagenets, Tudors, Jacobeans, Stuarts, Hanovarians, et al down to our own royal family. In the United States, school children learn about the First President, George Washington, through his elected successors and the dynastic families of the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Bushes. We critique their political record, admire their monuments and buildings, recount their legends as warlords and relish the intrigue and scandal and recoil at their errors of judgment. They may not have even been particularly nice people. I am not sure I would invite Shihuangdi for a beer at the local pub, though I can imagine myself talking over a glass of retsina with Hadrian about travels in Greece.

My explanation for this enduring interest is that we like to relate, to see connections between our own and ancient times and between ourselves as ordinary people and those who we consider to be extraordinary. We delight when we discover some tidbit about mundane aspects about their everyday lives. We also love a rags to riches story. Nothing succeeds like success. Yet, in their different ways, Tutankhamun, Shihuangdi, Hadrian and Genghis Khan remind us of the essentially unchanging nature of people and the deep-seated motivations that drive us to a lesser or greater degree. As you stare into the eyes of the statues, you try to imagine what they felt, dreamed of and their hopes and fears. For all their seeming remoteness in time, place and position, it seems we have much more in common with them than separates us after all.

One thing is certain in my mind: they were all desperate to achieve immortality. They cared very much about being remembered, and how. All those statues, monuments, tombs, panegyrics, were created to reach out across the ages to the very ordinary you and me. To the extent that we still remember them and celebrate their lives today, they did achieve a form of afterlife. Like modern celebrities, the great figures of history need the rest of us to provide the measure of comparison. The drive to live forever is quintessentially human and timeless, but seemingly strongest in the men history labels 'great'. Vanity was ever thus.

Which leads me to pose a disturbing question. Have we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the treasures they left behind? In other words, has the propaganda these men created and exploited during their lifetimes, survived beyond the grave to distort their true nature and record of these men? Implicit in these shows is an admiration, a celebration, of these men's lives – and for these twentieth century dictators, this is clearly not how we perceive their legacy. Our emotions are ones of disdain, disgust and disapproval. Imagine, then, this scenario: an exhibition in New York a thousand years from now discusses the life and legacy of Adolf Hitler. The show features models of Albert Speer's designs for buildings for Berlin, reinvented capital of Germania; visitors walk past busts of the dictator and view back-to-back reels of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens. Or two thousand years from now, an exhibition in London discusses the life of Stalin, in which plans and models show his designs for party buildings in Moscow accompanied by looping film of the secretary's speeches, while gigantic statues look down. Quite apart from the fact that neither Hitler nor Stalin left any cultural legacy of any value, such shows could not be put on for a contemporary public, let alone for profit. But what if they had left great art or architecture? Would we – or future generations – feel differently? The memory of the evil these men did is still with us, living on in the scarred lives of people who survived that era. Further, because there are people who still look up to these deranged deceased dictators as heroes, it is likely still too early for us to present their lives in the manner of a First Emperor or Hadrian under the dome of the British Museum, if ever there will be such a time to display the lives of infamous men.

There have been academic attempts to put their world in some sort of context. In the 1990s I attended a fascinating and memorable exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery on the South Bank that compared the propaganda of the governments in the 1920s-1940s. I recall it was a sobering experience. Franco, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin all used propaganda extensively (8). Indeed, Josef Goebbels addressing an assembly of the Nazi part made a joke (I paraphrase) that “propaganda was essential to government and good propaganda was essential to good government.” They developed strong graphic styles and messages – art, architecture, advertising, cinema, radio and the press – to reinforce their nationalistic aspirations. Modern eyes see them as distasteful. Since World War II and the end of the Cold War, we have come to see propaganda as pejorative, a distortion of information sharing. The ministry of propaganda has been replaced by a press officer or government spokesman (most memorably embodied by the plain speaking, unemotional British civil servant of the MoD during the Falklands War).

The lesson here is that passing time can sanitise evil. Just as we now question the motives of the spokesman on TV speaking on behalf of this or that organisation, so we should be prepared to critique the evidence and symbols that survive of men we label 'great' who lived a thousand and more years ago. The British Museum exposition on Hadrian exposition was a balanced telling, showing the tyrannical side of the emperor as well as his romantic, presenting a rounded out biography of the man. As Shakespeare eloquently put it,

“the evil that men do lives after them;
the good is often interred with their bones (9).”

For later generations, to take the true measure of a man, we have to remain alert to men who are good and others who are evil and not to be seduced by the art of the sculptor or propagandist they employ to dress up their image.

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict is showing at the British Museum, London until October 26. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaoh is showing at the O2, London until August 30; King Tut reopens in the USA at the Atlanta Civic Center from November through May 22, 2009 and will then move to the Indianapolis Children's Museum from June to October 2009.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_people

2. First Emperor at the British Museum, London 13 September 2007 to 6 April 2008. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shihuangdi

3. Hadrian: Empire and Conflict at the British Museum, London, 24 July to 26 October 2008. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian

4. Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaoh, at the O2 Dome (formerly The Millenium Dome), London, 1 November 2007 to 20 September 2008. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamun

5. Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan, a film by Sergei Bodrov (2008), www.mongolmovie.com/ See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_khan

6. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/index.html

7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_History_of_the_Mongols

8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

9. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II