"Have I Played The Part Well?"

It is Sunday afternoon, I have a tickle in my throat and wonder if I am coming down with the cold which a recent house guest brought with her.  I feel languid--it must be the impending cold.  I could not nap, am bored with reading the books I have stupidly assembled on economics, since frankly I cannot understand a word of them.  Ditto for the latest book by T.J. Clarke on Picasso.  Am I really getting that dim or is his prose and thinking as tortured as I fancy it is?  Should I confess that instead of worthwhile activity, I have been sitting at the computer bringing up photo news items about the Duchess of Cambridge and the rest of the Royal Family?  My husband is constantly deriding my interest in the royals, laughingly assigning it to my rube Middle Western upper middle class background, fraught with temptations of imagining a kind of aristocratic aura when of course none obtained.  Maybe that is so, although I tend to think not.  It is rather that I am fascinated by persons who perforce live public lives that are a self conscious construct at all times.  When I first studied Roman history I was deeply moved by what Augustus Caesar is reported (by his wife Livia and her son, Tiberius) to have said as his last words before dying: " “Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit.” He came to supreme imperial power by ruthlessly suppressing all the opposition following the death of his great-uncle Julius Caesar.  A country boy from a middle class background despite his pedigree (his mother married down) he used his connections and his ambitions to take on the opposition and rule the country, eventually being given the title of Imperator, from which descends the western tradition of royalty and emperors.  He realized that the political situation upon the  death of Caesar threatened anarchy and he made himself become the focus, and eventually the very symbol of the Roman State, and on the way to this, collapsed all democratically elected opposition to his position.  "L' état c'est moi," yes, indeed, and perhaps it did not begin with him, but he survived long enough, and made the Roman Empire stable enough that he left an indelible stamp on the idea.  Now while it is true that the English royal family has, as they say, zilch political power, they clearly hold an enormous totemic fascination for the English people as well as other nationals.  It is fascinating to me to watch them in action since they  are exactly what Augustus was talking about.  One is not supposed to touch the Queen, the people gasped when Michelle Obama hugged her in an impulsive gesture of friendship.  She cannot be touched because she is not supposed to be a flesh and blood human being but sacred as an icon.  That is fascinating to me.  When her son,  the Earl of Wessex, on her eightieth birthday was asked "What sort of person is your mother?", he paused and finally answered, "She really isn't a person, she's the Queen."  It is said that members of her immediate family make obeisance every day when they first are in her presence.  The idea that one self consciously inhabits a role at all times while in public is fascinating, that denial of any social reality for the sake of a constructed identity.  I can never make up my mind whether I am fascinated or horrified, thrilled or terrified by it.