The Twelve Caesars
Matthew Dennison
The Twelve Caesars
One of them was a military genius; one murdered his mother and fiddled while Rome burned; another earned the nickname 'sphincter artist'. Six of their number were assassinated, two committed suicide - and five of them were elevated to the status of gods. They have come down to posterity as the 'twelve Caesars' - Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Under their rule, from 49 BC to AD 96, Rome was transformed from a republic to an empire, whose model of regal autocracy would survive in the West for more than a thousand years.
3.8 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
400 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
May 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1848876835 |
| Publisher |
Atlantic Books |
| |
One of them was a military genius; one murdered his mother and fiddled while Rome burned; another earned the nickname 'sphincter artist'. Six of their number were assassinated, two committed suicide - and five of them were elevated to the status of gods. They have come down to posterity as the 'twelve Caesars' - Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Under their rule, from 49 BC to AD 96, Rome was transformed from a republic to an empire, whose model of regal autocracy would survive in the West for more than a thousand years.
Empress of Rome: The Life of Livia by Matthew Dennison.
Reviews
The Daily Express
Christopher Silvester
“Dennison’s approach combines thoughtful reflection and analysis with gossipy irreverence in a bewitching cocktail.”
25/05/2012
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The Independent
Manda Scott
“Taking as his starting-point The Twelve Cesars by Suetonius, he has built around that definitive text a humorous, intelligent, highly personal stroll through the careers of the first 12 men who ruled in post-republican Rome ... Suetonius, on the whole, ordered his biographies along very stringent lines. Dennison, by contrast, jumps back and forth with dizzying speed. It's not always obvious where we are in a particular life. But it probably doesn't need to be: none of us is reading this because we want to know the history. We'd better return to the ancient sources, or find more scholarly works, for that.”
16/06/2012
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The Daily Mail
Christopher Hudson
“Matthew Dennison has had the clever idea of updating a famously scandalous work, Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars, written in AD 117 - what you might call the Private Eye version of ancient Rome. It has been plundered, translated and reprinted hundreds of times since it was first compiled nearly 2,000 years ago, but this version, colourfully embroidered for a modern audience, I found unputdownable.”
07/06/2012
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The Sunday Times
Christopher Hart
“Dennison’s series of impressionistic pen portraits are compelling and imaginative, though very much focusing on the private lives of the emperors, and not for anyone who wants a straightforward history of Rome at its zenith. A psychologically astute observation of Pliny the Younger, an epigraph to the book, offers a justification for this gossipy approach: “It is a man’s pleasures…which tell us most about his true worth, his gravitas and his self-control. No one is so dissolute that his work lacks all semblance of seriousness; it is our leisure which betrays us.””
20/05/2012
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The Times
Iain Finlayson
“Dennison does not intend to contradict Suetonius, but he is able to revisit the great work with the benefit of “additional primary sources and associated secondary material”. His aim, accomplished in rather a stately prose, is to explore, in 12 portraits, the telling facets of fallible men too often corrupted by power and destroyed by hubris.”
26/05/2012
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The Financial Times
Carl Wilkinson
“Although by its nature brisk and at times compressed, The Twelve Caesars – intended as “an entertainment” – is gossipy and insightful, making for an enjoyable introduction to this power-hungry crowd.”
26/05/2012
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