The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, details everything from ancient policy failures to sex scandals.
Sex scandals and foreign policy failures don’t only beleaguer the modern politician, it turns out: in the early second century, the scholar Suetonius chronicled the dramas of the first set of Roman emperors, and now, their indiscretions and eccentricities have been dug up in a new translation which is proving popular in bookshops.
The US “Republican system was modelled on that of ancient Rome, but the [Roman] Republic ended up becoming an autocracy, and so in America, there’s always been this anxiety that a Republican system of government may end up an autocracy, and I guess that at the moment, that anxiety has a particular salience.”.
The book, published on 13 February, comes 18 months after ancient Rome became the centre of a major internet pop culture moment, when women began asking men how often they think about the Roman empire, and posting their responses online.
The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, made the Sunday Times hardback nonfiction chart this week.
