From Augustus to Nero

The Julio-Claudian dynasty is, without a doubt, the most fascinating, reviled, and romanticized lineage in all of world history. For two thousand years, our imagination has remained trapped within a formidable narrative cage artfully constructed by historians like Tacitus and gossip-loving biographers like Suetonius-representatives, or at least sympathizers, of that senatorial aristocracy that the early emperors had progressively stripped of power and humiliated.

Thus, for centuries, we have been content with the "dark legends": we believed in the infallible and pious Augustus, ignoring his cold, calculating ruthlessness; we shuddered at the alleged vices of the elderly Tiberius in his Capri retreat; we mocked Caligula's horse-madness, pitied Claudius's stammering idiocy, and cursed Nero's pyromaniacal sadism.

The book you hold in your hands has the great, rare merit of sweeping away the smoke of senatorial propaganda and the encrustations of moralistic historiography, restoring to us the flesh, blood, and, above all, the political rationale of these first, extraordinary masters of the world. The author undertakes a rigorous historiographical cleanup, demonstrating how Caligula was not a madman but a lucid, if premature, theorist of absolute monarchy of the Hellenistic mold, how Claudius was perhaps the Empire's greatest administrator, and how Nero attempted a cultural revolution whose traces survive to this day.