From Barry Strauss, the acclaimed ancient military historian and author of The Death of Caesar, comes Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine. As the title makes plain, Strauss’ book does not cover all Caesars of the first three centuries of the Christian era, but it does cover 10 of the most notable. Strauss passes over forgotten and otherwise unremarkable emperors, such as Otho, Galba, or Vitellius. The author, a professor of history and classics at Cornell University, sticks to the A-list.
You may object, but Julius Caesar is not among the 10 profiled. No, he is not, but then he was not, strictly speaking, an emperor. He was consul and, together with Crassus and Pompey, a member of the First Triumvirate. Only with the ascension of Octavian (later Augustus) after Caesar’s assassination, did the age of empire officially begin. The Roman Republic was over.
Comparisons are inevitable between Strauss’ book and that of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69 – 140 A.D.), The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Alas, comparisons are few. Strauss’ 10 Caesars cover the period 27 B.C. to 337 A.D.; Suetonius’ 12, from 46 B.C. (he includes Julius Caesar) to 96 A.D. The two works share the lives and times of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, and Vespasian. Suetonius’ book was first rendered into English in 1606 by Philemon Holland, a doctor of medicine and a grammar school teacher from Coventry, England. Thankfully, Strauss’ writing is far more accessible, as this borderline unreadable passage of Holland’s makes clear in his readers’ introduction:
That yee may with better contentment reade these Historicall reports
of the twelve first Caesars, which Suetonius hath delivered most truely,
compiled as compendiously, and digested right methodically, I have
thought it good with some few advertisements promised, to commend
the same unto you.
Strauss’ choice of emperors to begin and end his study is highly appropriate. In Augustus, we have the man who started it all: the first emperor, who defeated challenges to his ascension, chiefly from Marc Antony and Cleopatra VII, was responsible for the Pax Romana during his 40-plus years of rule, supported the arts, and embarked on a public works building program that took Rome from simply a large city to a magnificent one. “I found Rome in brick,” he allegedly said on his death bed, “and I am leaving it in marble.” In Constantine, we find a man who did to the eastern empire and Constantinople what Augustus did for the western half and Rome.
Among the other eight emperors included in the book, Strauss gives generous attention to the “five good emperors” (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius), and Tiberius, Septimius Severus, and Diocletian are also well considered.
Roman women and their influence on their respective emperors are given special attention, from Livia, the wife of Augustus, to Helena, Constantine’s mother. Perhaps the most interesting lady of the household was Agrippina, wife of Claudius. She took the name of Augusta, a brazen appropriation, and “sometimes joined Claudius while he was conducting public business, and sat on a separate tribunal, in a power play that shocked contemporaries.” She saw herself, Strauss tells us, “as his co-ruler.” Let’s see, an ambitious, power-seeking woman married to a head of state. Where have we seen that lately?
By following the chronology of these emperors, the reader can trace the decline and, by the end of the book, the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire and contrast it with the growth of power and influence of the eastern half. Invaders had sacked Rome twice in the fifth century and eventually forced the capital from Rome to Ravenna. But this effort brought no relief. The end came on Sept. 4, 476, as Romulus Augustulus surrendered power to the barbarian Odoacer. Gone was the Rome of Augustus, the five good emperors, Cicero, Juvenal, and Virgil. The so-called Middle Ages had begun in Europe.
The term “good read” is too often, even promiscuously, applied to new books. But the Ten Caesars is more than worthy of the term. Both classics scholars and armchair historians will find it rewarding. It is, truly, a good read.
Chris Timmers is a freelance writer in Columbia, S.C. He is a West Point graduate and specializes in books on military affairs and history.
