Palatine - An Alternative History of the Caesars with Peter Stothard

A unique and entertaining history of the Roman Empire’s first dynasty 14 CE: The first Roman emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine Hill, about to become the birthplace of Western bureaucracy, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive. This is a history of ancient Rome’s first imperial dynasty―the Julio-Claudians--with a cast of new men and newly dominant women, those reviled too often in the past as flatterers and gluttons, audacious slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes, and unhinged party animals. Palatine uncovers the lives of the Vitellii, perhaps Rome’s least admired imperial clan, of Publius, an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age, of Lucius, an exceptionally skilled and sycophantic courtier, and of Aulus a genial slugg