Emperor of Rome

Profile Books, 2023 8vo (24 cm), XVII, [1], 493, [1] pp. Publisher's cloth and dust jacket. "Emperor of Rome explores the fact and fiction of the rulers of the ancient Roman world, asking what they did, why they did it, and why their stories have been told in the extravagant, sometimes lurid, ways that they have. It looks at big questions of power, corruption and conspiracy. But it also looks at the day-to-day practicalities of their lives. What, and where, did they eat? Who did they sleep with? How did they travel? In the course of the book, we shall meet many people who were not, and did not aspire to be, emperors themselves, but who made the imperial system possible: wary aristocrats, enslaved cooks, diligent secretaries, court jesters - even a doctor who treated one young prince for his tonsillitis. The survival of the Roman empire as a system makes no sense if it was ruled by a series of deranged autocrats. I am interested in how those stories of madness arose, in how the business of empire was really conducted, and in Roman fears that the rule of the emperors was not so much blood-stained (they expected that), but was a strange and unsettling dystopia built on deception and fakery." (from the blurb)