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Ten Caesars
- Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Best-selling classical historian Barry Strauss tells the story of three-and-a-half centuries of the Roman Empire through the lives of 10 of the most important emperors, from Augustus to Constantine.
Barry Strauss’ Ten Caesars is the story of the Roman Empire from rise to reinvention, from Augustus, who founded the empire, to Constantine, who made it Christian and moved the capital east to Constantinople.
During these centuries, Rome gained in splendor and territory, then lost both. The empire reached from modern-day Britain to Iraq, and gradually, emperors came not from the old families of the first century but from men born in the provinces, some of whom had never even seen Rome. By the fourth century, the time of Constantine, the Roman Empire had changed so dramatically in geography, ethnicity, religion, and culture that it would have been virtually unrecognizable to Augustus.
In the imperial era, Roman women - mothers, wives, mistresses - had substantial influence over the emperors, and Strauss also profiles the most important among them, from Livia, Augustus’ wife, to Helena, Constantine’s mother. But even women in the imperial family faced limits, and the emperors often forced them to marry or divorce for purely political reasons.
Rome’s legacy remains today in so many ways, from language, law, and architecture to the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. Strauss examines this enduring heritage through the lives of the men who shaped it: Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian, and Constantine. Over the ages, they learned to maintain the family business - the government of an empire - by adapting when necessary and always persevering no matter the cost. Ten Caesars is essential history as well as fascinating biography.
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What listeners say about Ten Caesars
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Richferguson1
- 03-01-20
Good for beginners
If you have a good understanding of the history of Rome, skip this book. Few new insights I haven’t read elsewhere. As 1 book covers 10+ emperors, it is understandably difficult to develop the bios much. But for a beginner it is a fine overview.
8 people found this helpful
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- J. S. Johnson
- 11-21-19
Light on Details
It's a great tour of several centuries of history. It skips the chaotic inter-regnum periods in favor of a much more personal perspective of the men (and women) who ruled both in name and in fact.
7 people found this helpful
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- Sully
- 06-27-19
where's. Claudius?
Very good. Great narration. Endless research learned yet..... an hour spent on Nero and 5 minutes on Claudius. I can see not giving Caligula a chapter but I was interested in learning facts about Claudius and dismissing the many myths as the author did with Nero and the others. Disappointed.
7 people found this helpful
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- Marco
- 03-14-19
Roman emperors well explained
Very nicely written and the boom gave me a better insight into the why and how of the leaders (and there family) of the Roman empire since Augustus.
All though the performance is it at times a bit robotic and maybe can be called at best reasonable. However if you are interested in this part of Roman history it is a fact that can be easily lived whit.
6 people found this helpful
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- Germoglio
- 06-28-19
Well done
Accurate yea, but more: it turns the sequence of emperors (many more than the 10 of the title) into an engrossing narrative. Excellent judgement in balancing detail and story arc. Nothing is flawless but this is great. Great talent in the writing and great telling in the audio version. I wouldn’t hesitate to assign it to undergrads.
5 people found this helpful
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- Florin
- 05-28-19
Extremely watered-down
History as explained to a particularly stupid kid...Gee whiz, I never knew Constantinople is currently Istanbul!
4 people found this helpful
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- LTAwesome
- 08-02-21
performance was decent, no detail
overall the book comes across with a lack of detail and does not give credit to sources, so you are left just trusting the hyperbolic and subjective claims the author makes about the emotions and reasons why the events occurred. he is trying to put together a compelling and consistent narrative, but it comes across as childish and basic.
3 people found this helpful
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- Hal
- 07-25-19
Fascinating insights into ten pivotal Caesars
I have read a fair amount of Roman history, but this book gave me an overarching view of the effects of these ten pivotal Caesars on the total Roman empire and much of the world beyond and after it.
3 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 07-18-20
Utile but superficial and skewed
Barry Strauss is a competent scholar and he provides a usable overview of Rome’s most consequential Emperors but he lacks depth and deep insight. This is most evident in his examination of Constantine and his conversion.
While Strauss correctly notes that Constantine became more publicly Christian after 324 CE, he claims that his conversion came earlier. My sense is that Constantine ‘s conversion was of a later date, that is around 323-4 before that he was a worshiper of Sol whose cult he conflated with Christianity. Strauss doesn’t deal with the vision at the Milvian Bridge, which is is a Eusebian myth but he does come close to writing a less than critical panegyric for Constantine, whose conversion was at best an attempt to syncretize for political and personal issues and at worse purely political.
2 people found this helpful
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- Dennis
- 10-07-19
Great story, great history. Confusing names?
This is a great, well researched story about the ten Caesars. Narration was great. My problem, not the authors problem, was keeping track of all the confusing names. I do recommend this book, just keep a note pad and pencil in hand.
2 people found this helpful
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- Dene.F.
- 09-20-19
A shame!
Good content. Fine narration. Terrible audio quality. Don't know where they recorded this but it wasn't Audible's studios?
5 people found this helpful
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- G. Lynch
- 03-21-22
Excellent
A very useful overview of this era of the Roman Empire. A candid and informative book, written in an engaging style with good narration. A very helpful insight into this period of Roman history and its emperors, as it reached the zenith of its power and influence in the Middle East. The growth of Christianity during this period was significant, and this book provides a useful secular insight into how Rome adapted and morphed to accommodate this shift. Well worth purchasing if you want to learn more about this significant epoch of history.
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Following Caesar’s assassination and Mark Antony’s defeat of the conspirators who killed Caesar, two powerful men remained in Rome—Antony and Caesar’s chosen heir, young Octavian, the future Augustus. When Antony fell in love with the most powerful woman in the world, Egypt’s ruler Cleopatra, and thwarted Octavian’s ambition to rule the empire, another civil war broke out. In 31 BC one of the largest naval battles in the ancient world took place—more than 600 ships, almost 200,000 men, and one woman—the Battle of Actium.
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Highly detailed accounts
- By MP on 03-28-22
By: Barry Strauss
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Twelve Caesars
- Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (Bollingen Series)
- By: Mary Beard
- Narrated by: Mary Beard
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book - against a background of today’s “sculpture wars” - Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the Western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars”, from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian.
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This foray into art history is a disappointment.
- By Stephen J Chiulli on 11-10-21
By: Mary Beard
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Masters of Command
- Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and the Genius of Leadership
- By: Barry Strauss
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar: Each was a master of war. Each had to look beyond the battlefield to decide whom to fight and why; to know what victory was and when to end the war; to determine how to bring stability to the lands he conquered. Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar had to be not only generals but statesmen. And yet each was a battlefield commander, a strategist, a leader of men - in short, a warrior.
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this is a story of caesar hannibal and alexander
- By Michael Rose on 01-28-20
By: Barry Strauss
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The Death of Caesar
- The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination
- By: Barry Strauss
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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William Shakespeare's gripping play showed Caesar's assassination to be an amateur and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary operation, a generals' plot put together by Caesar's disaffected officers and designed with precision. Brutus and Cassius were indeed key players, but they had the help of a third man - Decimus. He was the mole in Caesar's entourage, one of Caesar's leading generals, and a lifelong friend.
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Absorbing
- By Jean on 03-24-15
By: Barry Strauss
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The Trojan War
- A New History
- By: Barry Strauss
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The Trojan War is the most famous conflict in history, the subject of Homer's Iliad, one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Although many listeners know that this literary masterwork is based on actual events, there is disagreement about how much of Homer's tale is true. Drawing on recent archaeological research, historian and classicist Barry Strauss explains what really happened in Troy more than 3,000 years ago. For many years it was thought that Troy was an insignificant place that never had a chance against the Greek warriors who laid siege and overwhelmed the city.
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Good summary of a great myth and its realities.
- By Kenneth M. Northrup on 07-09-20
By: Barry Strauss
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The Spartacus War
- By: Barry Strauss
- Narrated by: Ray Grover
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The Spartacus War is the extraordinary story of the most famous slave rebellion in the ancient world, the fascinating true story behind a legend that has been the inspiration for novelists, filmmakers, and revolutionaries for 2,000 years. Starting with only 74 men, a gladiator named Spartacus incited a rebellion that threatened Rome itself.
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Interesting
- By Jean on 08-02-15
By: Barry Strauss
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Nero
- Matricide, Music, and Murder in Imperial Rome
- By: Anthony Everitt, Roddy Ashworth
- Narrated by: Greg Patmore
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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There are many infamous stories about the Roman emperor Nero: He set fire to Rome and thrummed his lyre as it burned. Cruel, vain, and incompetent, he then cleared the charred ruins and built a vast palace. Nero has long been the very image of a bad ruler, a legacy left behind by the historians of his day, who despised him. But there is a mystery. For a long time after his death, anonymous hands laid flowers on his grave. The monster was loved. In this nuanced biography, Anthony Everitt and investigative journalist Roddy Ashworth reveal the contradictions inherent in Nero.
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An amazing 360 degree portrait
- By Cooper A Day on 01-01-23
By: Anthony Everitt, and others
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Trajan
- Rome's Last Conqueror
- By: Nicholas Jackson
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Until the publication of this captivating biography, no such volume on Trajan's life has been tailored to the general listener. The unique book illuminates a neglected period of ancient Roman history. Trajan rose from fairly obscure beginnings to become the emperor of Rome. He was born in Italica, an Italic settlement close to modern Seville in present-day Spain, and is the first Roman Emperor to be born outside of Rome. His remarkable rise from officer to general and then to emperor in just over twenty years reveals a shrewd politician who maintained absolute power.
By: Nicholas Jackson
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Augustus
- First Emperor of Rome
- By: Adrian Goldsworthy
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 18 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Caesar Augustus's story, one of the most riveting in western history, is filled with drama and contradiction, risky gambles and unexpected success. He began as a teenage warlord, whose only claim to power was as the heir of the murdered Julius Caesar. Mark Antony dubbed him "a boy who owes everything to a name," but in the years to come the youth outmaneuvered all the older and more experienced politicians and was the last man standing in 30 BC.
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You know my name...say it.
- By Steven on 12-10-14
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Rubicon
- The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
- By: Tom Holland
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows, Tom Holland
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the known world. Rubicon paints a vivid portrait of the Republic at the climax of its greatness - the same greatness which would herald the catastrophe of its fall. It is a story of incomparable drama.
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If you’re looking for a history book, this isn’t it.
- By Richard Sweeny on 12-16-22
By: Tom Holland
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Ancient Rome
- The Rise and Fall of An Empire
- By: Simon Baker
- Narrated by: Chris MacDonnell
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Simon Baker charts the rise and fall of the world's first superpower, focusing on six momentous turning points that shaped Roman history. Welcome to Rome as you've never seen it before - awesome and splendid, gritty and squalid. From the conquest of the Mediterranean beginning in the third century BC to the destruction of the Roman Empire at the hands of barbarian invaders some seven centuries later, we discover the most critical episodes in Roman history.