Roman Biography

Emperor Tiberius: Life and Reign offers a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of one of Rome’s most enigmatic emperors. Tiberius, who ruled from AD 14 to AD 37, has often been portrayed through the lens of his reclusive and autocratic later years, but this book aims to provide a balanced view, shedding light on both his achievements and controversies. From his birth into the prominent Claudian family and his early military successes to his complex relationships with Augustus and his mother Livia, Tiberius’ life is a tapestry of ambition, duty, and personal struggle. His rise to power ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A revelatory new biography of one of the most misunderstood and vilified First Ladies in American history: Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary Lincoln was at the center of politics at a time when society’s expectations for women were rigid and circumscribed. The product of...

The War of the Three Gods is a military history of the Near and Middle East in the seventh century - with its chief focus on the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Heraclius (AD 610-641) - a pivotal and dramatic time in world history. The Eastern Roman Empire was brought to the very brink of extinction by the Sassanid Persians before Heraclius managed to inflict a crushing defeat on the Sassanids with a desperate, final gambit.

The fall of Troy. A hero carrying his father out of the flames. A queen on a burning pyre. The founding of the greatest empire the world has known. Virgil's Aeneid is the poem that gave Rome its myth and gave Europe one of its founding epics — the story of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who escapes his city's ruin and sails west, through storm and war and the underworld itself, to found the race that will become Rome. This Erato Press edition presents the Aeneid complete in the classic verse translation of John Dryden, with an original critical essay and a life of the poet. THE POEM From the ...

The Practical Philosophy of Plato is an accessible guide to the enduring ideas of one of history's greatest thinkers, designed for modern readers who want to apply ancient wisdom to everyday life.

Step into the darkest corners of history in 21 Gripping True Crime Stories of Brutal Murders and Infamous Killers from the 16th Century. What murder was solved when a corpse began to bleed at the touch of its killer? Which teenager changed the course of French history with two murders and a single gunshot? What serial murderer met his end beneath the executioner's wheel in a German town? And what poisoner committed a crime so horrifying that King Henry VIII changed English law simply to devise a more terrible death for him? The answers lie within these pages. Journey into the violent heart ...

""A brave and marvelous book. A page-turner that will rip your heart out.""—Jon Krakauer In the tradition of Into the Wild comes an instant classic of outdoor literature, a riveting work of uncommon depth. I’m planning on doing 4 days in the jungle. . . . It should be difficult to get lost...

Danny Kingman is used to fending for himself. Working nonstop as an ER nurse to pay for his mother’s care, he’s been putting his own life on hold for as long as he can remember. But when an unbelievably hot, strangely intense man saves him from a mugging, Danny has a feeling everything is about to change. Especially when that man suddenly pops out a pair of fangs.

Stoicism, a school of Hellenistic thought founded in Athens in the third century BC, was one of the most sublime philosophies in the history of Western civilization. It is a way of living that focuses on reality instead of fantasy or idealism. According to its teachings, the path to peace and happiness is found in accepting the moment as it presents itself, by not allowing oneself to be ruled by the desire for pleasure or by the fear of pain.

From the creators of the wildly popular99% Invisiblepodcast, comes a guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities. Narrated by Roman Mars, with a bonus Q&A and a Full Episode of 99% Invisible. Have you ever wondered what those bright, squiggly graffiti marks on the sidewalk...

On Christmas Day in the year 800, a Frankish warlord knelt in a Roman church and stood up an emperor. The empire he claimed had been dead for three centuries. The idea he revived would outlive him by a thousand years. Charlemagne could barely write his own name. He spent most of his life on horseback, fighting a brutal thirty-year war against the Saxons that included the mass killing at Verden. He buried sons, watched a rearguard die at Roncesvalles, and ruled a sprawling realm with almost no bureaucracy, no standing capital, and no money economy worth the name. And yet, by the time he died...

Each of the first three Gospels calls attention to the Roman centurion--Longinus--who officiated at the Crucifixion, and it is through the life-changing story of this duty-bound soldier that Leonard Wibberley (author of The Mouse That Roared and himself a devout Catholic) achieves, with a shrewd appreciation of human motives, a thoroughly fresh interpretation of the Gospel story of Christ's ministry and Passion. "The Oldest Story Given Fresh Vigor."--Los Angeles Times ★★★★★ "Wonderful book. It gives new insight into the life of Christ and how he influenced those around him. Sure, ...

He told you he came, he saw, he conquered — and you believed him. This is the story of how Julius Caesar invented Julius Caesar: the most successful act of self-mythology in Western history, traced through the documents that built the legend, with an original critical study. Every other great figure was invented after death, by other hands. Caesar invented himself — in his own lifetime, in his own words, writing of his conquests in the cool third person ("Caesar advanced," "Caesar decided") so that propaganda would read as objective history. This volume gathers, for the first time as a ...

Named a “Best Book of the 21st Century” by Kirkus Reviews, this biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author brings to life the most intriguing woman in history: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and...

Antoninus Pius is often overshadowed by the emperors who came before and after him. Hadrian was the restless architect of imperial consolidation. Marcus Aurelius became the philosopher-emperor tested by war and plague. Between them stood Antoninus Pius, a ruler whose greatest achievement was far harder than conquest. He kept Rome at its height. In ANTONINUS PIUS: The Emperor Who Preserved Rome, Gordon J. MacKenzie examines the reign of one of the most stable and disciplined emperors in Roman history. Rather than chasing military glory or remaking the empire through spectacle, Antoninus ...

Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-ca. 216) began his remarkable career tending to wounded gladiators in provincial Asia Minor. Later in life he achieved great distinction as one of a small circle of court physicians to the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at the very heart of Roman society. Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine offers the first authoritative biography in English of this brilliant, audacious, and profoundly influential figure.

No era in world history has fascinated us more than that of the Roman Empire, especially when it was at its height. The period known as the Pax Romana is generally agreed to have occurred between Octavian's defeat of Mark Antony at Actium in 27 B.C. to the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D.180. During this 227-year period, most of the sharp military conflict was confined to the periphery of the empire, though the civil war kicked off during the Year of the Four Emperors in 68/69 was a glaring exception to this "universal" peace.

In Stalin’s Russia, when prison sentences stretched ten, fifteen, and twenty-five years, the future Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found himself incarcerated in its genocidal “corrective” labor camps (the so-called Gulag of the Soviet Union). His crime: expressing anti-Stalinist opinions in a letter to a friend. A devout Communist at his arrest, condemned to be worked to death in the frozen wastelands of Russia, he underwent instead a profound psychological transformation, broke free of his Marxist ideology—and survived. This full biography of one of the most influential ...

Before Christianity had cathedrals, creeds, councils, and emperors on its side, it had memory. And one man did more than almost anyone else to preserve that memory. Eusebius of Caesarea lived at one of the most astonishing turning points in Christian history. He saw the Church emerge from persecution, watched Constantine rise as Christianity’s imperial protector, and recorded the story of apostles, martyrs, bishops, heresies, Scriptures, and councils before much of that history could disappear. Known as the Father of Church History, Eusebius was not merely a writer looking backward. He ...

ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 See ancient Rome through the eyes of a gladiator—from the evening before the games at the Colosseum to the evening after "A grippingly original way of making the alien world of the Roman Amphitheatre both accessible and comprehensible." —Tom...