https://ancientrome.org/tags/julio-claudians/ Recent content in Julio-Claudians on Ancient Rome Hugo en-us Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/caligula-what-the-sources-say-about-the-mad-emperor-and-what-they-invented/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/caligula-what-the-sources-say-about-the-mad-emperor-and-what-they-invented/ <p>Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus ruled Rome for three years and ten months, from March 37 CE to January 41 CE. He was 24 when he took power and 28 when officers of his own Praetorian Guard cut him down in a corridor on the Palatine during the games. Rome has been arguing about what happened in between for two thousand years, and almost everything in the argument comes from men who never met him.</p> https://ancientrome.org/i-claudius-the-greatest-roman-television-ever-made/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/i-claudius-the-greatest-roman-television-ever-made/ <p>I, Claudius was broadcast by the BBC in 1976, produced on a budget that would not cover the catering costs of a modern prestige television production, shot almost entirely on interior sets that made no pretense of representing ancient Rome, and it is the finest dramatization of Roman history ever made. The production design is limited. The performances are not. Robert Graves&rsquo;s source novels provided a narrative that understood the Julio-Claudian dynasty as a political tragedy of Shakespearean scope, and the BBC production found the cast to realize it.</p> https://ancientrome.org/nero-the-emperor-rome-deserved/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/nero-the-emperor-rome-deserved/ <p>Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ruled the Roman Empire for fourteen years, from 54 to 68 AD, and the historical record that survives was almost entirely written by men who despised him. Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio — the three primary ancient sources for his reign — were senators or wrote from senatorial perspectives, and Nero&rsquo;s relationship with the Senate was sufficiently hostile that objectivity from that quarter was never likely. The result is an emperor whose actual governance has to be extracted from beneath layers of accumulated literary contempt, much of which is genuine but some of which is retrospective distortion by a class that had specific and personal grievances.</p> https://ancientrome.org/robert-gravess-i-claudius-fiction-as-history/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/robert-gravess-i-claudius-fiction-as-history/ <p>Robert Graves published I, Claudius in 1934, followed immediately by its sequel Claudius the God, and the two novels together constitute the most successful fictional treatment of Roman history in any language. They have never been out of print. They were the basis for the BBC television series that remains the finest dramatization of Roman history ever made. They are cited by historians as substantially accurate in their broad outlines while being recognized as works of fiction that invented freely within the framework the sources provided. They are also, simply, very good novels — constructed with the discipline of a scholar and the freedom of a storyteller.</p> https://ancientrome.org/suetonius-the-gossip-who-wrote-history/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/suetonius-the-gossip-who-wrote-history/ <p>Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote the Lives of the Twelve Caesars — biographies of Julius Caesar through Domitian — probably in the early second century AD, and the work has been read continuously ever since, generating controversy about its reliability that has not diminished its influence by the slightest degree. Suetonius was the secretary of the emperor Hadrian before being dismissed, apparently for inappropriate familiarity with the empress, and he had access to the imperial archives during his service. Whether he actually used the archives, and how judiciously, is a question classical scholars continue to disagree about.</p> https://ancientrome.org/tacitus-the-historian-who-hated-the-empire-he-served/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/tacitus-the-historian-who-hated-the-empire-he-served/ <p>Tacitus is the most important historian the Roman world produced and one of the most important historians in any tradition. He is also, unmistakably, a man writing under conditions that shaped his account in ways he could not always control and occasionally did not try to. He was a senator who served the emperors he despised, a man who had survived Domitian&rsquo;s reign by keeping his head down and who never entirely forgave himself for it, and who wrote history as an act of witness and accusation that the dead and the living were equally subject to. His prose style — compressed, ironic, capable of saying in a subordinate clause what lesser writers would require a paragraph — has influenced historical writing ever since and is the primary source for everything popular culture believes about Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and their courts.</p> https://ancientrome.org/the-succession-problem-romes-fatal-flaw/ Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://ancientrome.org/the-succession-problem-romes-fatal-flaw/ <p>The Roman Empire never solved its succession problem. This was not an oversight or a failure of political imagination — it was a structural consequence of the way the principate was constructed. Augustus had built a system that was functionally monarchical but constitutionally republican, which meant it could not have formal hereditary succession without admitting it was a monarchy. The result was a fiction maintained for centuries: that each emperor received his powers from the Senate and people of Rome, and that the previous emperor&rsquo;s designation of a successor was a recommendation rather than a binding determination. Everyone knew this was a fiction. The fiction was maintained because the alternative — acknowledging that Rome was a hereditary monarchy — was politically untenable for an aristocratic culture that had executed men for aspiring to kingship.</p>