The Julio-Claudian dynasty is undoubtedly the most fascinating, notorious, and heavily romanticized lineage in all of world history. For two thousand years, our imagination has remained captive within a vast narrative cageone artfully constructed by historians such as Tacitus and gossip-loving biographers like Suetonius: representatives, or at least sympathizers, of that very senatorial aristocracy from which the early emperors had gradually stripped power and which they had humiliated. Thus, for centuries, we have contented ourselves with these "dark legends": we believed in the infallible and pious Augustus while ignoring his cold, calculating ruthlessness; we shuddered at the alleged vices of the aging Tiberius in his refuge on Capri; we mocked Caligulas obsession with horses, pitied the stammering idiocy of Claudius, and cursed Neros pyromaniacal sadism. The book you now hold in your hands possesses the great and rare merit of sweeping away the smoke of senatorial propagandaalong with the encrustations of a moralizing historiographyand restoring to us the flesh, the blood, andabove allthe political logic of these first, extraordinary rulers of the world. The author undertakes a rigorous historiographical cleansing, demonstrating that Caligula was by no means a madman, but rather a clear-thinkingalbeit ahead-of-his-timetheorist of absolute monarchy in the Hellenistic mold; that Claudius may well have been the Empires greatest administrator; and that Nero strove for a cultural revolution whose traces endure to this very day.
