Tiberius and His Age
eBook - ePub

Tiberius and His Age

Myth, Sex, Luxury, and Power

  1. 280 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Tiberius and His Age

Myth, Sex, Luxury, and Power

About this book

A radical new portrait of the infamous Roman emperor

Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius (42 BCE–CE 37), has traditionally been seen as a villainous hypocrite—treacherous, grasping, vindictive, and depraved. But in Tiberius and His Age, Edward Champlin draws on vast and diverse evidence to show that Tiberius was—and was seen by contemporaries to be—recognizably human and far more complex than the monster of the hostile tradition that began with Tacitus and Suetonius.

Focusing on the overlapping themes of luxury, sex, power, and, especially, myth, Tiberius and His Age examines Tiberius’s standing as a folkloric figure in the Roman popular imagination and his conscious use of mythological themes to consolidate his power. It argues that the striking stories of Tiberius’s sexual depravity, which literary sources passed on to later generations, are ultimately incoherent fictions, the work of a brilliant fantasist who hated the emperor. The book’s portraits of three important figures in Tiberius’s circle—the gourmands Asellius Sabinus and Marcus Apicius and the emperor’s lieutenant, Sejanus—provide new perspectives on the emperor and his age. Tiberius’s passions for astrology, gastronomy, and mythology, which have often been seen as eccentric scholarly diversions, are revealed instead to be central to contemporary Roman debates and keys to understanding his personality, his power, and the lasting image of Roman emperors.

Incisive, witty, and original, Tiberius and His Age presents a startlingly new picture of Tiberius and the culture and politics of the early Roman Empire.

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Yes, you can access Tiberius and His Age by Edward Champlin, Robert Kaster in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Historical Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Foreword
  7. Abbreviations
  8. Part I: Representation and Self-Fashioning
  9. Part II: Sex and the Sources
  10. Part III. In the Emperor’s Orbit
  11. Notes
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index