Many years ago, my parents and I marveled at the Roman emperors depicted on the award-winning BBC television drama I, Claudius (1976), based on Robert Graves’s novel of the same name and re-aired by PBS in the eighties. Oh, how naive we were in those halcyon days of 1986 BT.

Nowadays, I still revel in imperial SPQR outrageousness by reading such books as Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome and The Dedalus Book of Roman Decadence: Emperors of Debauchery. In fact, ...