Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

History of Rome #2

by Tom Holland

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon—his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic—with Dynasty, a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.
 
Dynasty continues Rubicon's story, opening where that book ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman Emperors and it's a colorful story of rule and ruination, running from the rise of Augustus through to the death of Nero. Holland's expansive history also has distinct shades of I Claudius, with five wonderfully vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) Emperors—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony, lust, incest, pageantry, decadence—the tale of these five Caesars continues to cast a mesmerizing spell across the millennia.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ancient History, Roman History, Biography, Historical, Audiobook

496 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 3, 2015

About the author

Tom Holland is an English historian and author. He has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, on many subjects from vampires to history.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Holland was born near Oxford and brought up in the village of Broadchalke near Salisbury, England. He obtained a double first in English and Latin at Queens' College, Cambridge, and afterwards studied shortly for a PhD at Oxford, taking Lord Byron as his subject, before interrupting the post graduate studies and moving to London.

He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio 4. His novels, including Attis and Deliver Us From Evil, mostly have a supernatural and horror element as well as being set in the past. He is also the author of three highly praised works of history, Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium.

He is on the committee of the Society of Authors and the Classical Association.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Octavian the man. Augustus the God.

”When people think of imperial Rome, it is the city of the first Caesars that is most likely to come into their minds. There is no other period of ancient history that can compare for sheer unsettling fascination with its gallery of leading characters. Their lurid glamour has resulted in them becoming the archetypes of feuding and murderous dynasts.”

The women are schemers, and the men are ruthless. Even Augustus and Claudius, who are considered the more humane and least insane of the Caesars, also wade through the blood of their enemies, those confirmed and those suspected, to maintain their always tenuous hold on power.

”Tiberius, grim, paranoid, and with a taste for having his testicles licked by young boys in swimming pools.

Caligula, lamenting that Roman people did not have a single neck, so that he might cut it through.

Agrippina, the mother of Nero, scheming to bring to power the son who would end up having her murdered.

Nero himself, kicking his pregnant wife to death, marrying a eunuch, and raising a pleasure palace over the fire-gutted centre of Rome.”

”The first Caesars, more than any comparable dynasty, remain to this day household names. Their celebrity holds.”

I discovered Tom Holland when I picked up his first book Lord of the Dead, which was a novel about Lord Byron as a vampire. Of course, Lord Byron would make a perfect vampire. I then started hunting down his other horror novels as assiduously as Van Helsing, and in many cases I had to order them from England to be able to read them.

Then he disappeared.

Or so I thought.

Then I discovered his book Rubicon, which ends where this book begins. At first, I thought it must be a different Tom Holland, but after some research, I discovered it was the same man, a horror scrivner remade into a writer of the horrors of history. He doesn’t list his novels in the first few nonfiction works; after all, he has become a serious writer of history and doesn’t want to muddy the waters with claiming those rather lurid novels that I found to be delicious fun. (As I’m writing about them, I’m getting the itch to go read one again.) In this book, listed along with his nonfiction work, are those early horror novels. He must have reached a point in his career where he no longer had to think of those books as orphaned children, written by another man who was lost in the fetid, murky waters of pulp fiction.


There is a vampire horror novelist still lurking behind those eyes.

The significance of this for you, dear reader, is that his nonfiction books are written to entertain you. That does not mean they are not serious in nature for it is obvious he has done his research. He has a practiced eye, from writing to fiction, to know what readers want to know. For instance, Augustus saves the empire twice from complete destruction, which is actually fascinating with all the power struggles that the death of Julius Caesar causes. What is equally fascinating is that as Augustus grows older and becomes a God (the wheels might have started to come off the chariot), he becomes more conservative. He imposes those views on a traditionally hedonistic Roman population. The problem is the only child of his loins, Julia, doesn’t get the message, or she feels that being the child of a god that she is beyond reproach.


Julia, one of history's most famous adulterers.

The stories regarding her infidelities are numerous and legendary, but for me, the following statement attributed to her actually makes me gasp. ”Far from dismissing the rumours of adultery, she dared to mock the censoriousness of those who spread them. How could the stories that she had cheated on Agrippa possibly be true, she was once asked, when Gaius and Lucius look so very like him. ‘Why,’ she answered, ‘because I only ever take on passengers after the cargo-hold has been loaded.’”

There are plenty of people to scurry back to her father and relate these outrageous statements to him. Whether there is truth in all the allegations that land at her sandals, who can say? She certainly does not quell those rumors, but merely breathes more life into them. The end result is that Julia is exiled to an island by her dictorial father. Ovid, the poet concerned with the artistry of the bedroom, in particular seducing married women, is another thorn in the godly backside of Augustus. He too pushes things too far and is exiled, which is worse than death to a man obsessed with culture.

It is hard to like Augustus in his later years simply because he becomes more concerned about his own immortality, even more than preserving the few remaining members of his family. His heirs have been dropping like flies, and the rumors of his wife Livia poisoning them to clear the way for her son by her first marriage, Tiberius, are becoming harder to ignore.

Germanicus and Agrippina by Rubens, the power couple of the Roman Empire representing all that Rome believed themselves capable of.

Germanicus and his wife Agrippina are the apple of the eye of the Roman Empire. They are not only a beautiful power couple (bigger than Benniffer or Brangelina), but they are also proving very capable quelling any uprisings across the wide expanse of the reach of Rome. She, unlike most Roman wives, travels with her husband on his military campaign so his successes are more their mutual achievements, and that makes the people of Rome love them even more. When Germanicus dies under rather odd circumstances, that clears the way for Tiberius.

Tiberius is so stiff necked and puckered assed that he was must have squeaked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz when he walked. Holland sums him up very well. ”Bloodstained pervert and philosopher-king: it took a man of rare paradox to end up being seen as both.” We focus on his perversions, but he is actually very capable. Before succeeding Augustus, he wins several critical military campaigns. He just is horrible at promoting himself. He feels above it all and winning is just what he is supposed to do. Why should it be a surprise to anyone? He spends a good deal of time on his pleasure island of Capri and basically tells the world to go screw itself. He has a peaceful reign but, like all the Caesars, certainly becomes ruled by rampant paranoia.


Tiberius

It isn’t paranoia if people are really trying to kill you. The problem with the House of Caesar is that they don’t always target the right people or, in the course of suppressing conspiracies, bring death to such a broad sweep of people, who may or may not have been involved in a conspiracy, that they leave their friends about as equally depleted as their enemies.

Next in line is the infamous Caligula, who kills just about everyone who could possibly be considered a legitimate heir. He is the son of Germanicus, and any empathy that he was born with must have been burned out of him in the course of watching his family members die one by one. Tiberius’s comment was: ”I am rearing them a viper.”When Caligula is killed by his own Praetorian Guard, well mostly for being a psychopathic asshole, the only real option as his successor is his gibbering fool of an uncle.

Claudius survives numerous purges of his family by acting like a simple minded, helpless imbecile. The senators that bring him to power probably have it in mind that he will be easy to control.

He is not.

He is a student of history and natural science. He is infinitely smarter than anyone could comprehend. Because of his infirmities, he mostly has to travel through the eyes of others. Ambassadors knowing his interest in the arcane bring him specimens from all over the world. (If you have not watched the miniseries I, Claudius starring Derek Jacobi, it is excellent.)


Claudius

When Claudius breathes his last, the empire is left with Claudius’s great nephew Nero. His mother is Agrippina the Younger, daughter of Germanicus. The rumors of imperial incest between mother and son run rampant throughout Rome. Instead of denouncing those rumors, much like Julia, he embraces them. ”It was noted that he kept as one of his concubines a woman who looked exactly like Agrippina. And that whenever he fondled her, or showed off her charms to others, he would declare that he was sleeping with his mother.”

When Rome burns and Nero is one of the main suspects (after all his main concern is beautifying Rome, and how better to do that than to have a clean canvas to start from), he blames those pesky, noisy, obnoxious Christians. Between 900 and 1000 are killed and murdered (St. Jerome calls them martyrs.) in various creative ways. We don’t know for sure if the Christians had anything to do with the burning of Rome, but given the Sodom and Gomorrah events being sponsored and encouraged by Nero, I can see them convince themselves that burning Rome would be doing God’s work.


Nero was a cheeky looking bastard.

Nero believes strongly in applying pageantry to all aspects of his life, including executions. ”Spectacle, illusion, drama: these were the dimensions of rule that truly mattered. Attentive though Nero might be to the grind of business, his true obsession was with a project that he felt to be altogether worthier of his time and talents: to fashion reality anew.”

Augustus dies in bouts of blood, possibly from a poisoned fig. Tiberius may have been smothered by a pillow. Caligula is hacked to pieces by his own guard. Claudius may have been poisoned, but the wily, old bastard might have just died from old age. Nero commits suicide moments before a sentence of death is to descend upon him. The women don’t fare any better. They are starved to death, exiled, beheaded, run through with swords, and poisoned.

What a family! Despite their best efforts to destroy themselves they manage to hang onto power from 27BC to 68AD. It isn’t long after their passing, despite the bloody uncertainty of their reigns, that Rome misses them.

They must have missed the flair, the pageantry, and the insanity.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having enjoyed Tom Holland’s excellent, “Rubicon,” I was very happy to have the chance to review this volume.. Subtitled, “The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar,” this follows on from “Rubicon,” which centred around Julius Caesar and his adopted heir, Octavian. The dynasty of Augustus still very defines autocratic power and the celebrity of the Caesar’s remains. Rome’s first imperial dynasty have everything that modern day celebrity desires, and more. It was a time of tyranny, power, sadism and glamour. Holland manages to combine historical accuracy with a readable account of the times.

In the beginning of this volume, Holland backtracks slightly (so if you have not yet read, “Rubicon,” you can happily read this book and have it make perfect sense), by taking the story up to the assassination of Julius Caesar. The upheaval of Julius Caesar’s murder eventually led to the Imperator Caesar Augustus and then Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. The very names themselves conjour all sorts of images of power and excess. Even though not very familiar with the history of the Caesar’s probably have read snippets about the Caesar’s – Nero who fiddled while Rome burned, Caligula who appointed his horse a consul, how Claudius was discovered cowering behind curtains and given power. Rumours of incest, poison, malicious power, cruelty, the love of a spectacle conspiracy, the show of power and the reality ; sumptuous wealth and disgraced exile…

Happily for the reader, this time of immense power and excess is wonderfully brought to life; not only through the lives of the Caesar’s, but through their family ties, wives and mothers and others who thankfully left letters and details of how they lived. One such was the poet Ovid, who was seem as immoral during the time of Augustus, when adultery became a public offence, but who looked positively staid by comparison with Caligula. A wonderful read – if you have already enjoyed, “Rubicon,” then you can also be sure that you will love this. Lastly, I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

[Bettie · Rating 5 out of 5]

44BC

Description: Dynasty continues Rubicon's story, opening where that book ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman Emperors and it's a colorful story of rule and ruination, running from the rise of Augustus through to the death of Nero. Holland's expansive history also has distinct shades of I Claudius, with five wonderfully vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) Emperors—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony, lust, incest, pageantry, decadence—the tale of these five Caesars continues to cast a mesmerizing spell across the millennia.

Preface Opening: AD40. It is early in the year. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus sits on a lofty platform beside the ocean. As waves break on the shore and spray hangs in the air, he gazes out to sea.



AT THE STARTHaving loved the delicious psychopathic offering from I Claudius, I wonder if Holland's account will show us the characters over the fiction. Many trusted flisters have turned in favourable reviews.

LATERThere are many ways to say that human history repeats itself, not in the details perhaps, yet the trend is evident, especially when contrasting the Cult of Personality of ancient Rome and today's egotistical monsters - ladies and gentlemen, we have learnt a big, fat Llareggub.

Ancient death by heavy metal poisoning.

Tyrant's get the last (and only) decision

Extreme vetting

Sex texting ["Give me a thousand kisses" - Catullus]

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Dynasty' is exceptional. I can say, without reservation, that I have never been so engaged by a history book. Considering I am just finishing my MA in Classical Studies, that's more of a statement that you might imagine.

The events narrated by Holland are incredible, dramatic, exciting, horrifying. The pages are filled with intrigue and blood. It's safe to say that if these stories were presented as fiction, they would be too outrageous to be believed. In Roman politics, the stakes are as high as they come.

The book is extremely well written; it balances the historical with the personal. Quotes are given footnotes, so information about sources can be perused at the reader's leisure. Individuals are presented with depth and character, but Holland does not get lost in the internal monologuing to which some historians resort.

In any case, the fusion of writing style and thrilling subject matter made this book one I could hardly put down. It has piqued my interest in the period and I can't wait to read more. I will definitely be reading others by Tom Holland. I can't recommend it enough.


Many thanks to Netgalley and Little Brown Group UK for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dec 22, 2015
For cripes' sake! I have been working on this book for months and only just now realized it was never intended to be a novel, but is meant to be a popular history. Lawsy, I feel stupid. It would have made a difference in how I approached the whole endeavor. In any case, this may be "popular" with historians, but it was rough going for me. Below, see my earlier review, and everywhere you see me calling the work "fiction," have a laugh at my expense. Enjoy!
----------------
Tom Holland’s fiction reads like history. He assigns intent and motive to major characters in the Roman theatre, starting with the appearance of Julius Caesar and going through the family tree to Nero. Soapish in its intrigue, frank in its descriptions of sexual proclivities, and blasé about the heinous criminality of its subjects, this is human history writ large.

Holland knows his subject with such thoroughness, he can write about the wives and daughters, fathers and sons with a knowledge born of long immersion. The names of the chief actors will sound familiar, e.g., Julius and Julia, Marc Antony and Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Gaius, Agrippa, Caligula, Drusilla, Germanicus, Nero.

In 60 BC, Julius Caesar was 40 years old. In 44 BC, by a decree of the Senate, he was appointed “Dictator for Life.” A few short weeks later, on the ‘Ides of March,’ he was “struck down beneath a hail of daggers at a meeting of the Senate.” Several in his bloodline would eventually reign supreme in turn, and each would meet a death befitting a dictator, or “Son of a God” as so many of them preferred to be known.

Holland makes it a lively history, filled with anecdote, sex, violence, and bloody revenge. I listened to the audio of this, mainly so that I could listen to the exquisitely plummy tones of the narrator, Derek Perkins, and because I thought it would help me to get a grasp on what was happening. This novel is undoubtedly best for someone already somewhat familiar with the period since it covers the people and events of over one hundred and thirty years. The paper copy has timelines, family trees, and maps, all of which might aid comprehension if one is prepared to study.

Honestly, I found it overwhelming and felt it would be better listened to a couple of times. Though labelled a novel, it reads like no fiction I have ever read. No conversation, only imagined motivations: possibly decisions were made by the author about what happened when information was incomplete in the written record. The radical shifts from one train of thought, one character to another, one generation to another often flummoxed me to distraction and left me far behind and struggling to keep up. I never did care much for the trappings of power and gossip bores me terribly. I conclude that unless I was born into the leadership and had to pay attention so as not to lose my life from poison or the knife, I wouldn’t have cared too much about the Caesars then, either.

I am a poor historian, but I have made a sincere effort to understand, if not enjoy, this period in Rome. What a wretched place it was for those involved in the machinations of the leaders: one never knew where the next blow would fall. Never has that phrase about “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” been more aptly applied than here. Didn't see any immediate relevance of this story to our lives now, I am not sorry to report.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Caesar managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole that was Rome but he upset a few people on the way up, and got punctured by a lynch mob who stabbed him to death in the Senate in the name of the Roman Republic. His adopted nephew Octavian then seized supreme control after a series of civil wars, ruling as Augustus, first citizen or Princeps of the Roman Empire.

The descendants of Caesar and Augustus ruled as the Roman Empires first dynasty. Rule and misrule, excess and a marked decline in calibre as the rulers turn over. Dynastic intrigue featuring brutal murder and the surprisingly convenient illnesses of inconvenient rivals together with the inexorable rise of elite military units as the power behind the throne. This latter sowing the seeds for the eventual fall of Rome itself.

Some fine passages on the excesses of some fairly unsavoury and colourful characters. Holland has a way of bringing ancient history to life, with the occasional proto-tabloid turn of phrase. Erudite and compelling.

Worth a read

[K.J. Charles]

A hugely readable and clear account of the tangled politics of the House of Caesar (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero). It's extremely ghastly and bloody, in which Holland takes obvious relish, but this part of history is basically a horror comic, featuring a lot of utterly shitty people in a grotesque society, so. The telling is even-handed as far as that's possible, and the global, political and social context is all fleshed out very effectively. A rollicking read.

And quite a scary one, right now. It's hard not to read Caligula's open contempt for the Senate, his deliberate exposure of their mendacity and cowardice and self-serving, and not see parallels in the current US govt. Let alone the popular enthusiasm for Nero, because he was 'interesting' and 'fun'. This is how empires fall, clearly.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Last year, I watched a TV documentary called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, a three-part series about the final days of the Roman Republic. Not knowing much about classical history, I found the story of Caesar fascinating (and surprisingly relevant, too). I learnt, in essence, that the cult of personality which formed around the “great man” enabled him to both transgress the Roman Republic’s democratic laws and rapidly introduce draconian emergency powers, acts of leadership which quickly eroded Roman democracy’s fragile building blocks and placed ever more power in the hands of its self-anointed “Dictator”. (Sound familiar?)

After Caesar’s famous assassination by the members of the Roman senate (Et tu, Brute?), the republic limped on for a short time but soon dissolved, leading to the formation of the Roman Empire. This was as far as The Making of a Dictator took me, but I wanted to know more, which is what brought me to this book. Dynasty covers the 112 years from the fall of Julius Caesar (March 44 BC) to the suicide of Emperor Nero in June 68 AD. For this review, I’ve largely just recapped the period’s “plot”, something I’ve done mostly for my own reference, as a way of organising history’s events in my head — it turns out that the geographical landscape of history can be complex, and the drama of the Julio-Claudian century involves far too many significant actors for my small brain to properly contain.

—

After Caesar’s untimely death in 44 BC, Rome was thrown into a transitional period, one which initially saw the formation of the fragile Second Triumvirate, a political allegiance opposed to the rebels who’d brought about Caesar’s end. The triumvirate, as you might expect, was composed of three men previously loyal to the great dictator: long-time Caesar supporter and war hero Mark Anthony, irrelevant Lepidus, and Octavian (Caesar’s adoptive son and heir).

Several wars quickly saw the triumvirate emerge victorious over the anti-Caesar rebellion; however, in the years that followed, the three leading men (each with an unhealthy-sized ego) soon became fractious, dividing Rome between themselves, Mark Anthony taking the East, Lepidus taking the North, and Octavian overseeing the Italian peninsula and the West.

Lepidus was forced out of the triumvirate in 36 BC as a result of Octavian and Anthony’s growing rivalry, a rivalry which eventually descended into violence. By 31 BC, Octavian’s forces overpowered Anthony’s, and Anthony fled to Egypt, settling there with his fancy lady-Mrs: Cleopatra (Queen of Egypt). Octavian chased them down and again defeated their forces, this time in Alexandria. Both Anthony and Cleopatra committed suicide in 30 BC (Anthony by falling on his sword, Cleopatra by the venom of a snake). The dissolution of the triumvirate left Octavian as the sole ruler of Rome and enabled him to incorporate the last vestiges of Ancient Egypt into his realm.

Soon thereafter, Octavian consolidated his power and, in 27 BC (17 bloody years after the death of Caesar), he was declared Rome’s first emperor. Emperor Augustus, as Octavian became known, oversaw a largely stable, prosperous, and peaceful period in Roman history. As a master manipulator of media, he also became extremely popular — viewed by some, it seems, as a sort of gloriously triumphant living god. He lived until August 14 AD and reigned for 41 years. After his death, he was deified (granted the status of a God), and an Imperial Cult was formed. His image and name would hang over the Roman Empire for hundreds of years, an elevated symbol of the dawn of a golden era.

After the “divinity” of Augustus, his descendants — the direct descendants of Julius Caesar — formed a dynasty later to be known as the Julio-Claudian dynasty. This lasted for a further 4 generations (54 years):

1. Augustus (reigned for 41 years: 27 BC – 14 AD)
2. Tiberius (reigned for 23 years: 14 AD – 37 AD)
3. Caligula (reigned for 4 years: 37 AD – 41 AD)
4. Claudius (reigned for 13 years: 41 AD – 54 AD)
5. Nero (reigned for 14 years: 54 AD – 68 AD)

First, after Augustus, came grave Tiberius. Tiberius seems to have been a complex figure. He was initially reluctant to step up to the figurehead of emperor, instead withdrawing in his 20’s to the island of Rhodes. Augustus’s preferred heirs, Gaius and Lucius both died, however, and Tiberius was forced to take up the mantle.

From what I can tell, he seems to have been a fairly proficient leader, but far from a morally flawless one. Under Tiberius the Roman Empire continued with Augustus’s rapid expansion and development; however, his reign also became known for its cruelty and paranoia. He ultimately had his right-hand man, Sejanus, executed for treason in 31 AD. He was a sombre ruler who preferred to remain on the island of Capri away from the activity of Rome. For his sins, on his death he did not receive the same divine honours as had Augustus. Far from it, protests in the streets called for his body to be thrown into the Tiber like that of a common criminal.

Furthermore, in the weeks that followed this civil unrest rumour soon spread that Tiberius’s replacement, the new emperor Caligula, had brought about Tiberius’ death by a malicious act of poisoning. There isn’t much historical evidence to support this populist claim either way; however, such antics would clearly have been in keeping with the tone of Caligula’s rule, which, although initially extravagant and popular, quickly devolved into an infamously erratic and tyrannical regime. Caligula became known for lavish spending on celebrations dedicated to his name and for his indulgences in rampant sexual debauchery; furthermore, he appears to have experienced worse paranoia than even Tiberius. It has been suggested that he suffered from a worsening form of bipolar disorder.

Eventually, the mechanisms of state plotted his assassination. And so it was in January 41 AD, just 4 years into his reign, the day before he was due to depart for Alexandria for good (itself a decision likely to weaken Roman power), that his murder was carried out by the Praetorian Guard. The assassination itself reads as one of the most dramatic passages in Dynasty.

As he was leaving the games put on for him at the Imperial Palace, he was hoodwinked into going down a side alley. There he was surrounded by his assassins, Cassius and Chaeria, who ruthlessly stabbed him, hacking at his genitals, completely severing his head, and mangling the remains of his body beyond recognition. The two assassins fled, and the palace guard spread out looking for them. Caligula’s body was briefly left unattended only to be found shortly thereafter by his wife, Caesonia, and the couple’s young daughter. In turn, yet another member of the Praetorian Guard found the girl and Caesonia on the grizzly scene in a state of distress, and, as per his brief, slit Caesonia’s throat and dashed her daughter’s brains out against the alleyway’s stone wall. The three bodies were left united in a bloody mess on the floor.

It is said that Caligula’s successor, sickly and stammering Claudius (Tiberius’s nephew), survived the Pretorian purge by hiding behind a curtain in the Imperial Palace. In fact, far from wanting Claudius dead, the Praetorians saw him as an easy to manipulate would-be emperor, taking the opportunity to install a member of the Caesar line whom they thought could be easily controlled.

Indeed, at the beginning of his reign Claudius had many of Caligula’s loyalists promptly executed. He went on to become a surprisingly effective leader, further expanding the empire in true Augustinian fashion and overseeing a stable period at home in Italy. Under his reign, Rome finally witnessed its conquering of Britannia, something to which it had long aspired.

Claudius’s later years saw his health in decline, but he remained devoted to work. He died, aged 63, in 54 AD. It appears likely that he was in fact poisoned by his young wife, Agrippina the Younger (Caligula’s sister). It is said that Agrippina had become concerned that Claudius would not name her son, Nero, as his successor. If this conspiracy theory is indeed true, the likely method was by cooking poisonous mushrooms into Claudius’s food.

Agrippina was granted her wish and 17 year-old Nero ascended to the imperial throne in the immediate aftermath of Claudius’s death. Nero’s rule followed a similar trajectory to that of Caligula’s: initially promising and stable followed by a rapid descent into erratic despotism. The famous image of Nero joyously playing his violin while overlooking the smoke and flames of the great fire of Rome (63 AD), while unlikely to be factually accurate, certainly illustrates the angered view of Rome’s citizens, citizens who increasingly came to detest Nero’s self-indulgence and violently ruthless authority. The cause of the great fire itself is unknown (accusations that Nero himself instigated it are likely to be bogus); however, in its aftermath, Nero oversaw many sham trials which led to the persecution and execution of many thousands of early Christians, a group of strange outsiders who made for ideal scapegoats. (Again, sound familiar?)

The (darkly hilarious) “romance” of Nero and Sporus is perhaps the story which best illustrates the madness of Nero’s reign. Here it is tragicomically laid out by Tom Wambsgans in the Succession episode: Lion in the Meadow (season 3, episode 4). It’s **iconic**.

As with Caligula, eventually the mechanisms of state moved against Nero. Governor Galba of Spain led a rebellion in 68 AD which ultimately gained the support of the Roman senate and those same pesky Praetorian guards who had previously done away with Caligula. Before Galba marched on Rome, Nero, along with poor Sporus and the rest of his inner circle, fled Rome, taking refuge in a villa up in the city’s surrounding rural hills. There, with the sound of approaching horsemen bearing down on the group, Nero reluctantly committed suicide, either by his own hand or by the hand of one of his loyalists (history can’t be sure). With Nero the bloodline of Caesar finally came to an end, leaving Rome in a state of chaos and with a significant power vacuum. The following tumultuous year saw a succession of four combative emperors come and go.

Holland ends his book by commenting on Nero’s self-aggrandising and “customarily immodest” final words: “What an artist perishes with me!”:

“He had not exaggerated. He had indeed been an artist, he and his predecessors too. Augustus and Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, each in his own way had succeeded in fashioning out of his rule of the world a legend that would forever afterwards mark the house of Caesar as something eerie and more than mortal. Painted in blood and gold, its record would never cease to haunt the Roman people as a thing of mingled wonder and horror. If not necessarily divine, then it had at any rate become immortal.”

As you can see from the above quote, Holland is a good writer. With Dynasty, he walks a fine tightrope between entertainment and serious historical analysis. I wouldn’t rate this book as highly as I did, for instance, Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. Hitler is a serious piece of academic thought in which Kershaw tries to dig deeper towards the truth than any previous historian. Holland is writing from a different place. Indeed, you could almost mistake Dynasty for a novel, dramatic and poetic as its writing is at times. Entertaining and informative, I recommended it to anyone with a passing interest in the history of the Roman Empire.

[Kacey Kells · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read 'The Twelve Caesars' by Suetonius, I was excited to read John Holland's 'Dynasty' and I wasn't disappointed, quite the contrary. Oh, I won't say it's an easy book to read (I'm a bookworm, but it took me more than a month to reach the last page); nevertheless, Holland is both a brilliant expert and a very good storyteller who knows how to turn real life history into a vivid story, so that it reads like a novel.
What I liked the most is that Holland clearly tried to remain objective and refused to take a simplistic approach. Indeed, there is no systematic condemnation of the Julio-Claudian emperors, and to my surprise I came to realise that Caligula wasn't exactly the tyrant painted by Suetonius and that Livia (Augustus' wife) was much probably largely responsible for the dramatic fate of the Julio-Claudian dynasy.
Sometimes, history and real life story are way more fascinating than fiction, and that is particularly true here.
I can't recommend this book enough!

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The history is fascinating but Tom Holland's writing style is an acquired taste. I found the florid prose and the sarcastic tone a bit of a chore to read, along with his implausible capacity to know the innermost thoughts and feelings of people two thousand years dead.

Holland is almost exclusively interested in the lurid, the sensational, the titillating. Of course, reading about sex and violence in ancient times can be fun, but if your interests are in more mundane subjects, like the economy, administration of an empire, even military affairs, then perhaps look elsewhere.

[Aleksandar Tasev · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Remember, I am allowed to do anything to anybody.”
—Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (Caligula)

Dynasty is not a conventional history book. It’s a philippic. And rightfully so, for the Caesars achieved their glory through murder, tyranny, and sadism. As the Latin poet Claudian has put it, the “stain of the wrongs committed back in ancient times by these men [w]ill never fade from the history books. Until the very end of time, [t]he monstrous deeds of the House of Caesar will stand condemned.”

Dynasty begins with a short introduction to ancient Rome. Legend has it that Romulus founded the city in 753 B.C.E. and became its first king. Six tyrannous kings later, in 509 B.C.E., an uprising led by Brutus ended the monarchy for good. The Romans swore an oath never again to allow a single man to rule them, and the word king became an insult.

In 49 B.C.E., Julius Caesar attempted to take over Rome and end democracy. He almost succeeded: after instigating a civil war, he proclaimed himself a dictator for life in 44 B.C.E. However, another Brutus came to rescue and assassinated him with the help of about sixty other conspirators.

One more civil war followed, this time started by Augustus (Julius Caesar’s adoptive son and founder of the House of Caesar). By wiping out most of his opponents and pretending to support democracy, Augustus managed to take charge of everything and everybody. Even though his military skills were mediocre and his health was poor, he became the first full-fledged autocrat since the regal period. What he excelled at was using others as pawns.

Augustus was succeeded by his stepson Tiberius. The latter was a distinguished general who found pleasure in forcing Roman nobles to prostitute themselves in public. His carnal desires were not discriminative: little boys and unweaned babies were just as welcome as adults of both sexes.

And then came the craziest of all Roman emperors: Caligula. He crushed his subjects by showing them time and again that he could and would do whatever he wanted. Whether ordering his soldiers to pick up shells or having a random person torn to pieces, he was forever looking for new forms of entertainment. Before long, he was assassinated by Cassius Chaerea.

Enter Claudius. It might have been possible to find a less qualified ruler than him, but it would have taken too much time. The Romans were in a hurry, and the sickly Claudius had to do. He married his niece Agrippina, who probably poisoned him.

The last Caesar was Agrippina’s son Nero. It is unclear whether Nero made a move on his mother first or the other way around. In any case, one of Nero’s concubines looked exactly like Agrippina. Fond of doppelgängers, he also found one of his late wife Poppaea, whom he had kicked to death during her pregnancy. That the new Poppaea was a boy didn’t bother him much: the couple went to Greece and got married. One of them had to be castrated, though.

Yet, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Seneca had once told Nero that, no matter how many people he put to death, he could never kill his successor. Nero decided to try nonetheless and eliminated all his male relatives. He also had Agrippina murdered and celebrated this feat in games that were “the greatest ever.” In 68 C.E., he was proclaimed a public enemy and killed himself.

But did all this really happen? Probably, although we will never know for sure. As the Roman historian Tacitus remarked almost 2,000 years ago, the histories of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero “were falsified while they remained alive out of dread, … and then, after their deaths, were composed under the influence of still festering hatreds.”

Be that as it may, Tom Holland has done an excellent job analyzing sources and suggesting interpretations. His Dynasty offers a gripping, sarcastic narrative focused on personalities rather than events. It shocks, and it disgusts. It informs. It demonstrates “how far unlimited vice can go when combined with unlimited power.” None of the Caesars would have allowed this book. And that makes it worth reading.

[The Library Lady · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like so many adult historians, Holland's writing is often ponderous and you begin to drown trying to keep all the information straight.
The only time he brightens up is when he gets to talk about sex, and then with the glee of an adolescent boy he goes into detailed musings, often using graphic language that doesn't shock me, but doesn't match the fairly scholarly tone of the rest of the text. It's unpleasant and downright salacious.

I didn't read "Rubicon," (and wish I had know that it existed before reading this, because it would have explained the abruptness of the opening chapters,) but I don't plan to now. Instead I'll await my turn to read SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard, who writes readable, accessible history and can write about human sexuality in terms of the period with frankness and maturity.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “The Romanovs” last year and Tom Holland’s “Dynasty” about the five Caesars of the Julio-Claudia dynasty (Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula, and Nero) and how they each in their own unique way profoundly changed the Roman world is perhaps the most fitting companion to it.
Just as the Romanovs had extremely competent administrators in charge at various stages such as Catherine the Great, so Rome of the Caesars had men like Augustus and
Tiberius (this competence of course should perhaps be tempered by the sexual debauchery at court but for the most part all three were instrumental in expanding and maintaining their empires).
Sadly, as with most dynasties, arrogance eventually sets in and the good of the populace takes an increasingly larger backseat to personal enrichment, corruption, paranoia and slaughter. Just as Russia’S last monarch Nicholas II was playing tennis as Russia disintegrates, Rome’s Nero was leveling cities to build golden palaces to himself.
Speaking of which, can we talk about Nero for a moment?
While his uncle Caligula is justifiably seen as a symbol for sexual depravity and just generally being unhinged (sex with reportedly his sister, mother, slaves, men, women, boys to illustrate the former and an awesome story about him dressing up in public with a gold beard and holding a thunderbolt to illustrate the latter), Nero perhaps has him beat.
Continuing Caligula’s innovation of installing a brothel in the palace, Nero took things to the next level. Witness this story about a young slave boy of his that occurred soon after Nero had accidentally killed his pregnant wife by kicking her in the stomach:

Just as Nero had once delighted in sleeping with a whore who looked like his mother, he had ordered a hunt to be made for a doppelganger of the wife he had kicked to death. Sure enough, a woman with a close resemblance to Poppaea had been located, and delivered to his bed; but he had soon wearied of her. Then someone else had been tracked down: someone soft-skinned, amber-haired, irresistible.
To Nero, brought this prize, it was as though his dead wife had been restored to him. So completely did he imagine himself to be gazing on her face again, caressing her cheeks and taking her in his arms, that Poppaea seemed to him redeemed from the grave. Nevertheless, there was a twist. For all the eeriness of the resemblance, it was not a woman who had been found for Nero, nor even a girl. The lookalike, so perfect as to convince a grieving husband, was not perfect in every detail. The double of Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s greatest love, was a boy.
Nero, though, as was his invariable habit, had gone just that little bit further in scandalising respectable opinion. Yes, Sporus (meaning ‘spunk’ ewww…) had been gelded to ensure the preservation of his beauty, but that was not the only reason for castrating him. It was not a eunuch that Nero was interested in taking to bed, after all, but his dead wife. He wanted Poppaea Sabina back. And so that was the name given to her double. As his instructress in becoming an Augusta, Sporus was assigned a woman of high rank named Calvia Crispinilla, whose qualifications as a wardrobe mistress could hardly have been bettered. Modish and aristocratic, she had also won herself a notorious reputation as Nero’s instructress in sexual pleasures. Delivered into Calvia’s hands, Sporus was duly arrayed in Poppaea’s robes, his hair teased into her favoured style and his face painted with her distinctive range of cosmetics. Everything he did, he had to do it as a woman and a wife of Caesar’s at that.

Seriously man? That is some fucked up shit. Of course Nero wanting to impregnate his “wife” had explored how to remove Sporous’s mangled genitalia and cut a slit in his groin so that he could….
I needed a long shower after that little nugget.
While Nero and Caligula were probably the most excessive of the Caesars, probably unsurprisingly also being the last two , Rome was awash in depravity, incest, murder and pretty much whatever else you can imagine. It was not however, in a civil war. Holland makes the salient point of the book I believe when he writes that the Romans, particularly when Augustus in all but name had put an end to the Republic, had suffered years of bloody and traumatic civil war. Yes, the people surrendered some basic liberties. Yes, the people often lived in squalid conditions and were unable to have a voice in their government. But what they lost in liberty, they gained in security. It is difficult to underestimate how after years of bloodshed, stability at any price was welcome. And that is what the Romans until the fall of Nero indeed received. The battles on the borders of the empire rarely troubled everyday citizens and increasingly elaborate games and gladiatorial contests kept people entertained and their minds off what they had lost.
As the prominent intellectual Seneca wrote during the reign of Nero:

"Nothing is better able to brainwash and enslave us than the dazzle of spectacle."

While modern historians, rightly or wrongly, like to compare the decline of Rome to modern day empires such the United States, there are certainly disturbing parallels and warnings. Not the least of which is the sense of spectacle Seneca references. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and other social media insures we are always preoccupied while an increasingly bellicose and sensationalistic media amplifies “stories” in a frenzy until a fresh outrage arrives.
In many ways we are not Rome. In our obsession with sex and distraction however, the similarities are both stark and sobering.

[Palmyrah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book after hearing it plugged by the author in a lecture at the Galle Literary Festival earlier this year. Mr Holland’s pitch was that Suetonius, Tacitus and the rest were relying on earlier accounts, now lost to us, by authors contemporary with the Caesars or with their near successors and that these accounts were inevitably biased, distorted and/or confabulated in order to support contemporary political agendas, flatter powerful individuals, etc. Thus, he said, they must be treated with great suspicion, and assessed for veracity and meaning based on what we can find out about their historical context.

In such an alternate reading, Caligula emerges less as a blood-soaked lunatic than as a populist with a sense of humour who ingratiated himself with the Roman people by humiliating the senatorial class in various imaginative, filthy and sometimes deadly ways; Messalina may not have been a traitorous nymphomaniac but instead the victim of a palace coup by Claudius’s powerful slave and advisor Narcissus; and the great Augustus himself is seen as nothing but a successful terrorist and strongman upholding a pretend Republic while busily engaged, behind the scenes, in destroying the real thing

I was sold, and bought the book. Having read it, I can confirm that it lives up to its author’s sales pitch. The sections on the Republic, Augustus and Caligula are the best; the one on Tiberius I found not very interesting, perhaps because Tiberius himself was not a very interesting character. Be that as it may, I strongly recommend Dynasty for its refreshingly different and unsentimental view of history’s most famous family.

[Klaas Bottelier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dynasty is part two of the History of Rome series by Tom Holland, it focuses on the Julio-Claudian family, of which the first 5 Roman emperors where a part of, from Augustus Caesar until Nero. That family was something else, with its incredible infighting, the terrible intrigue, the inbreeding, and many over-the-top family members.

Fifth emperor Nero really stood out, the man did so many horrible things, even if half of what he was accused of is true. All in all it is just a fascinating read, start to finish, well written too. Next up is part three, Pax, when Holland focuses on the aftermath of Nero and his family and the emperors that came next.

I also wanted to give a shout-out to the “Rest is History” podcast, by Tom Holland with his fellow historian Dominic Sandbrook, a very enjoyable history podcast I listen to a lot, very much recommended (on Spotify or any other podcast app).

[Mark Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holland is an excellent writer and, quite apparently, a master of his subject matter. This praise feels hackneyed, but I can still think of none better: he makes the Caesars come alive.

He also helps support the thesis of his later book, Dominion, by showing how very different a culture’s sexual morality can be. Rome had its (God-given, Paul said in a letter to early Roman Christians [Rom 2:14–15]) moral conscience, its taboos. But it took Christianity to bring us a world in which a #MeToo movement could happen. Christians don’t always live up to their own standards of morality, but those standards are clear—and clearly different from those of the ancient Romans.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Sometimes I wish I Claudius was true, but then if it was, we wouldn't have nicely detailed books like this.

I highly recommend, you already have a general outline of the time because at points Holland jumps around a bit. I liked that, however, because it shows the relationships between different policies.

[Dan Sasi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is how narrative history should be written.

Tom Holland writes a highly engaging history of the rise and the fall of the house of Julius Claudian. Similar to Dan Jones, written with a focus on the dramatics this ends up being a really fun read. Starts with the Emperor Augustus and the social/societal/economic backdrop of Roman society during this time. With long chapters on each of the emperors through to Nero, this provides the reader with a solid foundation of Rome as it transitioned from oligarchy based republic, or what we call democracy, to the authoritarian-based empire.

My one complaint/question is that as Holland has a flair for the dramatic in his books, it’s unclear whether he took sources at face value as some of the stuff reported as matter of fact seemed like quite the stretch. To give him credit he will often say this seems like gossip or it’s hard to validate xyz.

Strongly recommend for any students of history especially if you’re trying to read more of the classics / get into more romance history

[Suanne Laqueur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding. The Roman Republic and Empire are huge gaps in my knowledge matrix, but I really learned a lot. I love Tom Holland’s writing and humor. If he were my social studies teacher, I’d never miss a class. And the parallels to a certain modern-day malignant narcissist megalomaniac were rather astonishing.

[Liviu · Rating 4 out of 5]

the usual story (with a few tweaks, more below) in the engaging style of the author of Rubicon (one of the best popular history books of all times alongside JJ Norwich Byzantium), but my ultra high expectations were not quite met as the book seems to go by fixed # pages per year, so the times of Augustus and Tiberius which cover about 80 of the 110 ten years of the dynasty (43 BC and the Triumvirate, though the book goes in the background of the story covered in Rubicon for a few pages in the beginning - 68 AD and Nero's fall) get most pages, but Claudius and Nero are really shortchanged, almost like: enough pages, it's time to wrap it up, so let's do a fast sketch - the short reign of Caligula actually is covered in more detail than the following two

- the main tweaks from the usual narrative come from an aristocratic republican point of view, so Augustus is generally the terrorist (descendant of the rope maker who crushed the aristocracy by any and all means) and Tiberius the high noble (descendant of Appius Claudius of legend and Claudius Nero the winner of Metaurus which essentially ended Hannibal's chances in Italy) who assumed the reign because he had to as the Senate was not capable of governing anymore after the very long Augustan age

- overall, superb narrative and a good accounting of the usual story, but lacks the coherence and balance of Rubicon; I Claudius is still the gold standard for the period

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I re read this book in 2023 over 3 days either side of a trip to see the Forum and Palatine Hill in Rome where so much of the key action and intrigues take place. But also due to the publication of “Pax” which now establishes this book as the middle of a brilliant narrative history trilogy.

If I had any criticisms: chapters of 70, 80 and 90 pages are too long - shorter more themed chapters would I think have aided here; conventional family trees as used here need I think more bespoke design to really allow for two such intermarried families as the Julians and Claudians, particularly with the frequency and importance of both divorce/remarriage and adoption.

ORIGINAL BRIEF REVIEW - 2016

Effectively a sequel to the wonderful Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republicand written in the same almost novelistic style which draws the reader in, without ever really giving a definitive history other than to readers already familiar with the story. Overall an excellent read and companion piece.

[Zachary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first read Rubicon by Tom Holland when I was fourteen years-old, enthralled with what little Roman history I had encountered in the hardcover picture books of my youth and on amateurish websites that catered to ancient history enthusiasts. Truthfully, the book transformed my life; by the time I had put it down, I was obsessed with Roman late Republican history. Holland, not unlike the most successful novelists, has a taste for the dramatic, a keen ability to touch upon and shift seamlessly between many thematic foci, and sufficient scholarly acumen to convince readers that they should take him seriously. Rubicon, then, when coupled with my own embryonic interest in ancient Roman society, cultivated in me a passion for the study of Roman politics and, especially, for historical questions about the fall of the Republic. Far before I had to declare a major at university, I knew that I wanted to study classics. In fact, inspired by Holland’s Rubicon and other popular histories of its ilk, I decided to learn Latin and Greek and aspired to become an ancient historian.

How little I knew about the field! As an adolescent untrained in Latin and unaware of what the term “classical studies” even referred to, I was enamored with Rubicon and oblivious to the fact that there was any other way to write history. Dynasty, much like Rubicon, is a narrative history that seeks to entertain readers just as much as it seeks to convey the “what happened” apropos its historical context. In both books, just as with his Persian Fire on the Greco-Persian wars of the fifth century BCE, Holland makes no attempt to put forth new scholarly conclusions. He offers sparse analyses of complex events, relies almost exclusively on textual evidence in Roman literature and history, only rarely points to the interpretations of other scholars in secondary sources, and casually inserts quotes from primary textual sources without any explanation of their source, context, or, sometimes, relevancy to the topic at hand (this last tendency perhaps vexed me the most; more often than not, one must turn to the notes, in the back of the book, to discover whom Holland has just quoted. Even then, I sometimes wondered why Holland had quoted a particular author. Given the absence of much elaboration, I was left mystified). The fact is, Tom Holland is an independent scholar and a popular historian (he is also a translator; see his translation of Herodotus’s Histories). He only does research—and it is clear, I should note, that he is extremely well-read and comfortable with primary and secondary source material—insofar as he seeks to tell a story, and not because he hopes to make new discoveries about how we interpret ancient Roman society.

When I read Rubicon as a fourteen-year-old, none of this bothered me, in part because (as I mentioned) I simply assumed that this was how scholars wrote history. Now, with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics and a thesis under my belt, and as a current Latin teacher, I am far less impressed by Holland’s “scholarship.” To be sure, Dynasty, a la Rubicon, is lucid, if somewhat florid, and dramatically re-tells the same stories told by Tacitus and Suetonius with a helpful touch of modernity. Unfortunately, just as Tacitus and Suetonius’s histories are inhibited by their narrow, aristocratic scope, Holland’s subject matter is notably limited to his principle characters from the crème de la crème of the Roman elite: the Julio-Claudians and their upper-class associates (read: enemies) in Rome. Consequently, Holland almost wholly overlooks the day-to-day lives of ordinary Romans of the early Principate (that is, beyond their fickle sentiment toward the Julio-Claudians, typically marked by either adoration or revulsion; Holland does, however, incorporate a much-appreciated aside into the lives of slaves), steers clear of systemic questions that address the Roman economy or climate’s impact on the success of the Pax Romana, and rarely cites evidence from material culture unless it pertains to monumental structures commissioned by the Julio-Claudian dynasts (there are also some references to coins and altars insofar as these depict the imperial family). The reader, then, must accept that Holland’s historical portraiture of the early Principate, however accurate it may (or may not) be, is monochrome and extremely sparse. That is not to say that one cannot or will not enjoy Dynasty; to the contrary, I think most readers will relish Holland’s narrative. Yet it is to say that ancient Roman society at this period was far more dynamic, complex, diverse, and even colorful than Holland makes it out to have been.

A few minor quibbles, and then a few major criticisms: first, Holland habitually enters into the minds of his historical characters and makes assertions that, while perhaps plausible, are in reality fictitious projections more suited to fantasy than history. Thus Octavian “knew from the scale of his ascent, none better, just how far he had to fall.” Holland likewise asserts that “certainly, to a man of his proven murderousness, character assassination [of Antony] was a minor consideration.” Such sentiments are, I suppose, conceivably attributable to Octavian, yet fall outside the realm of what the historian can claim for certain. Holland does this with other characters as well, and often: in the midst of the Triumvirate, “Livia could have been left with no illusions as to the brute realities of the new order”; Tiberius, faced with his ulcerous reflection in the mirror, “needed no reminder” of how treacherous intimate relationships could be; “Claudius understood as well as anyone” the benefits of insider information, nor was he “a man to cause deliberate offence.” Most fantastical: “For Claudius himself, who all his youth had been cooped up in his study while his elder brother played the war hero, the chance to lead an army into battle was a dream come true.” How, exactly, does Holland know Claudius’s most cherished hopes and dreams?

Second, Holland’s flare for the dramatic leads him far too frequently to assert some position or character perspective with a touch of hyperbole, then to start a new section with questions like “Or was it?” and, “Or could it?” This penchant for melodrama lends the book an air of amateurism that Holland’s editor would have done well to excise. On the same token, Holland never truly explains the validity of his conjectures, whether with respect to his characterizations or why he follows a particular narrative, the facts of which are up for debate (see, for instance, his explanation for why Ovid was exiled; Holland maintains in a footnote that it was for political reasons, yet does not explain why). Sometimes, I felt as if Holland was more reliant on the stereotypes established by Robert Graves and the I, Claudius television series (and, by connection, those first conveyed by Tacitus and Suetonius), than his own heady textual and historical analyses.

Finally, Holland’s use of the Italian mafia metaphor across Dynasty is kitsch and unwelcome. I understand his intentions and I see the obvious parallels between the autocratic rule and deviant behavior of the Julio-Claudians and the criminal excesses of mafia culture. Yet with the two major sections of the book titled “Padrone” and “Cosa Nostra,” and two heavy-handed characterizations of Agrippa and Sejanus as consiglieri, there came a point at which Holland’s coy allusions started to wear on me. Moreover, the fact remains that the entire client-patron system upon which Rome’s sociopolitical life was founded, well before the Julio-Claudians, already anticipates mafia power hierarchies. The political machinations of Rome’s first imperial family were not unique in this respect.

There are, however, far more substantive issues with Holland’s Dynasty. At times, when he describes the character and customs of non-Roman peoples, Holland ostensibly assumes the narrative voice of his characters, and as such articulates an un-nuanced ethnocentrism that needlessly exoticizes northern “barbarians.” Take, for instance, his depiction of the tribes north of the Greek city of Tomis on the Black Sea, where Ovid was exiled in 8 CE. Holland speaks of “the brutes who lurked beyond” the Danube, their “beards white with frost”; “plumes of smoke . . . above the sunless horizon” marked their ominous descent upon civilized peoples, which left in its wake “bodies . . . twisted by poisoned arrows, the survivors tethered and driven off.” Holland makes these unwashed heathens more closely resemble the White Walkers from Game of Thrones than any historical Eurasian tribe. Similarly, when he introduces the Germans, Holland speaks with less cultural awareness than Tacitus himself. The lands of the north that the German tribes inhabited “were the haunt of phantoms and hideous monsters,” their environment so harsh that it “doomed the inhabitants of the chilly North to a backwardness that was at once torpid and ferocious, dull and intemperate.” The Germans are, to put it bluntly, “hairy primitives.” Earlier in the book, Holland similarly describes the Celts of Gallia Comata as “hordes of barbarians: spike-haired, semi-nude warriors” who stuck the heads of enemies on posts and “[downed] their liquor neat.” Fortunately, Caesar had pacified these formerly “mustachioed” ruffians who by the time of the Principate had abandoned their drunken brawls and hill-forts in favor of vineyards and planned urban centers. The Bastarnians of the Balkans, likewise, fare no better on Holland’s account; they “lurked in the dank forests by the mouth of the Danube” and “were a patent menace” to Roman civilization.

Holland never qualifies these characterizations. He never explains how the tribes of northern Europe were “barbarians” from a distinct Roman perspective and why we may want to complicate Roman writers’ exotic portraitures. The reader is left to assume that despite obvious instances wherein Holland intentionally draws upon Roman hyperbole (his comment about the phantoms and monsters of Germania is representative of this narrative technique, I think), he mostly shares the ethnocentric views of Roman authors. While I should hope that a historian as well read as Holland does not buy wholeheartedly into the myth of Roman exceptionalism, there is little in Dynasty which intimates that he understands the historical inaccuracies that surround such a concept. This is a major flaw of the book.

The other major problem with Dynasty is Holland’s readiness to accept the claims made by Rome’s aristocratic authors about the most eccentric Julio-Claudians, and most especially about Tiberius. While Holland remains appropriately sympathetic to the flawed second princeps, he nevertheless endorses the traditional narrative that Tiberius reveled in sexual perversities while on Capri and that his principate was marked most notably for its maiestas trials and capital convictions. In particular, this tendency to take at face value Tacitus’s unfavorable characterization of Tiberius and his depravities overlooks the potentiality that Tacitus projects revulsion at his own political milieu under the Flavian emperor Domitian onto Tiberius, who ruled Rome nearly a century before Tacitus wrote his Annales. Tacitus, not unlike the senators he depicts in his histories, affected obeisance in the midst of Domitian’s own tyranny, which resulted in the deaths of many of his fellow conscript fathers. Once Nerva became princeps, Tacitus could safely show his true political colors: contempt for the new monarchical order and wistfulness for the republicanism of yesteryear. Yet Tacitus was ashamed of his behavior under Domitian, and much of what one reads in the Annales, especially with respect to the senate’s pathetic obsequiousness to Tiberius, perhaps reflects Tacitus’s own self-contempt.

Whatever the case may be, some skepticism is warranted when it comes to Tacitus’s portrayal of Tiberius, first on account of the clear similarities between the second emperor and Domitian, and second because most Romans (as Holland points out repeatedly) did not look favorably upon excessive privacy. Tiberius’s retreat to Capri could only mean that he wished to hide his perverse sexual proclivities from the senate and people of Rome. That he may well have reasonably despised public scrutiny to such an extent that he intended to administer the empire from afar, or that he actually wanted the senate to step up and reassert its auctoritas, were implausible explanations to first century CE Roman writers, and for that matter far too nuanced for public taste. (It should be noted that whatever his justifiable reasons may have been to leave Rome, Tiberius’s decision spelt disaster for the city. Sejanus was probably as corrupt and ambitious as Tacitus makes him out to be, and Tiberius’s confidence in the upstart equestrian turned Praetorian prefect certainly ruffled senators’ feathers.) At times, Holland alludes to the problems with our sources; for the most part however, he accepts their veracity without question. Most deficiently, he rarely probes Tacitus, Suetonius, and other writers with skepticism, and most often fails to craft his own narrative solution to problems the ancient sources pose (when faced with disparate accounts, Holland usually presents one side, then falls back on his “Or could it have been” technique and presents the other).

Despite these issues, Dynasty is mostly an enjoyable read. There are many positive elements to Holland’s historical narrative as well: his plausible and persuasive take on Nero’s theatricality, which may explain (in part) his motivation for some of his most heinous crimes; his repeated emphasis on the paradoxical nature of power in the early Principate, i.e. the shadow-play between the appearance of power within a republican framework and power itself, enforced as if by a monarch (which helps one better comprehend Gaius and Nero’s actions, for whom the princeps’ political dance, intended to satisfy the people, the senate, and the army all at once, was patently inauthentic and therefore mockable); his sensible take on Claudius, a paranoid man with ambition and intellect perennially hampered by domestic volatility. These sophisticated interpretations reflect Holland’s own scholarly acumen and save the book from its tendency to chronicle, rather than to explain.

To non-classicist readers, or to those who enjoyed Rubicon and seek to learn more about the early imperial period, I unreservedly recommend Dynasty. While I do not condone the sacrifices Holland makes in an attempt to render ancient history accessible to a popular audience (there are better ways to do this; see Mary Beard’s work), I see the attraction of his approach. No doubt, many readers will come to love ancient Roman history because of Dynasty, and will therefore come to value the important work of classicists and ancient historians. For this reason alone, I sincerely hope for Dynasty’s continued commercial success. Someday, perhaps, the academic journey upon which Holland sets readers will take them to other books, other writers, and even to the study of Latin and Greek, and thus to the primary sources themselves. Then, a more complicated, more colorful portrait of the ancient world will materialize, and the study of ancient peoples will become their life’s work, as it is mine.

[Alex Yauk · Rating 4 out of 5]

For being considered "popular history", this book is dense. It was hard work getting through, but I'm confident the payoff is worth the effort.

Dynasty sits in the middle of a Tom Holland trilogy on the Roman empire. First is Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2005). It tells the story of Julius Caesar's generation - the twilight of the republic - and its bloody transformation into an empire. Dynasty (2015) subtitled The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar picks up from the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC and carries readers through the lives of the five subsequent Princeps of the Julio-Claudians, ending with the death of Nero in 68 AD. Pax: War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age (2023) is the final account in the series and gives a portrait of Rome at the very pinnacle of its greatness.

I parachuted straight into Dynasty, which did not turn out to be an issue, and I have added the other two books to my reading list - not to mention Holland's 2019 work Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland is becoming a fascinating character to me himself, occupying this public intellectual / historian space operating from a perspective sympathetic to Christianity while not a practicing or believing Christian.

Dynasty is a rigorous history done well. I would place the book on a scale between a textbook and a novel (or even narrative non-fiction) slightly closer to the textbook side of the scale. The work is complete with maps, very necessary family trees, plus a timeline and character list at the end that I wish I would have discovered sooner.

Holland packs the information in, in a dense way almost to the point of catching me off guard when pivotal events occured. I would be reading along, then think "wait a minute, did (insert critical character) just die?" Holland's paragraphs are long and page breaks are sparse. All that said, I feel like I have a much clearer picture of the events in Rome (and beyond) during this time period. A taste of the brutality and utter depravity that was at the heart of Rome.

Jesus Christ and Christianity played less of a role than I expected, but in hindsight I think this makes sense given the time of Jesus's public ministry, the geographic location of Judea - while within the Roman Empire, still fairly remote - and Christianity's relatively small stature from Jesus's death and resurrection through 68 AD, though still prominent enough to take blame from Nero for the great fire in Rome.

Rome's preeminence and sources of its wealth and prosperity were seemingly taken as a given rather than being explored in this work. The Empire seems to have unlimited resources to support whatever whims of the current Princeps. This may be my inner economist coming out, but I would have liked an exploration or at least an introduction into Roman prosperity of the time.

This book is not for everyone, but serious readers interested in History, the Roman Empire, Biblical historical context would do well to pick this book up and explore Tom Holland's work!

[raffaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot about Rome this year, but most of the books I've read so far have to do with the Republic. Dynasty gave me a glimpse into what Rome was like after the Republic fell and the emperors reigned supreme. Holland only covers the first five Julio-Claudian emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero), but that's a good thing - it makes the narrative much more manageable to read through (especially if you're a beginning reader on this topic like me) and allows Holland to really be able to paint portraits of these five men and the times they lived in. (As a warning, Rome during this period could be quite violent and debauched, and the book includes some of that - so it's not for younger readers). Despite that, I found this an interesting read and I hope Holland writes more about other Roman emperors someday.

It's so ironic that even as emperors were claiming to be gods, the real Son of God was walking around on earth in a Roman province. And the Roman emperors would never have dreamed about this small and weird cult called Christianity taking over their invincible Empire, but it did! And it has proved far more long-living than even ancient Rome. That's the power of the King of kings (and emperors).

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

An accessible, well-researched, and lively history of the dynasty.

Holland picks up where he left off in Rubicon, but the background should be sufficient for those who haven’t read it. Each chapter will usually cover one of the emperors, his political career, and his military campaigns, along with the general situation in the empire.

The narrative is, for the most part colorful, engaging and easy to read, if a little dense and long-winded at times. Holland vividly covers the emperors, their decisions, how they impacted the history of the empire, and the context that makes the reigns of people as seemingly insane as Caligula and Nero make sense.

However, there is little analysis, and sometimes it seems like Holland is more interested in the sensational aspects of these people rather than their impact on the empire. The narrative has a very authoritative tone, as if Holland knows peoples’ motives for certain (always tricky for this era of history) The narrative gets a little rambling at times, and Holland also uses some odd modern terminology (“snack bars,” “fast-food stalls,” etc.) For some reason, when covering Nero, Holland does not cover his execution of Corbulo (and how it made the army Nero’s enemy) He also describes Caligula’s popularity but not his contempt for the people.

An energetic, compelling, and clearly written work.

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a vivid account of the first five Caesars of the Augustan dynasty. Their lives and achievements are described in detail and the (I suppose) bizarre mixture each displayed to varying extents of solid statecraft with grotesque personal characters. Augustus was recognisably human whose political acumen and genuine regard for the roman people was his strength. His feet had less clay than his four successors. Tom Holland describes the strengths and weaknesses of the four next Caesars with a cold and clear eye. He recognises their intelligence and their grasp of how to manage the people. He also graphically describes their weaknesses. All save Augustus and perhaps Claudius could be fairly called monsters by our expectations of how rulers might comport themselves but this is what makes the history of the times so fascinating.

[Sud666 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb history book. Well written, engaging and full of interesting information. This is how narrative history ought to be written. A wonderful book tracing the rise and fall of the Julio-Claudinian line of Emperors (starting with Julius Ceasar and ending with Nero) this is a phenomenal story of the Dynasty that helped to shape the Ancient Rome most recognized by people. Starting with Julius Caesar, then Octavian/Augustus Caesar and finishing with Caligula, Cladius and Nero-these 5 members of the Julio-Claudinian family helped to establish the rule of the Emperors (stamping their name into a title-Caesar). Set against the changing mores of the Roman people and the changes in the Rome that led from a Oligarchical Republic to Imperial Rome this is a must read for anyone interested in this period or anyone who just enjoys well written history.

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I literally waited years for this book to arrive in print. And when I discovered it online one afternoon, I was elated. Tom Holland is my favourite chronicler of history, there is nobody better, especially when it comes to Ancient Rome. Holland's wit, and fluid prose are a treat to read. In "Dynasty", Holland continued the story after Julius Caesar's death and covers the legendary Julio-Claudian line that began with the majestic Augustus, continued with the tormented Tiberias, was passed down to the depraved Caligula, then was suddenly handed to the unlikely, but successful Claudius, and then ended with the lunatic Nero.
To sum it all up -- this book was like dining at a top French restaurant, I savoured every word, and every sentence. "Dynasty" was truly delicious. A masterpiece. Bravo, Tom Holland !

[Doubleday Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the flare of a seasoned storyteller and the expertise of a practiced historian, Tom Holland brings the reign of the first five Roman emperors to life. Dynasty picks up where Holland’s popular Rubicon left off: with the murder of Julius Caesar. I’ve never been one to dip too deeply into history, but the exciting and riveting details Tom Holland brings to life in Dynasty left me unable to tear myself away. This book is awesome for readers looking for both a thrilling plot and a history lesson along the way—impress your friends with your newfound knowledge of Roman history, without having to trudge through a dry history textbook! What’s not to love?
- Sarah E., Doubleday Marketing Department

[Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloody brilliant. Eminently readable and scholarly - what more could you ask for!