Don Ready’s Reviews > Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar > Status Update

“…he brought a lethal and merciless precision to the art of mocking them. Aspirations that for centuries had steeled the nobility in the service of the Republic were made the object of corrosive jokes. When Caligula declared his intention of appointing Incitatus, his favourite horse, to the consulship, so cruel was the satire that it seemed to the aristocracy almost a form of madness.”

“The sight of her uncle standing before a statue of her grandfather…drove Agrippina into a paroxysm of fury. ‘A man who offers up victims to the god Augustus,’ she spat, ‘ought not to be persecuting his descendants! You think that his divine spirit has been interfused into mute stone? No, if you want his true semblance, then look for it in me – a woman with his heavenly blood in her veins!’”

“But one thing was certain. As Augustus breathed his last, it was his wife to whom he turned. A kiss – and then his final words. ‘Remember our union, Livia, for as long as you live – and so farewell.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Gossip was part of the air that citizens breathed. Wherever people gathered, they would pause and swap the rumours that passed for news. A story had only to be heard in the Forum for it to spread with remorseless inevitability out through the maze of the city’s back-alleys, into workshops and narrow cul-de-sacs, and tiny, hidden squares where pigs rooted for garbage and fullers hung their washing out to dry.”

“You are the greatest ever Princeps.’ So Horace had written shortly before his death. This verdict had not been flattery – merely a statement of obvious fact. Augustus had given peace to his fellow citizens, reconciled them to the gods, and restored to them their hope.
Surely now nothing could go wrong?”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Just as Julius Caesar had funded his own forum, complete with marble temple and statue of his horse, so had Pompey the Great put his name to the city’s first theatre built of stone. These rival developments, set as they were against the squalor and decay general in the rest of the city, had glittered like gold fillings amid a mouthful of bleeding gums.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Ever since the age of nineteen, when he had declared himself the avenging son of a god, the one-time Gaius Octavius had known that the surest reality lay in the eye of the beholder. What people could be persuaded not to see was quite as important as what they could.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“Long-forgotten figures of scandal gained a lurid new prominence. Set against the ruggedly pious builder of the Appian Way, for instance, was his grandson, who, informed on the brink of a naval battle that the sacred chickens would not eat, had ordered them dumped into the sea. ‘If they won’t eat, let them drink, he had sneered – and promptly lost his fleet.”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland

“The annals of the Claudians were filled with the deeds of women. One, a virgin consecrated to the service of Vesta, and therefore sacrosanct, had fearlessly ridden in her father’s chariot to protect him from enemies who were looking to drag him down;”

Excerpt From
Dynasty
Tom Holland