Tiberius And His Age

Download or read book Tiberius and His Age written by Edward Champlin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As any reader of Tacitus' Annals or Suetonius' biographies knows, Rome's second emperor was a mere hypocrite when he was not a thoroughgoing villain-treacherous, grasping, depraved, and vindictive. But in Tiberius and His Age, Edward Champlin develops the overlapping themes of luxury, sex, power, and, especially, myth to show that the man was-and was seen by contemporaries to be-a far more complex and recognizable human being than the villainous hypocrite of hostile tradition. As worthy successors to the landmark Nero, the nine studies gathered here draw on vast amounts and diverse kinds of evidence, much of which will be unknown even to specialists, to present lucid arguments and startling new perspectives on Tiberius and the culture of his times. The first four chapters survey Tiberius's standing as a figure out of folkore in the popular imagination and his own quite conscious use of themes from myth to consolidate his power. The next two chapters show how striking but ultimately incoherent fictions of sexual depravity shaped the image of the emperor that our literary sources passed along to later generations. And in the book's concluding section, portraits of three men in Tiberius' orbit-the gourmands Asellius Sabinus and Marcus Apicius and the emperor's lieutenant, Sejanus-show how even lesser figures can throw new light on this pivotal period in Rome's history, and our own"--