The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial Rome 31 B.C. - A.D. 476

In this book, author Michael Grant tackles the daunting task of providing a biography for every man who held the imperial purple for any length of time in the Imperium Romanum, from the time of Augustus to the traditional `fall' of the Western Empire in 476. In the opinion of this reviewer, he succeeds admirably. In this concise, simply-written guide, the great heroes (and monsters) of Rome's history, Augustus, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, Constantine, are described in only slightly more detail than the military emperors of the mid Third Century, and the host of petty imposters who drained the Empire of her power throughout the 4th and 5th Centuries. There is no jargon, and few pictures, only a few simple black-and-white photos of marble busts and coins. The book is simply what it claims to be - providing a short but thorough biography of each of these men, concluding with a summary of his reign, and a description of his personal character and temperament, and how these positively or negatively affected the eternal Empire he led.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, then this is a game for you! All the kids in our home 'fight' over playing this CD-Rom game. It is rated for everyone, don't let the cover discourage you from purchasing.

If you were to compare the list of U.S. Presidents to that of the Roman Emperors, you'd get an idea of the relative political stability that the U.S. enjoys. In our most disputed elections (1800, 1824, 1876 and 2000), things were resolved with nothing more violent than grumbles, and even our one Civil War did not seriously threaten our form of government as much as who was governed. One statistic that illustrates comparative stability. Of the 43 Presidents, only 2 (around 4.7%) served less than a year - William Harrison and James Garfield - and even in the case of Garfield's assassination, it was not due to a coup by his successor. Of the 92 emperors listed in Michael Grant's Roman Emperors, at least 17% served a year or less, a statistic that is more glaring when you consider that emperors basically had lifetime positions, yet less than half would even serve a decade. The point of the previous paragraph is the theme that runs through Grant's book: for a number of reasons, the Roman Empire, despite its immense size and power, was an inherently unstable system. It could right itself, but it was never far from teetering again, usually upon the death of an Emperor (natural or otherwise). Grant's compilation of Imperial biographies also serves as a history of the Empire. The book is divided into several groupings of Emperors. First, we have the Julio-Claudian Dynasty with the names that are probably the most familiar: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. As with most dynasties, what starts off great often ends in mediocrity or worse, and Nero's death would lead to the Year of Four Emperors, with several trying to fill the dynastic void and finally the Flavian Dynasty succeeding. After the brief existence of the Flavians, we get the Adoptive and Antonine Emperors, a group that would last almost a century and would provide generally competent and stable leadership. It would conclude with Commodus (the villain in Gladiator). Then there would be the House of Severus in which things began to get bad, leading to a 33 year Age of Crisis and then a Military Recovery. In an effort to maintain things, there was an inclination to split the Empire into two. The Eastern Empire was centered in Byzantium and would last in some form for another thousand years. The Western Empire - which was really what was left of the Roman Empire - would last only a couple centuries beyond the Military Recovery, in three more eras: The Tetrarchy and the House of Constantine (in which the split became official and the Empire adopted Christianity); the House of Valentinian; and The Fall of the West. Grant, who I've read a number of times in the past, is reliably informative, if a little dry. The book often feels like a compilation of mini-biographies instead of a single book as there are redundancies between biographies. Also, many of the more obscure Emperors have little hard facts about them, and when things are more speculative, Grant lets us know

Michael Grant's definitive one-volume biographical sketch of the Roman Emperors from Octavian to Augustulus is authoritative and informative. It is a compact catalog of Roman history and biography; and it is a source-book which makes gaining knowledge of Imperial Rome both quick and fulfilling. There are also many maps and diagrams, along with a dictionary of key Latin terms and Greco-Roman authors, which make this work all the more valuable.

This is a particuarly useful guide to each and every Roman emperor - including usurpers/failed coup leaders who called themselves emperor, and including East and West. It is a terrific "gap-filler" if one is seeking a biography of an obscure or forgotten Augustus. (Contrary to received Hollywood wisdom, the princeps was usually called "Augustus," the title "Caesar being reserved for the heir apparent or junior emperor.) This is particularly useful when we get to the cast of thousands who occupied the throne in the Third Century. Grant's great strength is his sobriety: he refuses, utterly, to be drawn into hysterics about mad emperors like the fool Commodus (as caricatured by Joaquin Phoenix's in "Gladiator") or the sun-worshipping Heliogabus (compare the more credulous popular works which insist Heliogabus was a depraved hemaphrodite), and he disdains the "whig" history which tends to idolize the later Christian emperors and demonize those earlier rulers who threw churchgoers to the lions.