Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 2 Apr 2025This time we look at the empire under the Julio-Claudians, and address the broader question of why conquest became so rare after the death of Augustus. Along the way, we take a look at the campaigns in Germany in AD 14-16, the subsequent arrangements of the Rhine frontier, and Corbulo’s campaign during Claudius’ reign. We touch a little on the invasion of Britain, but will deal with that in more detail in a separate video. Other topics covered include North Africa, Egypt, and the relationship with the Parthian Empire to the east.
October 20, 2025
The Julio-Claudians and the Empire – The Conquered and the Proud 16
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July 26, 2025
The Julio-Claudians – The Conquered and the Proud 15
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 26 Feb 2025This time we take a look at the reigns of Augustus’ successors — Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius and Nero, referred to collectively by scholars as the Julio-Claudian dynasty. We think about the whole question of the succession, and trace how each diverged from Augustus when it came to the style of governing.
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July 21, 2025
Caligula: Was He Really Mad?
The Rest Is History
Published 3 Feb 2025Enough of the Princeps, what remains to be described, is the monster …
The Roman emperor Caligula endures as one of the most notorious figures in not only Roman history, but the history of the world. Famed as a byword for sexual degeneracy, cruelty and corruption, the account of his life written by the Roman historian Suetonius has, above all, enshrined him as such for posterity. Throughout the biography there is a whiff of dark comedy, as Caligula is cast as the ultimate demented Caesar, corrupted absolutely by his absolute power and driven into depravity. Born of a sacred and illustrious bloodline to adored parents, his early life — initially so full of promise — was shadowed by tragedy, death, and danger, the members of his family picked off one by one by the emperor Tiberius. Nevertheless, Caligula succeeded, through his own cynical intelligence and cunning manipulation of public spectacle, to launch himself from the status of despised orphan, to that of master of Rome. Yet, before long his seemingly propitious reign, was spiralling into a nightmare of debauchery and terror …
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the most notorious emperor in Rome: Caligula, a man said to have slept with his sister, transformed his palace into a brothel, cruelly humiliated senators, and even made his horse into a consul. But what is the truth behind these horrific legends? Was Caligula really more monster than man …?
00:00 A mysterious emperor
05:18 Why are the stories about Caligula so bad?
08:40 Germanicus: the best man in Rome
16:20 Caligula is the heir
19:30 The death of Tiberius
20:55 Caligula’s cynical intelligence
22:50 Caligula’s skill playing to the gallery
28:39 Caligula’s turn to evil (according to Suetonius)…
31:35 Caligula as Suetonius’ monster
37:22 Caligula confronts the senate
45:10 The conspiracy against him moves
48:14 Did all this actually happen?
58:43 Did he make his horse a consul?Producer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Video Editor: Jack Meek
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor
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July 14, 2025
Tiberius: Rome’s Most Underrated Emperor?
The Rest Is History
Published 31 Jan 2025The Roman historian Suetonius’ biography of the controversial Emperor Tiberius is one of his most shocking and salacious, condemning Tiberius to infamy. But was Tiberius really the perverted monster Suetonius would have us believe? Born of Rome’s most illustrious family and a sacred bloodline — the Claudians — Tiberius’ mother Livia was unceremoniously taken from his father while she carried him, to marry the great Emperor Augustus. So it was that Tiberius grew up in the very heart of imperial power, proving himself intelligent, and a superb military commander. But, following the unforeseen deaths of Augustus’ young heirs, he found himself primed to become the next Caesar of Rome. The reign that ensued would prove largely peaceful, prosperous and stable, though Tiberius himself was increasingly plagued by paranoia and fear. While the last of Augustus’ bloodline were wiped out one by one, he retired to Capri, much to the horror of the Roman people. Before long, rumours had begun percolating of the heinous deeds, sick proclivities, and vile abominations Tiberius was practicing on his pleasure island …
Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Tiberius, the impressive though widely lambasted second emperor of Rome. What is the truth behind the sordid myths and mysteries of his reign …?
00:00 The bad emperor?
06:45 Was he depraved?
08:30 The Roman version of the Kennedys
13:29 How he became the heir
16:50 The greatest general of his generation
17:53 Tiberius is manoeuvred into the succession
21:23 Tiberius the emperor
(more…)
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July 24, 2024
Tiberius Caesar, the second emperor
In The Critic, Jaspreet Singh Boparai reviews Iron Imperator: Roman Grand Strategy Under Tiberius by Iskander Rehman:
Tiberius was 55 years old when he became the second Roman emperor. He ruled from AD 14 to 37, spending most of the second half of his reign on the island of Capri, where he never lost his grip on power despite being over 130 miles from Rome.
Like most bureaucratic administrators, he was far from popular. Tacitus (AD 56–120), the greatest of all Roman historians, presents Tiberius as paranoid, ruthlessly cruel, and pathologically unable to say what he meant. The imperial biographer Suetonius (69–122) completes the Tacitean picture of a dour, charmless pervert, miserable even in his increasingly sordid pleasures.
Not all writers are quite so hostile to Tiberius: since the Enlightenment he has won qualified praise from thinkers including Montesquieu and Voltaire, who have often been willing to overlook at least some of his vices. The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote in 1825: “The more I read Tacitus, the more I come to like Tiberius. He was one of the greatest administrative minds of antiquity.”
Of course, Pushkin could take revisionism to contrarian extremes, as when he said of a notorious assassination: “If murder can be guiltless in an autocratic state when it is for reasons of political necessity, then Tiberius was justified”.
Iskander Rehman doesn’t go quite so far as Pushkin; yet he does want us to look past all the gossip and scandals, and see what we can learn in practical terms from this controversial emperor. Tiberius was not a conqueror; his main task was to consolidate his predecessor’s achievements and establish stability throughout the empire.
He was faced with the question of how you govern a massive, unwieldy state as an absolute monarch without the benefit of personal charisma, reliable subordinates or the momentum of conquest. Rehman focuses on foreign policy, military affairs and imperial management in general, and concludes that, whatever else might have been wrong with Tiberius, at least he understood grand strategy, international relations, and how to handle the Roman economy.
I must admit that my impression of Tiberius was largely informed by my childhood encounter with Robert Graves’ excellent novels I, Claudius and Claudius The God, which definitely drew the character details of Tiberius in the novels from Tacitus and Suetonius. But Graves also pointed out that whatever personal flaws were displayed in his private life, for the vast majority of the empire he was a competent successor to the great god Augustus.
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April 21, 2023
Tiberius Caesar, the second Roman Emperor
Andrew Doyle considers how the reputation of Emperor Tiberius was shaped (and blackened) by later historians:
Tiberius Caesar
Original in Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen via Wikimedia Commons.
I am at the home of a psychopath. Here on the easternmost point of the island of Capri, the ancient ruins of the Villa Jovis still cling to the summit of the mountain. This was the former residence of the Emperor Tiberius, who retired here for the last decade of his life in order to indulge in what Milton described as “his horrid lusts”. He conducted wild orgies for his nymphs and catamites. He forced children to swim between his thighs, calling them his “little fish”. He raped two brothers and broke their legs when they complained. He threw countless individuals to their deaths from a precipice looming high over the sea.
That these stories are unlikely to be true is beside the point; Tiberius’s reputation has done wonders for the tourist trade here on Capri. The historians Suetonius and Tacitus started the rumours and, with the help of successive generations of sensationalists, established a tradition that was to persist for almost two millennia.
All of which serves as a reminder that reputations can be constructed and sustained on the flimsiest of foundations. Suetonius and Tacitus were writing almost a century after the emperor’s death, and many of their lurid stories were doubtless echoes of those circulated by his most spiteful enemies. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of prurience. Who can deny that the more lascivious and outlandish acts of the Roman emperors are by far the most memorable? One thinks immediately of Caligula having sex with his siblings and appointing his horse as consul. Or Nero murdering his own mother, and taking a castrated slave for his bride, naming him after the wife he had kicked to death. For all their horror, who doesn’t feel cheated when such tales turn out to be false?
Our reputations are changelings: protean shades of other people’s imaginations. More often than not, they are birthed from a combination of uninformed prejudice and wishful thinking. And we should be in no doubt that in our online age, when lies are disseminated at lightning speed and casual defamation has become the activist’s principal strategy, reputations are harder to heal once tarnished.
I am tempted to feel pity for future historians. Quite how they will be expected to wade through endless reams of emails, texts, and other digital materials — an infinitude of conflicting narratives and individual “truths” — really is beyond me. At least when there is a dearth of primary sources it is possible to piggyback onto a firm conclusion. “Suetonius said” has a satisfactory and definitive air, but only because there are so few of his contemporary voices available to contradict him.
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June 18, 2022
The Early Emperors – Part 3: Tiberius, A Safe Pair of Hands
seangabb
Published 22 Oct 2021The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.
Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/
Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/
His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…
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September 26, 2015
Tiberius Caesar
A thumbnail sketch of the second Roman Emperor:
Upon the death of Augustus, Tiberius Claudius Nero stood as the last logical choice in a long and tumultuous line of potential heirs. In 14 AD, at the age of 56, Tiberius ascended to Imperial power as a somewhat uncertain figure. The continuation and success of the newly created Principate rested squarely on the shoulders of a man who seemingly had only a partial interest in his own personal participation.
For the first time the transfer of power from the greatness of Augustus was to be tested. The passing of this test would prove to be more a culmination of Augustus’ long reign and establishment of precedent than the ability of Tiberius to fill the enormous sandals of his step-father.
While Augustus was the perfect political tactician with powerful personality yet approachable demeanor, Tiberius was a direct contrast. He was a dark figure, keenly intelligent, sometimes terribly cunning and ruthless, yet pre-disposed to a more Republican ideal than any emperor that followed him. Tiberius’ failures, however seem to have been his inability to define his own role within the Principate and the roles of those around him, including the Senate. While he professed a desire for the Senate to play a more active role in Imperial government, he did little to illustrate what these roles should be. To an aristocratic body that had been cowed into general subservience through the sheer will and force of Augustus, defining a new role required more definitive action than the simple desire of Tiberius for change.
He was inconsistent in policy and behavior, sometimes dictating his own idea of order from the position of ultimate power, sometimes withdrawing completely in favor of any who might dictate the appearance of command. Mood swings and depression plagued him, perhaps resulting from a life spent as an uncertain member of the ‘Julio-Claudian’ family. Until his final ascension, and only after the deaths of several favored ‘heirs’, did Tiberius probably know for sure that the ultimate power would actually belong to him.
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