Fifty Talents — Caesar I: Fifty Talents — For an ordinary legionary, that is more than two thousand years of pay. The pirates stare at their young captive as if he were mad, because no one has ever haggled with them for a higher price.
Tears in Gades — Caesar II: Rome on Credit — Caesar begins to speak, and his subject is his aunt. It is 69 BC, he is about thirty-one and has recently become quaestor, the most junior of Rome’s magistrates.
Caesar’s Wife — Caesar II: Rome on Credit — That whole night was played out under a secrecy protected by law. Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, is a goddess of women, and her festival is held once a year in the house of a consul or praetor.
The Dice — Caesar III: The Ides of March — Meanwhile in Rome, the bond that held the world together snaps. In 54 BC Julia dies, Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s wife, in childbirth in her husband’s house.
A Stamp of the Foot — Caesar III: The Ides of March — Pompey once boasted in the Senate that when war broke out he need only stamp his foot and Italy would fill with armies. Now he stamps, and no one comes.
Rome in Marble — Augustus: He Found Rome Brick and Left It Marble — When Augustus takes power, Rome looks like a city that has not grown into its role as capital of the world. Suetonius writes that it was not adorned as the dignity of the state required, and that it was threatened by floods and fires.
My Sejanus — Tiberius: Capri and Paranoia — Lucius Aelius Sejanus comes from Volsinii, from an equestrian family. He commands the Praetorians, that is, the emperor’s Guard.
The Island — Tiberius: Capri and Paranoia — Tiberius travels with a small retinue: one senator, the jurist Cocceius Nerva, one equestrian, Curtius Atticus, Sejanus and a few Greek scholars for conversation. The astrologers, writes Tacitus, said that the arrangement of the stars forbade him to return.
Jupiter of the Palatine — Caligula: The Horse in the Senate — After returning from the north, the emperor appears less and less as a man. Dio writes that he dresses up as gods: Hercules, Dionysus, Apollo, and also goddesses, Juno, Diana and Venus.
The Corridor on the Palatine — Caligula: The Horse in the Senate — Warnings pour in. Suetonius lists them: the statue of Jupiter from Olympia, which was to travel to Rome, bursts into laughter so loud that the scaffolding collapses; on the Ides of March lightning strikes the Capitol at Capua; an omen from Antium warns the emperor against Cassius.
Two Rulers — Nero: Artist on the Throne, Rome in Flames — For a few months Rome has two rulers, and the second is sixteen. The Senate grants Agrippina two lictors, an escort with rods like a magistrate of the state, and the priesthood of her deified husband.
Rome Burns — Nero: Artist on the Throne, Rome in Flames — After his mother’s death no one restrains Nero. He has dreamed of the stage since childhood, so he begins with the games “of the youth,” which anyone may enter, and performs in them himself with the kithara.
The Fifteenth of January — AD 69 I: You Don’t Buy Soldiers — Otho says it outright: he cannot stay on his feet unless he becomes emperor. It makes no difference whether he falls at the hand of an enemy in battle or at the hands of creditors in the Forum.
The Dagger No One Wanted — AD 69 II: The Capitol in Flames — While his commanders were betraying him, Vitellius was lounging in gardens near Aricia. Tacitus compares him to lazy animals that lie motionless as long as someone feeds them.
The Prisoner from Jotapata — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink — The prisoner says “Caesar” to a man who has not a drop of the Caesars’ blood in his veins. Vespasian is fifty-seven, bald, with the look of a man who is always wrestling with something.
The Emperor from Egypt — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink — In two years Vespasian takes the whole plain and all the cities of Judaea except Jerusalem. In that time Nero dies in Italy, and after him Galba, Otho and Vitellius fight over the throne.
The Triumph — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink — After the capture of Jerusalem the soldiers hail Titus as imperator and do not want to let him leave the province. They plead and even threaten: let him stay, or take them all with him.
Money Doesn’t Stink — Vespasian: Money Doesn’t Stink — The Rome the emperor finds in the autumn of AD 70 looks like a place after a war, because it is a place after a war. The Capitol is ashes, the streets are full of ruins from fires, and the treasury holds nothing.
Cities Under Ash — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — Beneath the cloud lies Pompeii, about ten kilometers from the crater, downwind. From early afternoon pumice rains down here: light pebbles, first white, then gray, layer upon layer, for more than a dozen hours.
The Frontiers — Domitian: Lord and God — First Domitian does something Galba never wanted to do. He raises the soldiers’ pay by a third: each soldier gets three more gold coins a year.
Gleaming Walls — Domitian: Lord and God — The closer the foretold time, the greater the fear. Suetonius writes that the emperor had the walls of the porticoes where he took his walks lined with phengite — a stone so shiny that he could see in it the reflection of everything happening behind his back.