Palatine : an alternative history of the Caesars

Stothard, Peter2023

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Summary

14CE: the first Roman Emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine hill, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, offices of diplomacy and destruction, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive. Amid a cast of new men and women, commonly reviled as flatterers and gluttons, uppity slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes and unhinged party animals, 'Palatine' reveals the history of perhaps Rome's least admired imperial clan, the Vitellii. Publius is an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age; Lucius an exceptionally sycophantic courtier; Aulus a genial sluggard whose prowess at the table carries him all the way to the throne, before collapsing his family's fortune forever. Few now remember them. Yet in their creeping ascent to the very summit of the imperial hierarchy lies a truth about Rome that its own historians never wanted us to see.