Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius (42 BCE–CE 37), has traditionally been seen as a villainous hypocrite—treacherous, grasping, vindictive, and depraved. But in Tiberius and His Age, Edward Champlin draws on vast and diverse evidence to show that Tiberius was—and was seen by contemporaries to be—recognizably human and far more complex than the monster of the hostile tradition that began with Tacitus and Suetonius.
Focusing on the overlapping themes of luxury, sex, power, and, especially, myth, Tiberius and His Age examines Tiberius’s standing as a folkloric figure in the Roman popular imagination and his conscious use of mythological themes to consolidate his power. It argues that the striking stories of Tiberius’s sexual depravity, which literary sources passed on to later generations, are ultimately incoherent fictions, the work of a brilliant fantasist who hated the emperor. The book’s portraits of three important figures in Tiberius’s circle—the gourmands Asellius Sabinus and Marcus Apicius and the emperor’s lieutenant, Sejanus—provide new perspectives on the emperor and his age. Tiberius’s passions for astrology, gastronomy, and mythology, which have often been seen as eccentric scholarly diversions, are revealed instead to be central to contemporary Roman debates and keys to understanding his personality, his power, and the lasting image of Roman emperors.
Incisive, witty, and original, Tiberius and His Age presents a startlingly new picture of Tiberius and the culture and politics of the early Roman Empire.
Edward Champlin is professor of classics and Cotsen Professor of the Humanities, emeritus, at Princeton University. His books include Nero, Final Judgments: Duty and Emotion in Roman Wills, 200 B.C.–A.D. 250, and Fronto and Antonine Rome. Robert A. Kaster is the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin, emeritus, at Princeton. He is the author of, most recently, How to Do the Right Thing: An Ancient Guide to Treating People Fairly (Princeton).
“Wonder, once banished from classics, has been brought back by Edward Champlin, who tells a golden tale. There cannot be a classicist in the world who does not secretly wish to have written this book. Through the keyhole of a tradition that knew the cruel and twisted Emperor Tiberius as a wise man and a warlock, Champlin sees imperial Rome as a cabinet of curiosities wholly unsuspected by traditional historians. Tiberius the sorcerer! All praise to the man who conjured up the emperor’s shade: Champlin is a mage among the magi.”—J. E. Lendon, author of That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World
“Tiberius and His Age presents a bold new cultural, social, and political history of this enigmatic but pivotal emperor. The book is distinctive both in its evidence, much of which will be unknown even to specialists, and in the overall picture of Tiberius that emerges from Edward Champlin’s analysis—a more complex, and more sympathetic, figure than that of the traditional narrative. This is a model of how one can write exciting ancient history from a carefully curated blend of familiar and obscure literary sources.”—Carlos F. Noreña, University of California, Berkeley
“Tiberius and His Age brings into focus a whole series of texts that don’t usually get much attention, but that offer insights into the culture and society of the era.”—Alison E. Cooley, University of Warwick
