That means that if you’re a Roman householder, your family is not just your blood relatives: it’s everybody in your household. Really worthwhile article with some intriguing insights Interesting comment comparing our current cultural disintegration with the reformation period rather than the decline and fall of Rome.

Tom Holland’s Pax, the third instalment of his Roman trilogy, describes the collapse of the Julio-Claudian dynasty with the assassination of Nero, the civil conflict that followed, the Flavians who emerged from it, and the ‘Spanish Emperors’, Trajan and Hadrian, to whom has been attributed the settled heyday of the Roman Empire, the Pax, ‘peace’, of Holland’s title. Nicholas II became the last Tsar of Russia after his father, Alexander III, died an early death from kidney disease. Publisher Richard Beswick acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to the book from Patrick Walsh, agent at PEW Literary. The Greeks and Romans were far less squeamish in discussing these issues than westerners were until very recent times. Perhaps more surprisingly, given its title, are the many conflicts – including the year of the four emperors, but also wars in the provinces and beyond – that are such a significant part of the tale.

There’s also a danger of using previous examples of historical change and superimposing them, or at least the terminology, on the current historical changes taking place. The bestselling historian, author and co-host of The Rest Is History podcast turns his attention to Rome’s golden age in the third of his superb books on the Roman empire. But the Romans don’t think what they’re doing is in any way morally depraved; they think it’s absolutely justified.

There was an assumption that the mere rumour of being treated in this way would stain you for life; and if you enjoy it, then you are absolutely the lowest of the low. Hadrian is a significant figure — an emperor who stabilises the Empire by constructing what in effect is a frontier, although it’s not cast as that; by acknowledging the natural limits of the Empire; and, above all, by integrating the Greek world into the fabric of Roman imperial culture, so that in time we can talk of Greco-Roman culture. Let the sensitive beware: this is a book that judges everything about Rome by the standards of the Romans themselves. I guess it’s now a marker of whether someone’s “with it,” tolerant, modern, or so open-minded that their ability to reason is heavily compromised.Thereafter, I was able to pursue my love of history and turn it into a career, founding Get History in 2014 with the aim of bringing accessible yet high quality history-telling and debate to a wide audience. So I think there was a sense that Antinous has the beauty of a eunuch, which makes him incredibly precious. Two ancient sources, Suetonius and Cassius Dio both claim that the Emperor Domitian (81-96 AD) brought in the prohibition.

One of the other highly influential freed persons Holland focuses on is Antonia Caenis, “a woman who knew where numerous bodies lay buried. And it reflects a moral anxiety on the part of the Romans that has been characteristic of them, really, from the time that they start conquering massively wealthy cities in the East — the cities in Asia Minor or Syria or, most of all, Egypt. In the late 30s, Vespasian charmed Caligula with flattery and proved his merit during the invasion of Britain under Caligula’s successor, Claudius, in 43. The lessons from the Book of Revelation and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire have fused to create a sense that you can’t be great in the long run.There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women. The series began with Rubicon, and continued with Dynasty, and now arrives at the period which marks the apogée of the Pax Romana," the publisher says.