Emperors Behaving Badly: The Julio-Claudian Dynasty
Taught by Nick Fokas
Nick misspent his youth studying and teaching ancient history and classics. When not yelling at kids to get off his lawn, he raises a ruckus playing guitar in the band Reserved For Rondee.
Murder. Adultery. Incest.
The Julio-Claudian dynasty was one of the most powerful families in the ancient world. Ruling over the vast territories of the Roman Empire, the emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty had at their disposal unimaginable wealth and power, and the leisure time necessary to use and abuse both. Stories of imperial debauchery and misbehavior fill the pages of ancient writers who almost gleefully document even the wildest rumors of the family's inappropriate behavior.
Many of the most lurid stories are to be found in the Annals of the historian Tacitus and in Suetonius' Twelve Caesars, a collection of biographies examining the lives of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors. Taking these texts as our point of departure, we will not only explore the various tales of misbehavior preserved in the ancient authorities, but also examine the veracity of these stories and attempt to understand how these stories, whether true or false, may have come to be associated with these individuals, and why their contemporaries would have been inclined to believe them.
