Mary Beard’s excellent new book, Emperor of Rome, begins with a timeline of Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus that gives each emperor’s years of reign, a quick fact or two, and often, his manner of death. But these three pages are the last time that Beard presents her readers with anything like a forced march through Roman history. Indeed, her book is specifically designed not to do that, and Beard sounds somewhat exhausted by the idea that she might. “Mercifully, this book is not a history of almost thirty individual rulers, one after the other.”
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