This title introduces young readers to several important rulers of ancient Rome, the largest empire in the ancient world. The extraordinary cast of characters are described in short entries, with illustrations from the collections of the British Museum.

"The Roman Empire was one of the greatest political powers of the ancient world, encircling the entire Mediterranean Sea and lasting for nearly five centuries. This illustrated dictionary traces the history of twenty-seven of the empire's supreme rulers. Meet Trajan, who pushed the empire's frontiers to their greatest extent; Hadrian, who built his famous wall and the Pantheon; Septimius Severus, the African emperor who rebuilt Rome and the empire after ruinous wars; and Constantine, who reunited the empire and made Christianity the official religion. Then read about the emperors who were mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Nero, who murdered his relatives and swept away much of Rome to build his Palace; and Caligula and Domitian, who were infamous for their curelty and extreme behavior."--BOOK JACKET.

Introduces ancient Roman society and the everyday life of people of different classes and occupations.

An accessible and beautifully illustrated survey of the world of Ancient Rome

Discusses different gods and goddesses of ancient Greece that appear in stories, films, and art.

The turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed. Suddenly Rome was forced to confront an imperial future as bloody as its Republican past and a ruler from outside the house of Caesar. The anonymous historical drama Octavia is the earliest literary witness to this era of uncertainty and upheaval. In Staging Memory, Staging Strife, Lauren Donovan Ginsberg offers a new reading of how the play intervenes in the contests over memory after Nero's fall. Though Augustus and his heirs had claimed that the Principate solved Rome's curse of civil war, the play reimagines early imperial Rome as a landscape of civil strife with a ruling family waging war both on itself and on its people. In doing so, the Octavia shows how easily empire becomes a breeding ground for the passions of discord. In order to rewrite the history of Rome's first imperial dynasty, the Octavia engages with the literature of Julio-Claudian Rome, using the words of Rome's most celebrated authors to stage a new reading of that era and its ruling family. In doing so, the play opens a dialogue about literary versions of history and about the legitimacy of those historical accounts. Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, Ginsberg contextualizes the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes. Her book claims for the Octavia a central role in current debates over both the ways in which Nero and his family were remembered as well as the politics of literary and cultural memory in the early Roman empire.