Dynasty ─ The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated withRubicon—his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic—withDynasty, a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.

Dynasty continues Rubicon's story, opening where that book ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman Emperors and it's a colorful story of rule and ruination, running from the rise of Augustus through to the death of Nero. Holland's expansive history also has distinct shades ofI Claudius, with five wonderfully vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) Emperors—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony, lust, incest, pageantry, decadence—the tale of these five Caesars continues to cast a mesmerizing spell across the millennia.

TOM HOLLAND gained the top degree at Cambridge before earning his Ph.D. at Oxford. He is the author of the novelsThe Bone Hunter, Slave of My Thirst, and Lord of the Dead, and the nonfiction works of historyRubicon, Persian Fire, The Forge of Christendom, In the Shadow of the Sword and, most recently,The Histories, a new translation of Herodotus. He wrote and presented Islam: The Untold Story, a documentary commissioned for Channel 4 in Britain based onIn the Shadow of the Sword. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters.