nero
They weren’t all scheming poisoners: the maligned women of imperial Rome
Joan Smith criticises the distortions of Robert Graves in particular, whose villainisation of the empress Livia had no historical basis whatever
The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor
Elagabalus’s suffocating party tricks may have been exaggerated, but Domitian’s sinister, death-themed feasts could be seen as a dictator’s flamboyant threat
How to tell your Roman emperors apart
Rising professors do well to be controversial if they wish to be invited to contribute to mainstream media. But the…
A nicer side of Nero
New York I haven’t felt such shirt-dripping, mind-clogging wet heat since Saigon back in 1971. The Bagel is a steam…
What ancient Roman Remainiacs can teach Matthew Parris
Matthew Parris feels that he has become a genuine Remainiac, and kindly readers, fearing for his mental health, have been…
If he’s lucky, Jeremy Corbyn might be as good on defence as Nero
Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Nicholas Houghton is worried that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will never use the existing…
John McDonnell’s true economic guru: the emperor Nero
John McDonnell, shadow chancellor in the Corbynite splinter-group, has announced that £120 billion is waiting to be reclaimed from tax…
Rid of their enemies, the Caesars set about murdering family and friends
According to Francis Bacon, the House of York was ‘a race often dipped in its own blood’. That being so,…
What Tacitus would have made of the applause at Fifa
Apparently Fifa emperor Sepp Blatter received a ten-minute standing ovation from his 400 staff when he addressed them after his…
How the Romans went about their business
When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch…
Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
