How Often Do Men Think About The Roman Empire? Book on Roman Emperors’ Scandals Becomes Bestseller 2,000 Years After Writing

A gossipy account of the lives of the Roman emperors, The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius, has hit the Sunday Times hardback non-fiction chart 2,000 years after it was written.

This was reported by The Guardian.

The Lives of the Caesars was translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland and published by Penguin Classics.

At the beginning of the second century, the scholar Suetonius wrote down a chronicle of the lives of the first 12 Roman emperors, starting with Julius Caesar (although he was not an emperor - The Gaze). 

Translator Tom Holland is delighted with Suetonius himself and says ‘that the guy is capable of making the bestseller list two millennia later’. And Penguin Press publishing director Stuart Proffitt said: ‘If there had been bestseller lists in second-century Rome, Swetonius' Lives of the Caesars would have been on them, no doubt.’

Holland attributes the great interest in the book to the fact that it is full of spicy details from the lives of the greatest people of their time.

‘The book is full of the most sensational gossip,’ he says.

The book, published on 13 February, comes 18 months after Ancient Rome became a mega-popular meme on the internet when women started asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire and posting their answers.

Holland believes that another reason for the book's popularity is that it touches on contemporary realities: ‘The republican system in the United States was modelled on the system of ancient Rome, but the [Roman] republic eventually became an autocracy, so there has always been an anxiety in America that a republican system of government could become an autocracy, and I think that anxiety is particularly pronounced at the moment.’

As reported by The Gaze, the University of Kentucky in the UK announced that it had managed to decipher the word on a 2,000-year-old scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which, like Pompeii and Stabia, was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.