Quotes from Elizabeth Speller

Caligula, trapped leaving the games, was run through by noblemen who then hacked at his genitals and in their ferocity may even, according to Cassius Dio, have gorged themselves on his flesh. His wife, one of the few people Caligula loved, was murdered on the spot and his infant daughter, so a narrative of chilling verisimilitude relates, was picked up by the feet and had her brains dashed out against a wall.

Hadrian finds a man scratching his back against a post in the public baths and donates a slave to perform the duty for him, and money to keep him; on his next visit the emperor finds a whole group of old men hopefully rubbing their backs on posts, and confounds them by genially suggesting that they scratch each other.

It has been estimated that only one in four of the empire's citizens lived above subsistence level,13 and a rural population had become increasingly urbanised.

Nero's insistence on entering himself in singing competitions and athletic contests, where being awarded the supreme prize was a surprise only to him, was perceived as undignified. Emperors sponsored games; they were not supposed to become part of the spectacle.

Augustus' tomb, once a landmark of the city, had many subsequent incarnations as a fortress, a walled garden, a bear-baiting arena and an opera hall. Today it is derelict, inaccessible; a crumbling tumulus, inhabited by cats, at the centre of a square

He never let it be forgotten that he had served his time in battle, nor forgot himself that it was the army which had initially acclaimed him as emperor.

Hadrian, for whom it was rumoured the beautiful Antinous had sacrificed himself in the hope that his lover might find health and an extended life, died on 10 July 138 CE, less than eight years after his companion.

The memory of Mark Antony and his attempts to create a new eastern Hellenistic empire had not yet died. So sensitive was the situation under Augustus that the emperor prohibited independent visits to the new province by Roman senators and eminent knights.

The earliest and most abiding influence on Hadrian was his love of Greece. It is here, and with Hadrian's intention to create a new golden age, that the uniqueness of his reign and legacy begins.

Animula vagula blandula Hospes comesque corporis Quae nunc abibis in loca Pallidula, rigida, nudula, Nec, et ut soles, dabis iocos. Little wandering soul, Guest and companion of my body, Where are you going to now? Away, into bare, bleak places, Never again to share a joke.

In the end, the historians record rather vaguely, he pursued a course of slow suicide, embarking on a bout of massive over-indulgence which brought about first oblivion and then the death he sought – a death whose timing he had himself predicted years before.

To the Romans, Egypt was exciting: incomprehensible, with a pleasing hint of malignity.

Martial was among many who extolled the healthy life in the country, but he, at least, retained his sense of irony. My orchard isn't the Hesperides There's no Massylian dragon at the gate, Nor is it King Alcinous' estate; It's in Nomentum, where the apple-trees, Perfectly unmolested, bear a crop So tasteless that no guard needs be kept.

The reign of Domitian lasted for fifteen years from 81 CE, when Hadrian was a child of five, until 96, when he was a serving officer in the Roman legions aged twenty; thus it formed the backdrop to Hadrian's experience of imperial life.

Hadrian controlled the empire in a way which had no precedent. What he did, at first perhaps by instinct, but later almost certainly as a calculated and largely successful policy, was to take the established dynamics of imperial rule and aristocratic behaviour and expand them beyond anything that had been seen before.

Domitian is an important figure in Hadrian's life primarily because the choices and assumptions Hadrian was to make about how to be an emperor were undoubtedly influenced by the experience of living within the tensions of Domitian's reign.

Building was profoundly connected with two crucial elements in the dynamic of Roman society: the manipulation of popular support, and the ability to entertain lavishly. Erecting public buildings and subsidising public leisure were considered so potentially politically seductive that at various times legislation was enacted to curtail involvement in such schemes by anyone outside the imperial family.

Poetry, architecture, music, philosophy and mathematics all intrigued him and he was patron of them all, surrounding himself with men of genius: the poet and satirist Juvenal, the architect Apollodorus, the historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Arrian, the writers Pliny the Younger, Pausanias and Plutarch.

The always suspicious Tiberius was given an enormous fish and promptly beat the fisherman about the face with it. The fisherman, in thoughtless simplicity, responded with the comment that he was glad he hadn't given the emperor the oversize lobster he had also collected.

I don't want to be Caesar Plodding round Britain, [...] Freezing my nuts off in a Scythian midden Hadrian's matching riposte conveyed wit and affability and a side of his personality that he was eager to project: I don't want to be a Florus, Crawling round pubs, Skulking in pie-shops Bitten by bugs.

It was a grim tableau of a reign gone wrong; of an emperor completely isolated at the centre of his empire and his family. Domitian summed up his own predicament succinctly: 'Nobody believes in a conspiracy against a ruler until it has succeeded.'12 His death was a justification of his beliefs; and it was the justification for Hadrian's later hostile action against the four senators.

He built public buildings in all places and without number, but he inscribed his own name on none of them except the temple of his father Trajan. At Rome he restored the Pantheon, the voting enclosure, the Basilica of Neptune, very many Temples, the forum of Augustus, the baths of Agrippa . . . Also he constructed the bridge named after himself, a tomb on the bank of the Tiber and the temple of the Bona Dea.

Within weeks of Trajan's death the senate was coerced into agreeing to the summary execution of four alleged plotters against Hadrian's life. Neither he nor the senate ever forgot it, and the senate never forgave him. The deaths also appeared to contradict the new emperor's own stated intentions for his reign.

Antinous became a god within weeks of his death, and the new cult was taken up swiftly by devotees throughout the empire. Although it was never to be as popular in the Roman west, worship of Antinous flourished in the east and reached its apogee, unsurprisingly, in Antinous' homeland of Bithynia. In some places it continued until it was finally displaced by the state adoption of Christianity.