Peter Stothard

Horoscopes and horror – the reign of Septimius Severus

Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, was renowned during his reign (193-211 AD) for the mass killings of his rivals (ruthlessness even by ancient standards); for his genocide against the Scots (a rare recourse, despite Rome’s bad reputation as imperialists); and his budget-stretching generosity to his soldiers. He had an unusually glamorous Syrian wife, Julia

The crude tirades of Cicero the demagogue

It is rare to read a book about Cicero that likens its hero to a demagogue. Rome’s prosecutor of conspiracy and corruption in the last years of the Republic is seen more commonly as a toga-draped crusader for virtue. Was he also a ranter steeped in violence, crude character-assassination, tendentious storytelling and racial stereotypes? Yes,

What ‘pax’ meant in Rome’s golden age of imperialism

The Roman emperor Domitian began life as a spare. At the end of the 1st century CE, while his brother Titus was the heir to their father Vespasian, the younger boy’s ‘sense of resentment and frustration had festered’, writes Tom Holland. ‘Rather than stay in Rome, where his lack of meaningful responsibility was inevitably felt

Peter Stothard: Crassus

40 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Peter Stothard, whose new book Crassus: The First Tycoon tells the story of the third man in Rome’s great triumvirate: landlord, power-broker, Spartacus’s nemesis and leader of a hubristic expedition to the east that was to see his glorious career end in bitter failure. Image © Teri Pengilley

Mythic automata

Among the myths of Ancient Greece the Cyclops has become forever famous, the Talos not so much. While both were monsters who hurled giant boulders at Mediterranean shipping, the Cyclops, who attacked Odysseus on his way home from Troy was a monster like us, the son of a god, an eater, a drinker, a sub-human

Lessons for the Prime Minister’s speech-writer

To a new Prime Minister’s speech-writer the party conference approaches like a bullet train. If my friend, Sir Ronald Millar, were still alive he would be working flat out on Theresa May’s speech by now. With the date of delivery advancing and the drafts on her desk ever more undeliverable, the need for ‘Ronnification’ must

What is written down

Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than most writers of any epoch; but more important than any particular work was that so much survived to define his time. He had a secretary, Tiro, who can reasonably be given the credit for researching,

A neglected corner of Roman history

When Ovid was seeking ‘cures for love’, the most efficient remedy, he wrote, was for a young man to watch his girl on the toilet. The American author of The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy begins with this worrying poetic advice. The evacuation of the human body has had little previous attention from historians