Lives of the Twelve Caesars
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Narrated by:
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Derek Jacobi
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By:
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Suetonius
About this listen
Suetonius wrote his Lives of the Twelve Caesars in the reign of Vespasian around 70AD. He chronicled the extraordinary careers of Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian and the rest in technicolour terms. They presented some high and low times at the heart of the Roman Empire. The accounts provide us with perspicacious insights into the men as much as their reigns, and it was from Suetoniaus that subsequent writers such as Robert Graves drew so much of their material.
Download the accompanying reference guide.(P)2005 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.; ©2005 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.Listeners also enjoyed...
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An excellent brief intro to Moors Spain
- By wireless-0110 on 06-20-19
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Our Oriental Heritage
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- Narrated by: Robin Field
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The first volume of Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization, Volume I chronicles the early history of Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia.
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Wonderful
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The Age of Caesar
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Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman republic, their lives still haunt us as examples of how the hunger for personal power can overwhelm collective politics, how the exaltation of the military can corrode civilian authority, and how the best intentions can lead to disastrous consequences. Plutarch renders these history-making lives as flesh-and-blood characters.
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Terrific
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Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome
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Acclaimed British historian Anthony Everitt delivers a compelling account of the former orphan who became Roman emperor in A.D. 117 after the death of his guardian Trajan. Hadrian strengthened Rome by ending territorial expansion and fortifying existing borders. And - except for the uprising he triggered in Judea - his strength-based diplomacy brought peace to the realm after a century of warfare.
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A Biography "too tall for the height of the cella"
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Cleopatra
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Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.
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Approach this book with caution
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The Borgias
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The Borgia family have become a byword for evil. Corruption, incest, ruthless megalomania, avarice, and vicious cruelty - all have been associated with their name. And yet, paradoxically, this family lived when the Renaissance was coming into its full flowering in Italy. Examples of infamy flourished alongside some of the finest art produced in western history.
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Gossip
- By Amazon Customer on 10-02-19
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The Byzantine Empire
- By: Charles Oman
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The Byzantine Empire survived as a self-contained political entity longer than any other in the history of Christianity. This history by Charles Oman is a catalog of good, bad, and indifferent emperors who either pushed Byzantine Civilization to new heights or savagely drove it to defeat and dissolution. It is a strange tale populated by some of the most interesting men and women who have ever lived.
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adequate good book. great reader
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The Story of the Goths
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The Goths are the most enigmatic of all the ancient German tribes. Their name today is still widely in use for a variety of cultural and artistic movements. But unlike other famous German tribes whose names are still descriptive of nations they founded - the Franks, the Lombards, the Angles, the Saxons and the Alemanni - the Goths simply disappeared. The subject of Henry Bradley's splendid short history is tracing the rise, the migrations, and the impact of the Goths on European history along with their spectacular fall.
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Interesting Book about a little understood people
- By Mark on 07-29-15
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Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
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Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic - first published in 1841 - shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds.
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People don't change
- By J. on 07-05-16
By: Charles MacKay
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What listeners say about Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Marty
- 02-21-23
Good introduction in shortened form.
I wouldn't call this a kids' book by any means, but definitely a good book to get a base understanding. Much shorter. I started listening to another longer version, and was very lost after Augustus (I could only follow until that point because of previous knowledge).
Great starting point if you want to listen to the longer versions, but have very little background in the subject.
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- Trent Infield
- 07-19-15
Masterful
It felt like I was a contemporary roman listening to a wise and educated man tell the stories of the Caesars.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lloyd Chappell
- 09-14-18
Derek Jacobi knocks it out of the Park
This is the finest reading of a Roman primary resource (book) I've ever heard. Derek Jacobi makes Seutonius come alive, almost like you are talking with Seutonius. Here his outstanding work in the BBC series "I, Claudius" really pays off. He knows the material inside and out. I marveled at his performance on this audio book.
Anyone who knows Roman history knows there are flaws with Seutonius; some of the information here is true; some is court gossip, rumor or innuendo. However, it is an important work, warts and all.
If you love Roman history, this is worth a try. There are so many wild, interesting and somewhat crazy anecdotes here. And some real History.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Elizabeth
- 05-20-07
Translation doubts
Jacobi reads beautifully (he played Claudius, one of the Caesars in question), but Naxos, the publisher, seems strangely coy about the translator--not even in its catalog does it reveal whose English version Jacobi is reading. It's certainly not the celebrated Robert Graves translation (for that go to the Audio Connoisseurs edition) but a far looser one, and, of course, heavily abridged. Information about the translator would seem a basic courtesy to the buyer. This buyer, at least, is disappointed by the lack of it.
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34 people found this helpful
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Overall
- vandypool7
- 10-24-18
children's version
This is the 7 hour, children's version. Do not purchase. Buy the 14 hour version instead.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- anon0me
- 07-11-07
Reader is distracting
I found myself fixated on the reader's pronounciation rather than the book itself. Think Pontius Pilate/Michael Palin from the movie "Life of Brian", because I do whenever I listen to it.
Perhaps the choice of reader was intentional.
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5 people found this helpful