In The Twelve Caesars Matthew Dennison offers a beautifully crafted sequence of colourful biographies of each emperor triumphantly evoking the luxury licence brutality & sophistication of imperial Rome at its zenith. But as well as vividly recreating the lives loves & vices of this motley group of despots psychopaths & perverts he paints a portrait of an erao of political & social revolution of the bloody overthrow of a proud 500-year-old political system & its replacement by a dictatorship which against all the odds succeeded more convincingly than oligarchic democracy in governing a vast international landmass.