"A wry cartoonist's bloody romp through Roman history. Being an emperor in ancient Rome was a dangerous business. Most of the nearly 100 emperors from the dawn of the Roman empire to its fall died violently--often the victims of assassination, battle wounds, or gruesome maladies. A sly work of cartoon history, with a touch of Edward Gorey's dark wit, Et Tu, Brute? is an irreverent, illustrated compendium of the deaths of all the Roman emperors"--

"The Roman emperor Nero has long been the very image of a bad ruler--cruel, vain, and incompetent. He committed incest with his mother, who had schemed and killed to place him on the throne, and later murdered her. He supposedly set fire to Rome and thrummed his lyre as it burned. Afterward he cleared the charred ruins of the city center and, in their place, built a vast palace. Historians of his day despised him, and it's their recollections that...

"Bestselling classical historian Barry Strauss tells the story of three and a half centuries of the Roman Empire through the lives of ten of the most important emperors, from Augustus to Constantine. Barry Strauss's Ten Caesars is the story of the Roman Empire from rise to reinvention, from Augustus, who founded the empire, to Constantine, who made it Christian and moved the capital east to Constantinople. During these centuries Rome gained in splendor...