Twelve Caesars: the dramatic lives of the Emperors of Rome. Matthew Dennison. 2012.

One of them was a military genius, one murdered his mother and fiddled while Rome burned, and another earned the nickname ‘sphincter artist’. Six of their number were assassinated, two committed suicide -  and five of them were elevated to the status of gods. They have come down to posterity as the ‘Twelve Caesars’ - Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Under their rule, from 49 BC to AD 96, Rome was transformed from a republic to an empire, whose model of regal autocracy would survive in the West for more than a thousand years.