Tom Holland. (2015). Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tom Holland. 2015. Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Tom Holland. Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Holland, Tom
   • bioText: Tom Holland is a historian of the ancient world and a translator. His books include Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, Persian Fire, In the Shadow of the Sword and The Forge of Christendom. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to “the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilization of Ancient Greece and Rome.” He lives in London with his family.
     Visit the author's website at www.tom-holland.org.
   • name: Tom Holland

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2015-10-20T00:00:00-04:00

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Dynasty

fullDescription

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon—his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic—with Dynasty, a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.
 
Dynasty continues Rubicon's story, opening where that book ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman Emperors and it's a colorful story of rule and ruination, running from the rise of Augustus through to the death of Nero. Holland's expansive history also has distinct shades of I Claudius, with five wonderfully vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) Emperors—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony, lust, incest, pageantry, decadence—the tale of these five Caesars continues to cast a mesmerizing spell across the millennia.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post
   • content: "This is great material, and Holland does it justice with a chiseled prose style and an eye for the luminous detail.... A graduate of both Cambridge and Oxford, Holland is a master of narrative history. On the strength of Dynasty, he deserves a laurel wreath."
2. • premium: False
   • source: James Romm, Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Holland, a classical scholar turned full-time author, has written highly regarded accounts of Roman, Greek, medieval European and early Islamic history and has also translated...the sweeping narrative of Herodotus out of ancient Greek. The canvas of Dynasty is his broadest yet, both in terms of time (he begins well before the Julio-Claudians, to show how they arose) and territory. He keeps his eyes trained on the men and women of the August Family even while following events as widely dispersed as Britain, Germany and North Africa. His ability to operate at small and large scale simultaneously--both domi and fores, in Rome and abroad, as Tacitus put it--is one of his great talents.... Dynasty surely secures his place among the foremost writers of popular history practicing today."
3. • premium: False
   • source: G.W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books
   • content: "Holland's novelistic approach enhances a story that he has not invented. This means that his account is gripping and occasionally eloquent, but sometimes the larger historical setting vanishes as he concentrates on vivid personalities at the expense of the vast empire within which all the domestic horrors were taking place."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Nick Cohen, The Guardian
   • content: "Among the many virtues of Tom Holland's terrific history is that he does not shrink from seeing the Roman emperors for what they were: 'the west's primal examples of tyranny'. He accepts that tales of their paranoid depravity make historians uneasy.... He knits the history of ancient Rome into his narrative--its founding myths, the fall of the republic, the religious superstitions--with a skill so dextrous you don't notice the stitching. Dynasty is both a formidable effort to compile what we can know about the ancient world and a sensational story."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "A vivid account of five Roman emperors, emphasizing their vices and vicious behavior with less attention to the vast empire, which continued to prosper despite them."
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 15, 2015
     A decade after his award-winning life of Julius Caesar (Rubicon, 2004), veteran historian Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, 2012, etc.) delivers biographies of five descendants who ruled after his death. This is well-trod ground for good reason: this period saw the foundation of the Roman Empire, whose emperors, after a prosperous start, revealed a distressing if entertaining tendency to self-indulgence, paranoia, and murder. Following Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C.E., his adopted son, Octavius, won a brutal civil war to assume power. Octavius restored the facade of the old republic while a compliant Senate granted him vast authority. As Augustus, he ruled efficiently and was widely mourned upon his death in 14 C.E., having expanded the empire and begun the 200-year "pax Romana." Several promising successors died during his long reign, and Rome was left with the sullen, reclusive Tiberius, who retired to Capri after a few years, leaving ruling to underlings and living a life of (according to later chroniclers) debauchery. The short, stormy reign of Caligula ended with him as the first emperor murdered by the Praetorian Guard, who crowned his successor, Claudius. Modern scholars have a fairly high opinion of Claudius and even of his adopted son, Nero, although the dynasty ended with widespread revolt and his suicide in 68 C.E. Holland makes liberal use of unreliable but lurid Roman sources, including Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio, and others, but he has done his homework and acknowledges modern scholars who take these with a grain of salt. The author also includes a timeline, a dramatis personae, and a family tree for the Julians and Claudians. A vivid account of five Roman emperors, emphasizing their vices and vicious behavior with less attention to the vast empire, which continued to prosper despite them.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 1, 2015
     

     The dynasty in question is the Julio-Claudian (27 BC-68 AD), which forms a dramatic subject for Holland's follow-up to his best-selling Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. Beginning with a short return to the theme of that book with the fighting between Pompey and Caesar, the action picks up with the origin story of Augustus's wife, Livia Drusilla (also known as Julia Augusta), which is appropriate given her crucial role in forming the dynasty. Augustus and Livia make up the first section as the Padrone, in a term borrowed from the Sicilian Mafia. The next section carries on the theme as "Cosa Nostra," with chapters roughly corresponding to the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. That Holland is also a novelist is clear from his epic scope and focus on moments of tension, which are plentiful with this set of leaders, whom Holland does a lovely job of humanizing while still presenting an accurate historical portrait, somewhat along the lines of Robert Graves's I Claudius but staying within what is evident from the historical record. VERDICT While fans of Roman history will certainly want to read this account, it's tone will also appeal to lovers of historical fiction.--Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 15, 2015
     

     A member of the British Commission for Military History, Holland authored 2013's Dam Busters: The True Story of the Inventors and Airmen Who Led the Devastating Raid To Smash the German Dams in 1943, which has been optioned by filmmaker Peter Jackson. Here Holland offers the first of three revisionist volumes on World War II, arguing that Germany did not have the world's best army in 1939 and that Britain was not washed-up and awaiting America's rescue.

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon—his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic—with Dynasty, a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.
 
Dynasty continues Rubicon's story, opening where that book ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman Emperors and it's a colorful story of rule and ruination, running from the rise of Augustus through to the death of Nero. Holland's expansive history also has distinct shades of I Claudius, with five wonderfully vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) Emperors—Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony,...

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