Palatine

14 CE: The first Roman emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine Hill, about to become the birthplace of Western bureaucracy, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive.

This is a Roman history with a cast of new men and newly dominant women, those reviled too often in the past as flatterers and gluttons, uppity slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes and unhinged party animals. Palatine uncovers the lives of the Vitellii, perhaps Rome's least admired imperial clan, of Publius, an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age, of Lucius, an exceptionally skilled and sycophantic courtier, and of Aulus a genial sluggard whose prowess at the table carries him all the way to the throne before collapsing his family's reputation for ever. Few now remember them. Yet in their creeping ascent to the very summit of the imperial hierarchy lie neglected truths about a lasting legacy of Rome.

Lets us see how power really worked, in public and private. We glimpse the emperors at work and at play, in the dining room and in the bedroom. And we see how even they, despite the sycophants, were often prisoners, not architects, of the system. One false step and it would all be over ... Stothard tells this story superbly -- Dominic Sandbrook Sunday Times
This is a story you think you know, told through the eyes of people you don't ... Not so much an alternative history as an alternative epic, farce and satire rolled into one. Palatine is an absorbing saga of battles and banquets, as densely populated and richly depicted as Game of Thrones -- Rachel Cunliffe The Times
Profound scholarship written with the verve and expertise of an accomplished novelist. On every page lapidary phrases evoke the reality of life in the ancient world . . . Wonderful, evocative stuff! -- Harry Sidebottom Daily Telegraph
Fans of Peter Stothard's previous books - On the Spartacus Road (2010), The Last Assassin (2020), and Crassus (reviewed here October 2022) - will need no urging towards his latest, a wonderfully evocative study of that dynasty, leading up to the fall of Vitellius in the Year of Four Emperors (AD 69). Palatine, like its predecessors, is imaginatively constructed from a series of realistic vignettes charting the imperial court from the last days of Augustus through to the arrival of the Flavians ... Stothard tells the familiar story in a very original way, making the two Vitellii his central characters ... it's a brilliant device that illustrates how, with some paternal scheming, a relatively ordinary man could push his way through the corridors of power and emerge on top ... This hugely readable novel-like account [is] a Succession for the Julio-Claudian years -- Sir Michael Fallon, Founder of the Parliamentary Classics Group CLASSICS FOR ALL

Peter Stothard is an author, journalist and critic. He is a former editor of The Times and of The Times Literary Supplement . His books include ALEXANDRIA, THE LAST NIGHTS OF CLEOPATRA, ON THE SPARTACUS ROAD and THE LAST ASSASSIN. He lives in Cambridge.

This is an unusual history of a time that still defines our world - a view of the early Roman empire that its historians never intended us to see. Beginning sixty years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, it graphically depicts a story parallel to that of Caligula and Nero, and shows us those struggling to survive around them.This is the Roman imperial world seen through the eyes of men and women in a single house on Rome's Palatine Hill. Amid a household of servants and soldiers, self-appointed lawyers and the fabulously extravagant who once were enslaved, it examines the lives of one pair of flatterers and gluttons - namely, a father and son. The first is Lucius Vitellius (10BC-AD 51), an exceptionally sycophantic courtier; the second is Aulus Vitellius (AD12-69), a genial sluggard who for eight mad months became an emperor of the Roman world, and against some tough competition set his own standard for gluttony, brutal indolence and dramatic death.PALATINE has the drama and pace of a thriller whilst casting an entirely new light on an extraordinary family in imperial Rome.

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