It's the ancients on History Hit.

I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast, well it's a good old top 10 Roman

Emperor's podcast.

We're looking at 10 of the most significant Roman emperors from antiquity and joining

me to talk through this list of emperors I was delighted to get on the show Barry Strauss

from Cornell University in the USA.

Barry, he has written books varying from the Battle of Salamis to the Death of Caesar

to Spartacus and he's also more recently written a book about these 10 key Roman emperors.

This folks was a great chat.

We have stuff varying from Augustus to the death of Constantine, from dog slurping in the

background to me slightly rather embarrassing saying cue the music.

Most of that further ado, strap yourselves in for more than an hour's chat on Roman emperors.

Here's Barry.

Barry, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

You're welcome Tristan, it's great to be here.

Now this is a massive topic, a book dedicated to some of the most influential figures in history.

I think that's true, yeah.

So what drove you to these 10 specific Roman emperors?

Well, I got an assignment to write a book on Roman emperors and that's pretty open-ended.

I could be any emperors that I wanted and when I thought about it, I felt that living

in the early 21st century, the big question was how do societies deal with change and

in particular how do they deal with multi-ethnic, multicultural, diverse societies?

...