Ah they and welcome to Empress of Rome, a podcast series looking at the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me as always is Dr.

Rianen Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

As we are now briefly between emperors, we thought we'd take the opportunity to recommend a few books you could read in case you wanted to further expand your knowledge of the Roman emperors we've discussed.

The request for such a list came from Owen O'Donnell on Twitter. Here's

Riandon Evans. If you don't know anything about the Roman emperors and you want to

go to the source, the place to start is with the biographies of the emperors written by Suetonius.

He wrote biographies of Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors and we usually call it lives of the Caesars or the 12 Caesars because there's 12 in all.

He was writing under the Emperor Hadrian who comes a bit later than the first 12 in about 130 CE.

But he was also the secretary to the Emperor Hadrian,

which meant he had access to all of the records of the previous emperors.

So he was really well set up to write these biographies and that makes him a fantastic source.

What some people think makes him a less fantastic source is that he's

quite sensationalist in the way he writes. He's sort of been compared to the tabloid press. He always

wants to tell us about the most extravagant or

disgusting behavior of the emperors, but that means that he's a really fun

read. So have a look at Suetonius to start with and he just goes through each emperor's life.

Give us a lot of detail. He's absolutely our best source.

There's a couple of other primary sources, one with notable gaps in it, but we do have parts of Tacitus, don't we?

We do have Tacitus's Annals, which runs from the death of Augustus.

It should run up until the death of demission.

Covering all the emperors we've looked at from Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and so on.

...