Anthony Birley

The Augustan history was written by an anonymous fourth century author pretending to be a team of six much earlier biographers. Historical fact about the Roman emperors from Hadrian through Heliogabulus is mixed with apocryphal anecdotes. Birley has bridged the gap between this text and Suetonius by including brief lives of Nerva and Trajan.

Lives of the Later Caesars

Esta es la biografía más exhaustiva que se ha escrito hasta ahora sobre el emperador Adriano, una figura fundamental para entender el devenir político e histórico del Imperio romano. Anthony Birley logra un retrato personal e íntimo de un hombre odiado en el momento de su muerte y enormemente respetado con el paso del tiempo. "El carácter de Adriano era desconcertante y contradictorio: severo y jovial, afable y duro, impetuoso y dubitativo, mezquino y generoso, hipócrita y franco, cruel y compasivo, y siempre mudable en todo siendo una sola persona".

Adriano

The Fasti of Roman Britain

Cornelius Tacitus

Cornelius Tacitus, Rome's greatest historian, was inspired to take up his pen when the assassination of Domitian ended `fifteen years of enforced silence'. Agricola is the biography of his late father-in-law and an account of Roman Britain. Germania gives insight into Rome's most dangerous enemies, the Germans, and is the only surviving specimen from the ancient world of an ethnographic study. Each in its way has had immense influence on our perception of Rome and the northern `barbarians' and the edition reflects recent research in Roman-British and Roman-German history.

Agricola and Germany

Hadrian's reign (AD 117-138) was a watershed in the history of the Roman Empire. Hadrian abandoned his predecessor Trajan's eastern conquests - Mesopotamia and Armenia - trimmed down the lands beyond the lower Danube, and constructed new demarcation lines in Germany, North Africa, and most famously Hadrian's Wall in Britain, to delimit the empire. The emperor Hadrian, a strange and baffling figure to his contemporaries, had a many-sided personality. Insatiably ambitious, and a passionate Philhellene, he promoted the 'Greek Renaissance' extravagantly. But his attempt to Hellenize the Jews, including the outlawing of circumcision, had disastrous consequences, and his 'Greek' love of the beautiful Bithynian boy Antinous ended in tragedy. No comprehensive account of Hadrian's life and reign has been attempted for over seventy years. In Hadrian: The Restless Emperor, Anthony Birley brings together the new evidence from inscriptions and papyri, and up-to-date and in-depth examination of the work of other scholars on aspects of Hadrian's reign and policies such as the Jewish war, the coinage, Hadrian's building programme in Rome, Athens and Tivoli, and his relationship with his favourite, Antinous, to provide a thorough and fascinating account of the private and public life of a man who, though hated when he died, left an indelible mark on the Roman Empire.

Anthony Birley

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