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Historical person
64 BCE–14
Augustus, born Gaius Octavius, was Julius Caesar’s adopted heir and the founder of the Roman principate. After defeating Caesar’s assassins and then his former ally Mark Antony and Cleopatra, he became Rome’s dominant ruler and in 27 BC received the name Augustus.
Augustus presented his regime as a restoration of republican order after decades of civil war, but real power rested on his control of the army, provinces and political patronage. He cultivated a public programme of religious renewal, monumental building and dynastic succession while carefully avoiding the title of king. The deaths and scandals within his family repeatedly frustrated his succession plans before Tiberius eventually became his heir.
Adrian Goldsworthy’s Augustus focuses on the political skill behind his transformation into Augustus. Lindsay Powell’s Augustus at War challenges the conventional image of the first emperor’s reign as an era of effortless peace. Additional non-fiction treatment of Augustus comes from Hourly History’s Augustus Caesar, Lindsay Powell’s Eager for Glory, Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome, Lindsay Powell’s Germanicus, and Lindsay Powell’s Marcus Agrippa.
Periods
Series
The Silent Years explores Jewish life between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, moving from Cleopatra’s Egypt through the Maccabean revolt and Hasmonean monarchy to the court of Herod the Great. Fictional witnesses and historical rulers reveal a period of Greek and Roman power, dynastic conflict and…
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The Masters of Rome series reconstructs the final century of the Roman Republic from the rise of Gaius Marius in 110 BCE to the settlement that made Octavian Augustus in 27 BCE. Across seven novels, military commands, elections, family alliances, provincial wealth and personal patronage become instruments in…
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Penguin Classics: Ancient World brings together foundational works of literature, history, philosophy, drama and poetry from the earliest civilisations through classical Greece and Rome. The wider Penguin Classics series began in 1946 with E. V. Rieu’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, reflecting its original aim of making important texts…
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The Parthian Chronicles follow Pacorus, a fictional Parthian prince whose life stretches across the violent politics of the first century BCE. The opening novel places him beside Spartacus during the Third Servile War; later volumes return him to Mesopotamia, where he becomes ruler of Dura and is drawn…
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The Emperor series is a highly fictionalised retelling of Julius Caesar’s life and the violent end of the Roman Republic. It follows Caesar from youth through war, political ascent and conquest, then continues beyond his assassination into the struggle between Octavian, Antony and Caesar’s killers.
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The Caesar’s Spies series follows Iacomus Artemidorus, code-named Septem, and the intelligence unit operating for Julius Caesar and later Mark Antony. The sequence begins with the attempt to prevent Caesar’s assassination in March 44 BC and continues through the pursuit of the conspirators, the struggle among Antony, Cicero…
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Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy reconstructs the final decades of the Roman Republic through Tiro, Cicero’s enslaved secretary and eventual freedman. Imperium follows the advocate’s prosecution of Verres and campaign for the consulship; Lustrum places his consulship inside the Catilinarian crisis; and Dictator carries him through exile, Caesar’s civil…
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The Publius Ovidius Mysteries reimagine the exiled poet Ovid as an unwilling investigator in Tomis on the Black Sea. His self-importance, literary knowledge and connections to Rome make him both useful and dangerous to Marcus Avitius, the provincial adviser responsible for maintaining order. The frontier setting places local…
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The Legion XXII series follows Titus Cervianus, a civilian surgeon transformed into a capsarius and soldier with Legio XXII Deiotariana in Roman Egypt. His medical skill gives the campaigns a distinctive viewpoint, moving between the wounded body, the tensions inside the legion and the strategic demands of Augustus’s…
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The Claudius Series is Robert Graves’s two-volume fictional memoir of the Roman emperor Claudius and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. I, Claudius follows the imperial family from Augustus to Caligula through Claudius’s wary, observant voice, while Claudius the God covers his own reign and the forces that undermine it. Together…
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Lucius Cominius Tullus begins as a newly promoted centurion on Rome’s German frontier, where a wager on a foot race draws him into a deadly dispute. Years later, he marches east with Governor Varus and three legions, unaware that Arminius has united German tribes and prepared an ambush…
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The Lucius Sestius Mysteries follow the historical Roman senator Lucius Sestius Quirinalis through the destruction of the Republic and the consolidation of Augustus’s principate. Beginning as a young lawyer under Julius Caesar, Forsyth’s Lucius is repeatedly drawn into murder inquiries whose evidence threatens the political settlement of the…
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The Mark Antony series presents a biographical saga of the Roman commander from the Catilinarian crisis to his defeat by Octavian. Antony’s youth is shaped by the execution of his stepfather, service under Aulus Gabinius in Judaea and Egypt, and the campaigns in Gaul that bind him to…
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The Dream of Rome is an omnibus collection rather than a single continuous saga. Its volumes gather the complete Sword of Rome campaigns, the two Augustus novels, the first three Spies of Rome investigations, the complete Sword of Empire sequence and three later Rufus Varro novellas. The collection…
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Spies of Rome follows the poet Rufus Varro and his former-gladiator bodyguard Manius as reluctant agents of Marcus Agrippa during the first years of Augustus’s rule. The original trilogy investigates a coup, a slave trader’s murder and a killing connected to the imperial household. Three later novellas send…
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The Quintus Roman Thrillers follow Julius Quintus Quirinius through the early Augustan principate as he rises from ordinary legionary to decanus, optio, centurion, speculator and evocatus. His service begins with decimation in Hispania and an oath to support the family of Ursus, the comrade killed by his own…
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Michelle Moran’s Egyptian Royals Collection follows three royal women whose lives are reshaped by dynastic rupture and imperial power. Nefertiti rises beside Akhenaten during the Amarna religious revolution; Nefertari struggles to overcome that discredited legacy at the court of Ramesses II; and Cleopatra Selene is carried to Rome…
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The Roma Trilogy follows generations of the fictional Pinarius family across the long history of Rome. Roma begins with the city’s legendary foundation and continues through the Republic and the rise of Augustus; Empire carries the family through the Julio-Claudian, Flavian and adoptive-emperor periods; Dominus follows the later…
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The Augustus series follows Gaius Octavius from the assassination of Julius Caesar to the point at which Caesar’s heir can compete for control of Rome. The two novels place his personal development within the collapse of republican government, showing an inexperienced claimant learning to use adoption, veteran loyalty,…
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The Shards is a historical fantasy sequence in which divine relics shape the wars and dynastic struggles of the ancient Mediterranean. The prequel The Aegis and the Oasis follows Alexander the Great and Hephaestion in Egypt; the main trilogy begins after Julius Caesar’s assassination and follows the conflict…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
