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Historical person
16 BCE–19
Germanicus was a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the adopted son of Tiberius and one of Rome’s most popular generals. He campaigned across the Rhine after the Varus disaster, recovered legionary standards and fought Arminius without permanently conquering Germany.
Sent east with broad authority, he quarrelled with the governor Piso and died at Antioch in AD 19. Rumours that he had been poisoned intensified suspicion of Tiberius and made Germanicus an ideal lost prince.
Ben Kane’s Hunting the Eagles places Germanicus at the head of the Roman return to Germania, where survivors of Varus’s disaster seek revenge and the lost legionary standards. Eagles in the Storm continues those campaigns, showing the tension between Germanicus’s determination to defeat Arminius and the limits imposed by terrain, weather and imperial strategy. Robert Graves’ I, Claudius views Germanicus through the Julio-Claudian family, where his popularity, marriage to Agrippina and early death shape Claudius’s understanding of dynastic danger. Robert Fabbri’s Tribune of Rome places his memory and descendants within the politics of Tiberius and Sejanus. Lindsay Powell’s Eager for Glory, a biography of Germanicus’s father Drusus, completes the family context by tracing the military reputation and imperial expectations Germanicus inherited.
Periods
Series
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…
All books in this series
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…
All books in this series
The Vespasian series follows Titus Flavius Vespasianus from obscure young nobleman and soldier to the imperial contender who will found the Flavian dynasty. The novels use Vespasian’s career to move through the Julio-Claudian court, frontier warfare, Britain, Armenia, North Africa, Judaea and the civil-war crisis of AD 69.…
All books in this series
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
