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Historical person
21 BCE–31
Sejanus was the powerful commander of the Praetorian Guard under Tiberius. He accumulated influence while the emperor lived on Capri, removed rivals and may have aimed at succession before being suddenly arrested and executed in AD 31.
In Fiona Forsyth’s Poetic Justice, Ovid and Avitius must identify the killer without giving Augustus or Sejanus another reason to silence the poet. In L. J. Trafford’s The Wine Boy, Emperor Tiberius has withdrawn to Capri, leaving the Praetorian prefect Sejanus with extraordinary influence over the capital. Other novels featuring Sejanus include Fiona Forsyth’s Written in Blood and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
In non-fiction, Sejanus is discussed in Lindsay Powell’s Germanicus. In Lindsay Powell’s Germanicus, the final chapters examine the persecution of Germanicus’s widow and children under Tiberius and Sejanus, and the survival of his public image through Caligula, Claudius and later Roman memory.
Series
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…
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
Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
