Julio-Claudian dynasty

We've already had one.

We've had the Julio-Claudians.

The idea that it was going to be anyone other than Vespasian's two sons who was going to succeed him It's a moot point by this point.

No one is seriously arguing that there's any kind of meritocracy now.

There's like that, that is kind of the underlying thing that runs through this biography is like, there is a job to do.

Um, there are, there are things that the emperor is supposed to, the emperor is supposed to handle natural disasters, right? Like if there's a fire or Vesuvius erupts, like that's, it's the emperor's job to take care of that.

And that you can kind of see over the course of the now hundred ish years that Suetonius has covered in this hundred plus years that, um, that idea gets lost with the Julio-Claudians, that there are actual tasks that you're supposed to perform.

You don't want

And soon after becoming emperor, she'll give birth to another child, Britannicus, a boy who will also, spoiler alert, go on to be murdered by Nero.

And what Messalina does, we're told, at the very beginning of Claudius's reign, is she has several people put to death, really in following in the tradition of Julio-Claudian women.

You'd like to

think you wouldn't, but if you were suddenly catapulted from the sidelines into the main event, it would take a very strong person not to go, actually, all of those bitches who've got on my nerves over the years.

I won't spoil anything else about the plot, but he also happens to be a famous chariot racer.

That much you learn in the first couple of pages, as you also learn you have landed in the fascinating time a few decades after Julius Caesar's assassination, and you're firmly in a society ruled largely through the incredibly messy, slightly incestuous family that historians call the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the Roman Republic is now a memory.

By the way, give the family tree for these guys a quick look, but don't try too hard to understand it because it simply raises more questions than answers because no tree in the real world resembles this thing.

If this were pure fiction and not historical fiction, you'd be forgiven for writing some of the bigger events off as too outlandish to be believable.

Maybe.

I, I should say that the reason I don't quite ca- believe this argument, because those sorts of behaviors go right back to, like, Nero and the early emperors and the Julio-Claudians.

Right.

They-

So, so the important thing in the governorship of Cerialis is that he's given the task by the new emperor, Vespasian, of winning martial glory for the new dynasty.

It's the end of the Julio-Claudians, Year of the Four Emperors, the Flavians.

He's won a civil war.

There's no martial glory in winning a civil war for an emperor.

Several people were buried there before Augustus himself died, including his right-hand man and son-in-law, Agrippa, and two of his three grandsons.

Augustus himself is laid to rest there as well, and then later, all of the Julio-Claudian emperors and their close family members were buried there, too.

So basically, all of the emperors up until the Flavian dynasty.

At that point, things change a little bit, and the Flavians would use their own space elsewhere in Rome on the Quirinal Hill.

It's not that he is demonized by Plutarch, and there's probably a reason for that that I could even say is political.

Let's face it, Mark Antony's bloodline is in that of the Julio-Claudians [laughs] thanks to his relationship with Octavian's sister, brief though it was.

But also, I don't think anyone would want to completely trash his reputation, nor is it entirely in Octavian's interest to completely trash his reputation.

Just like they don't want to wholly undermine Cleopatra.

His last words were, what an artist dies with me.

He was 30 years and six months old, the last of the Julio-Claudian line that stretched back to Augustus.

Nero marked the end of a dynasty and the end of an era.

The first emperors, Julius Caesar and Augustus, had persuaded the Roman people that one-person rule was a good thing.

He certainly wasn't very good at running an empire, but then what did Rome expect? If you put a messed up 16-year-old in charge of half the known world, you're asking for trouble.

Rome learned the hard way.

From now on, it abandoned the Julio-Claudian line of emperors in favor of skilled administrators.

But Nero did leave his mark on history.