How to Be a Bad Emperor
An Ancient Guide to Truly Terrible Leaders (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers Series)
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Narrated by:
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P.J. Ochlan
About this listen
If recent history has taught us anything, it's that sometimes the best guide to leadership is the negative example. But that insight is hardly new. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Suetonius wrote Lives of the Caesars, perhaps the greatest negative leadership book of all time. He was ideally suited to write about terrible political leaders; after all, he was also the author of Famous Prostitutes and Words of Insult, both sadly lost. In How to Be a Bad Emperor, Josiah Osgood provides crisp new translations of Suetonius's briskly paced, darkly comic biographies of the Roman emperors Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. Entertaining and shocking, the stories of these ancient anti-role models show how power inflames leaders' worst tendencies, causing almost incalculable damage.
How to Be a Bad Emperor is both a gleeful romp through some of the nastiest bits of Roman history and a perceptive account of leadership gone monstrously awry. We meet Caesar, using his aunt's funeral to brag about his descent from gods and kings - and hiding his bald head with a comb-over and a laurel crown; Tiberius, neglecting public affairs in favor of wine, perverse sex, tortures, and executions; the insomniac sadist Caligula, flaunting his skill at cruel put-downs; and the matricidal Nero, indulging his mania for public performance.
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Story
Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.
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Approach this book with caution
- By GolfZilla on 12-02-10
By: Stacy Schiff
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Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
- By: Plutarch
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 83 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Plutarch (c. AD 46-AD 120) was born to a prominent family in the small Greek town of Chaeronea, about 20 miles east of Delphi in the region known as Boeotia. His best known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices. The surviving lives contain 23 pairs, each with one Greek life and one Roman life as well as four unpaired single lives.
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For the Very Dedicated
- By John Pinkerton on 03-13-18
By: Plutarch
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The Shadow of Vesuvius
- A Life of Pliny
- By: Daisy Dunn
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his 37-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder's notebooks - filled with pearls of wisdom - and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man, who would grow up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, and chronicler of the Roman Empire.
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Enjoyable but lost track at times
- By Joshua Miller on 12-16-20
By: Daisy Dunn
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Evil Roman Emperors
- The Shocking History of Ancient Rome's Most Wicked Rulers from Caligula to Nero and More
- By: Phillip Barlag
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Roman history, from the very foundation of the city, is replete with people and stories that shock our modern sensibilities. Evil Roman Emperors puts the worst of Rome's rulers in one place and offers a review of their lives and a historical context for what made them into what they became.
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Brisket and nu potato
- By Michael Ayers on 06-27-21
By: Phillip Barlag
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A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
- Murder in Ancient Rome
- By: Emma Southon
- Narrated by: Sophie Ward
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In ancient Rome, all the best stories have one thing in common - murder. In one 50-year period, 26 emperors were murdered. But what did killing mean in a city where gladiators fought to the death to sate a crowd? In A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Emma Southon examines a trove of real-life homicides from Roman history to explore Roman culture, including how perpetrator, victim, and the act itself were regarded by ordinary people. Inside ancient Rome’s darkly fascinating history, we see how the Romans viewed life and death and what it means to be human.
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Narration is stilted, author tries too hard
- By Allison Jackson on 07-13-21
By: Emma Southon
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Dominus
- A Novel of the Roman Empire
- By: Steven Saylor
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 20 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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A.D. 165: The empire of Rome has reached its pinnacle. Universal peace - the Pax Roma - reigns from Britannia to Egypt, from Gaul to Greece. Marcus Aurelius, as much a philosopher as he is an emperor, oversees a golden age in the city of Rome. The ancient Pinarius family and their workshop of artisans embellish the richest and greatest city on earth with gilded statues and towering marble monuments. Art and reason flourish. But history does not stand still. The years to come bring wars, plagues, fires, and famines. The best emperors in history are succeeded by some of the worst.
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Excellent conclusion to the Trilogy
- By John f. Mc Cullagh on 07-26-21
By: Steven Saylor
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The Age of Caesar
- Five Roman Lives
- By: Plutarch, James Romm - preface and notes, Pamela Mensch - translator
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman republic, their lives still haunt us as examples of how the hunger for personal power can overwhelm collective politics, how the exaltation of the military can corrode civilian authority, and how the best intentions can lead to disastrous consequences. Plutarch renders these history-making lives as flesh-and-blood characters.
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Terrific
- By Michael on 06-13-23
By: Plutarch, and others
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The Death of Caesar
- The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination
- By: Barry Strauss
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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William Shakespeare's gripping play showed Caesar's assassination to be an amateur and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary operation, a generals' plot put together by Caesar's disaffected officers and designed with precision. Brutus and Cassius were indeed key players, but they had the help of a third man - Decimus. He was the mole in Caesar's entourage, one of Caesar's leading generals, and a lifelong friend.
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Absorbing
- By Jean on 03-24-15
By: Barry Strauss
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Augustus
- First Emperor of Rome
- By: Adrian Goldsworthy
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 18 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Caesar Augustus's story, one of the most riveting in western history, is filled with drama and contradiction, risky gambles and unexpected success. He began as a teenage warlord, whose only claim to power was as the heir of the murdered Julius Caesar. Mark Antony dubbed him "a boy who owes everything to a name," but in the years to come the youth outmaneuvered all the older and more experienced politicians and was the last man standing in 30 BC.
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You know my name...say it.
- By Steven on 12-10-14
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Cleopatra: The Egyptian Queen: The Entire Life Story
- By: THE HISTORY HOUR
- Narrated by: Lizzie Richards
- Length: 1 hr and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Cleopatra VII Philopator was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, nominally survived as pharaoh by her son Caesarion. She was also a diplomat, naval commander, polyglot, and medical author. As a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder, Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great.
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Good overview, poor narration
- By HP on 10-31-22
By: THE HISTORY HOUR
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Civilizations
- A Novel
- By: Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor - translator
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them. Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even after he is captured by the Tainos, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken. Thirty-nine years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe.
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A BRILLIANT BLEND OF HISTORY AND FICTION
- By Amazon Customer on 09-25-21
By: Laurent Binet, and others
What listeners say about How to Be a Bad Emperor
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- Anonymous User
- 08-04-23
Sleepy joe must have listened to this
Good drive into what happens when evil people have power
joe & hunter took this to heart
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- edward
- 07-10-23
Not worth listening to
I have followed many stories of ancient Rome. The depravities and viciousness of the emperors is always amazing. Unfortunately, this telling of those events is terrible. It is poorly written, disjointed, and uninterested. I couldn’t get through it all the way. Tried several times. Listen to anything else than this.
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