Never the preferred heir, Tiberius (42 BC – 37 AD / reigned 14 – 37 AD) soon showed why Augustus had wanted someone else. His political inability, poor judgment ...

A review of How to Be A Bad Emperor by Suetonius, selected and translated by Josiah Osgood. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote around 120 A.D., more than one hundred years after the establishment of ...

Tiberius is known today, if at all, as the man who greased the Roman Empire’s slide into the degenerate dictatorships of Caligula, Claudius and Nero. So let’s take a look at the reign of Tiberius ...

Since 2016, a genre of journalism has emerged in the Democratic press to explain the 45th American president as a version of one of history’s great tyrants. There is, of course, Trump as Hitler, ...

The author of an outstanding biography of Nero, Prof. Champlin proposed to follow it with one on Tiberius. Although he never completed the project, he did write several papers about that ill-reputed ...

It is the year 33 A.D. The Emperor Tiberius is troubled by strange phenomena, an earthquake and the sky turning black as an eclipse. His astrologers give him fair warning: their omens indicate that ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...