Emperors

Mary Beard is everybody’s favourite poster girl. A classics don from Cambridge, Beard is revered for rescuing Roman history from a dusty discipline, elevating it to a primer on personality and power. Beard is erudite and entertaining; she writes expansively on ancient Rome – everything from laughter to shoes to sex in the swimming pool.A good place to start reading Mary Beard is It’s a Don’s Life. This memoir began as a blog on her life as a don (a lecturer) in Cambridge. I found it zippy and sparkly; it talks about…

Wine was a big deal in ancient Rome. The emperor himself opened each year’s wine grape harvest by cutting a symbolic cluster of grapes and sacrificing a lamb to the god Jupiter. As a young man, emperor-to-be Marcus Aurelius attended such a ceremony: “I set out for my father and stood by him at the sacrifice. Then I went to lunch,” the 21-year-old wrote around 141 C.E. “Then we set ourselves to the task of picking the grapes; we sweated, and rejoiced.” Now,…

A team of researchers has cracked a five century-old code which reveals a rumored French plot to kill the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V.Charles was one of the most powerful men of the 16th century, presiding over a vast empire that took in much of western Europe and the Americas during a reign of more than 40 years.It took the team from the Loria research lab in eastern France six months to decipher the letter written in 1547 by the emperor to his ambassador in France.The tumultuous period saw a…