Since the city was not adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded ... [Augustus] so beautified it that he could justly boast that he had found it built of brick and left it in marble.

Over the course of the 1st century AD,the Roman Empire achieved never before seen glories. In Lives of the Caesars, the Roman historian Suetonius recounts the story of the rise of the Roman Empire through the colourful characters of its emperors. By turns courageous, tyrannical, extravagant, and visionary, the dictator Julius Caesar and the eleven emperors who followed him wielded exceptional power and shaped the history of the Mediterranean.

A masterpiece of both history and biography, Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars is an essential and readable account of Rome's first century under the emperors.