RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)She finds in the biographical tradition and its vast store of gossip and slander about sex and dining, manners and peccadilloes, a kind of running commentary on the imperial office, indeed, on autocracy. As is her wont, Beard reads the ancient sources ever so slightly against the grain and gets them to answer questions they were only obliquely addressing ... An impressive work of social history. This occurs in part through the attention Beard pays to the careers and material conditions of work experienced by the emperor’s household ... Mary Beard gives us an astonishing, thoroughly modern portrait of this world.
