“Peter Stothard is a master of modern writing about ancient Rome, of vividly bringing to life its poetry and its poets.”-Mary Beard

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE) wrote some of ancient Rome’s greatest poetry, melding languages and cultures with youthful ideals and a realist’s recognition of the dictatorial world around him. Horace is famed for his fine phrases, lyric sex, and guidance on how to live, but he was a poet maddened by war, and many of his most self-revealing poems have rarely been read. He could be sublime and obscene, amusing and abusive, a model of moderation and anything but.

In this book, the first modern retelling of Horace’s life, Peter Stothard follows the poet from his birth as the son of a formerly enslaved father through his rise to the highest circles of Roman society. He shines a light on how shattering experiences in the war to save Rome’s republic shaped the loyal servant and revolutionary artist he became. With astute scholarship and sympathy, Stothard follows Horace’s rise from humble beginnings to the social and political heights of the autocracy he had fought to prevent.

14 CE: The first Roman emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine Hill, about to become the birthplace of Western bureaucracy, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive.

This is a Roman history with a cast of new men and newly dominant women, those reviled too often in the past as flatterers and gluttons, uppity slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes and unhinged party animals. Palatine uncovers the lives of the Vitellii, perhaps Rome’s least admired imperial clan, of Publius, an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age, of Lucius, an exceptionally skilled and sycophantic courtier, and of Aulus a genial sluggard whose prowess at the table carries him all the way to the throne before collapsing his family’s reputation for ever. Few now remember them. Yet in their creeping ascent to the very summit of the imperial hierarchy lie neglected truths about a lasting legacy of Rome.

14 CE: The first Roman emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine Hill, about to become the birthplace of Western bureaucracy, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive.

This is a Roman history with a cast of new men and newly dominant women, those reviled too often in the past as flatterers and gluttons, uppity slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes and unhinged party animals. Palatine uncovers the lives of the Vitellii, perhaps Rome’s least admired imperial clan, of Publius, an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age, of Lucius, an exceptionally skilled and sycophantic courtier, and of Aulus a genial sluggard whose prowess at the table carries him all the way to the throne before collapsing his family’s reputation for ever. Few now remember them. Yet in their creeping ascent to the very summit of the imperial hierarchy lie neglected truths about a lasting legacy of Rome.

Many men killed Julius Caesar. Only one man was determined to kill the killers.

THE LAST ASSASSIN dazzlingly charts an epic turn of history through the eyes of an unheralded man. It is a hunt that an emperor wanted to hide, of torture and terror, politics and poetry, of ideas and their consequences, a gripping story of fear, revenge and survival.