“One of the really remarkable books of our day”—the story of the Roman emperor on which the award-winning BBC TV series was based (The New York Times).
 
Once a rather bookish young man with a limp and a stammer, a man who spent most of his time trying to stay away from the danger and risk of the line of ascension, Claudius seemed an unlikely candidate for emperor. Yet, on the death of Caligula, Claudius...

The story of Messalina, third wife of the emperor Claudius and one of the most notorious women to have inhabited the Roman world. The image of the empress Messalina as a ruthless, sexually insatiable schemer, derived from the work of Roman historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius, has taken deep root in the Western imagination. The stories they told about her included nightly visits to a brothel and a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a prostitute....

"Tormented by the murder of his family, the young, wary Caligula eliminates his devious adoptive grandfather Tiberius and seizes control of the declining Roman Empire as it descends into a spiral of depravity, destruction, and madness. Restoring the complete performances of McDowell and O'Toole along with fellow film legends Helen Mirren and John Gielgud, this extensive reconstruction of the notorious 1980 spectacle, based on the original narrative...