Representing Rome’s Emperors: Historical and Cultural Perspectives Through Time

Roman emperors have long functioned--and continue to function--in the western imagination as paradigms of imperial leadership to be emulated or avoided. This innovative volume brings together an international team of experts to examine the literary and artistic representations of Roman emperors across more than two thousand years of history. In doing so, it breaks down traditional disciplinary boundaries that have separated the study of emperors in antiquity from their representation in later periods. The individual chapters offer close readings of different texts, media, and contexts, ranging from the Annals of Tacitus, Roman lamps, and triumphal statues to medieval legends, early modern philosophical tracts, twentieth-century novels, and museum exhibitions. Collectively they explore the creative impulses and political agendas that have shaped how we understand Roman emperors today.

Caillan Davenport, Associate Professor of Classics and Head of the Centre for Classical Studies, the Australian National University, Shushma Malik, Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge and Onassis Classics Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge

Caillan Davenport is Associate Professor of Classics and Head of the Centre for Classical Studies at The Australian National University. He was educated at the University of Queensland and the University of Oxford before holding posts at Queensland, Macquarie University, and ANU. He has received an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. He is the author of A History of the Roman Equestrian Order (2019), which won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize.

Shushma Malik is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, and Onassis Classics Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. She graduated with a PhD in Classics from the University of Bristol in 2013, and since then has held posts at the Universities of Manchester, Queensland, Roehampton, and Cambridge. She has research expertise in imperial Rome and its reception, and is author of The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (2020). From 2020-2023, Shushma was Co-Investigator on a research project co-funded by the AHRC (UK) and DFG (Germany) on the study of ancient corruption.