If it weren't for the fact that I needed to read this for a uni essay, I never would have finished it. It's a fictional memoir of Tiberius (complete with prologue and postscript that give an account of how this memoir fell into the hands of the author, even with a bit of Christian evangelising in the latter!), and it is a great example of why I often struggle with historical fiction, particularly when it's set in a period I know a lot about. I know a lot about the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Therefore, this review is enormously biased and I happily admit to that fact.

Regardless, I just found this to be awful. Massie picks and chooses which chunks of the historical record he wants to use, and is quite happy to write the opposite of what he ignores. I think I found this particularly annoying because of the way the book claims to be Tiberius' memoirs. If you want to pretend that something is the ~true~ version of events, I feel like you need to pay more attention to history than if you're just writing a novel based on the period and even its most well-known figures.

The worst thing for me, though, was the way that Massie, in attempting to redeem Tiberius, demonised practically every woman of the era, with the notable exceptions being Vipsania and Antonia. Women are either whores or 'prigs'. There is no attempt to look beyond the ancient writers' biases regarding their representation of the women of the period and, in fact, I would argue that writers such as Tacitus, Dio and Suetonius actually present women more even-handedly than this book does.

Oh well, at least I didn't have to read the author's book about Augustus. That may well have killed me ;)

This is one of the best of Allan Massie's books on Rome. An attempt to get inside the head of a very difficult man, faced with the almost impossible task of running an Empire he had inherited, almost against his will. The final page is a bonus that brought me up short. ( )

Engrossing and sympathetic portrait of an Emperor who has rarely been regarded sympathetically. The ending (narrated by his German freedman was also a little unexpected. ( )

Of the four novels in the author's series about Roman rulers I have read so far, this is the one that seemed to flow the best. In some respects the most interesting as Tiberius is perhaps relatively less well known than Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Augustus, he comes across as a sympathetic man who would much rather not be supreme ruler. An engrossing read. I hope Massie continues with his series and decides to do Claudius, Robert Graves notwithstanding. ( )