Blood and Power in Ancient Rome

Power in Rome rarely changed hands peacefully. It was taken with a knife.

From the murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March to the conspiracy that ended the life of Aurelian, the Roman Empire was shaped not only by its greatest victories but by the violent deaths of its rulers.

In Blood and Power in Ancient Rome, historian Abednego Abbey explores five assassinations that reshaped the course of Roman history. Each death reveals the same unsettling truth: in Rome, the closer a man came to a...