Beginning with the events that led to the Republic-ending civil war, and ending with the granting of citizenship to all subjects of the imperium, Beard frames and gives context to some of the most well-known stories of history. Some of these have become almost mythical, colored by literary and popular retellings. Beard takes a lot of what you thought you knew about Rome, deconstructs it, and recasts it in a more realistic, more organic, more human mold. Sometimes this can be unsettling, such as when she suggests Caligula may not have been so bad (she calls him by his proper name Gaius), and Claudius not the reluctant good emperor he has been depicted as. The concept that the victors write the history is applied here, as she points out that the emperors who were assassinated were also universally maligned as psychotic.

I especially enjoyed the later chapters concerning the lives of the common Roman, for which so little evidence remains. What we have, however, are tantalizing clues that we may relate to these folk, rather than the sons of the deified Caesar.