Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STEPHEN DANDO-COLLINS is the author of Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome, Nero's Killing Machine: The True Story of Rome's Remarkable Fourteenth Legion, Cleopatra's Kidnappers: How Caesar's Sixth Legion Gave Egypt to Rome and Rome to Caesar, and Mark Antony's Heroes: How the Third Gallica Legion Saved an Apostle and Created an Emperor. He is an Australian-born researcher, editor, and author who has spent the last three decades identifying and studying the individual legions of the Roman army of the late Republic and the empire of the Caesars.

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It was an unfitting death for any Roman soldier. For the empire's greatest hero--a brilliant thirty-three-year-old general, fierce warrior, and gifted diplomat, beloved by the people and in line to become the third emperor--to die in his bed, after suffering weeks of agony, was more than a shock: it was a crime. Germanicus Julius Caesar died with the names of his presumed murderers on his lips, imploring his friends to bring charges against them. The year was A.D. 19, and, says noted historian and author Stephen Dando-Collins, the seeds of the destruction of the empire had just been sown.

In Blood of the Caesars, the fifth of his stirring histories of Rome, Dando-Collins delves into this ancient murder mystery with a fresh eye, a keen mind, and a host of questions. He lays out the evidence that Germanicus was poisoned, assesses the cases against those accused of the murder, and unearths a raft of new suspects, many of whom were among the most prominent and respected citizens of Rome. Then, he supplies a stunning solution to the mystery.

This provocative account unveils the labyrinthian array of intrigues, plots, counterplots, deceptions, and double-dealing that led up to the death of Germanicus and came into full flower after his murder. Beginning with the killing (not suicide, as many claimed) of one of those accused of poisoning Germanicus and followed by verdicts and sentences in the trial that many believed to be a sham, these sub-rosa doings included both failed and successful attempts on the lives of emperors.

How profound was the impact of Germanicus's death? Huge mobs stormed temples around the city because the gods had ignored their prayers for his life; Rome's bitter enemy King Atarbanus of Parthia declared a period of mourning; barbarians at war with the empire made peace in his honor. More darkly, Dando-Collins shows that the emperor Augustus had picked Germanicus to succeed Augustus's immediate heir, Tiberius, believing that the young general was the only man in Rome who could complete the job of empire-building that the first emperor had begun. With his death, Rome ceased to be a work in progress and became an unfinished edifice that could only crumble with time.

Blood of the Caesars combines a fascinating journey into the ancient world with a compelling real-life murder mystery and a truly astonishing solution that will require the rewriting of Roman history.

Aus dem Klappentext

It was an unfitting death for any Roman soldier. For the empire's greatest hero--a brilliant thirty-three-year-old general, fierce warrior, and gifted diplomat, beloved by the people and in line to become the third emperor--to die in his bed, after suffering weeks of agony, was more than a shock: it was a crime. Germanicus Julius Caesar died with the names of his presumed murderers on his lips, imploring his friends to bring charges against them. The year was a.d. 19, and, says noted historian and author Stephen Dando-Collins, the seeds of the destruction of the empire had just been sown.

In Blood of the Caesars, the fifth of his stirring histories of Rome, Dando-Collins delves into this ancient murder mystery with a fresh eye, a keen mind, and a host of questions. He lays out the evidence that Germanicus was poisoned, assesses the cases against those accused of the murder, and unearths a raft of new suspects, many of whom were among the most prominent and respected citizens of Rome. Then, he supplies a stunning solution to the mystery.

This provocative account unveils the labyrinthian array of intrigues, plots, counterplots, deceptions, and double-dealing that led up to the death of Germanicus and came into full flower after his murder. Beginning with the killing (not suicide, as many claimed) of one of those accused of poisoning Germanicus and followed by verdicts and sentences in the trial that many believed to be a sham, these sub-rosa doings included both failed and successful attempts on the lives of emperors.

How profound was the impact of Germanicus's death? Huge mobs stormed temples around the city because the gods had ignored their prayers for his life; Rome's bitter enemy King Atarbanus of Parthia declared a period of mourning; barbarians at war with the empire made peace in his honor. More darkly, Dando-Collins shows that the emperor Augustus had picked Germanicus to succeed Augustus's immediate heir, Tiberius, believing that the young general was the only man in Rome who could complete the job of empire-building that the first emperor had begun. With his death, Rome ceased to be a work in progress and became an unfinished edifice that could only crumble with time.

Blood of the Caesars combines a fascinating journey into the ancient world with a compelling real-life murder mystery and a truly astonishing solution that will require the rewriting of Roman history.

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Blood of the Caesars

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

A murder is in progress. The most famous Roman of his day, heir apparent to Rome's imperial throne, lies on his bed, racked with pain and convinced that he has been poisoned. Thirty-three-year-old Germanicus Julius Caesar, grandson of Mark Antony, brother of Claudius, father of Caligula, grandfather of Nero, nephew, adopted son, and heir apparent of the emperor Tiberius, is a handsome, principled, dashing young Roman general adored by the Roman people. According to one Roman authority, Germanicus was seen as potentially the equal of Alexander the Great as a soldier and as a man. Talented, courageous, and kind, he was, to many, the hope of Rome. And here he is just hours away from meeting his death.

It is early October in the year A.D. 19, twenty-three years after the birth of Christ. We are in the grand palace at Daphne (sometimes called Epidaphna), on the Orontes River, five miles west of Antioch, capital of the Roman province of Syria. That province takes in most of modern-day Syria plus Lebanon and part of Turkey. In A.D. 19, the palace at Daphne, along with temples to Jupiter, Apollo, and Diana, sat amid ten shaded and sacred square miles of tall cypress trees, cool ponds, and rippling streams. This October day, beyond lofty, pillared halls and lush courtyard gardens with their tumbling, perfumed fountains and sweet-smelling flowers, all attention is focused on the bedchamber of the dying young general.

At the bedside kneels Germanicus's attractive thirty-two-year-old wife, Agrippina, granddaughter of the late emperor Augustus and daughter of Augustus's loyal lieutenant Marcus Agrippa. She is alternatively giving Germanicus sips of water and dabbing his flushed face with a damp cloth. His redheaded young chief of staff and five of his best friends-generals and Roman senators-cluster around the bed. Some of them are looking worried, others, angry. Anxious servants hover in the background.

Germanicus Caesar's multifaceted fame has spread beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, as far as Parthia, Rome's traditional enemy farther to the east in latter-day Iraq and Iran. The Parthians know that as a youthful colonel Germanicus had played an important role in putting down a five-year revolt in the Balkans, leading flying columns that tracked down and eliminated rebel forces in Dalmatia. As Roman commander in chief on the Rhine he led massive counteroffensives against German armies led by Arminius-or Hermann, as the Germans called him-after the three Roman legions of General Publius Quintilius Varus had been notoriously wiped out by Hermann in Germany's Teutoburg Forest. Sweeping into central Germany, Germanicus had defeated the Germans in three major battles, and had kept the German hordes east of the Rhine. After recapturing two of the three sacred golden eagle standards of the legions of Varus destroyed by Hermann, Germanicus had consecrated those standards at Rome. In doing so, he gave Romans back their pride.

The Senate had voted Germanicus a Triumph for his achievements in Germany. When he drove through the streets of Rome in a golden four-horse chariot on his triumphal procession on May 25, A.D. 17, those streets were lined with as many as a million cheering Romans, many seated in the massive Circus Maximus, through which the Triumphal procession passed, others seated on the temporary wooden tiers erected along the broader city streets for Triumphs. That day, too, Germanicus had done something quite unique. Prior to this, generals celebrating a Triumph had shared the chariot with just a driver and an attendant. On the day of his Triumph, Germanicus had shared his chariot with his then five children, including four-year-old Caligula and even his youngest daughter, two-year-old Agrippina the Younger.

Sent by the emperor Tiberius to become commander in chief of the Roman East that same year, Germanicus had sailed across the Mediterranean, landed in southern Turkey, and marched into Armenia, a country tussled over by Rome and Parthia for centuries, to dethrone one king and make another. The king of Parthia, Artabanus had made his son king of Armenia, but Germanicus had other ideas. He hadn't gone into Armenia with an army. He went with just his personal staff. After crossing treacherous mountains and trekking hundreds of miles, he had entered the Armenian capital of Artaxata as the Parthian-installed ruler fled ahead of him. There, Germanicus had crowned the son of the king of Roman ally Pontus as Armenia's new King Artaxias, allying the country to Rome.

Half a century before, Germanicus's grandfather Mark Antony had achieved a similar result in the face of Parthian resistance, but he had taken a hundred thousand Roman soldiers into Armenia to do it. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, King Artabanus of Parthia-the King of Kings, as he was styled-was in dread of Germanicus, and in dread of the possibility that the reputedly unbeatable Germanicus would lead his legions on an invasion of Parthia. To pacify Germanicus, the Parthian king had sent envoys with gifts of crowns of gold for the prince of Rome. And then he had come himself to the bank of the Euphrates River, the border between Parthia and Roman Syria, to meet with Germanicus and seal a peace treaty with Rome.

No Roman had ever before brought the Parthians to heel like this; certainly no Roman who marched without an army at his back and who achieved success purely on the strength of his reputation and his personality. Running out of honors for Germanicus, the Senate voted him an Ovation, a form of Triumph where the recipient rode through the streets of Rome on horseback on his triumphal progress rather than in a chariot.

Even before he came to the East, Germanicus, said the Roman biographer Suetonius, had won such popular devotion that he was "in danger of being mobbed to death whenever he arrived at or left Rome." No Roman before or after Germanicus won such popularity. From comforting his wounded soldiers at their bedsides to talking with people in the city streets, in the words of first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, Germanicus had never let his royal dignity "prevent him being familiar with them all, as if they were his equals."

Germanicus's charismatic image was enhanced by his gutsy, much-admired wife, Agrippina, herself a member of the royal family of the Caesars, who devotedly went everywhere with her husband. Imagine a glamorous pair of young royals today who were also movie stars-such was the status achieved by Germanicus and his Agrippina in their day and long after it. If there had been celebrity magazines in those times, young Germanicus Caesar and Agrippina would have dominated their covers year in, year out.

Now Germanicus is dying. And he knows it. Weeks before, in September, he had been hit by the first violent symptoms. News of his sudden illness, which quickly laid him low, swept around the Roman Empire. At that time, the government courier service, the Cursus Publicus Velox-literally "the State's very fast runner"-could take news to Rome from the farthest edge of the empire in just ten days via its express riders and fast stage coaches. At Rome, when the news of Germanicus's serious illness arrived late one day in the early fall, people rushed in their thousands...