Chris Scarre’s Chronicle of the Roman Emperors is very well written and amply illustrated. This 240 page book presents all the basic information on the different emperors and their reigns in a balanced and very readable manner. It is quite a feat to manage to outline their respective characters in the relatively brief space allotted to each of them within the format of this book; yet the author generally succeeds remarkably well at this. Some are of course necessarily portrayed more detailed than others, and some only very sketchily, depending on how long they held (or vied for) power. For the most part the layout works well, though not always – at times I would choose to rather leaf back to read some of the information in the sidebars, and especially in the case of the double paged inserts with photos and texts focusing on construction works. Though just that detailed information on the major buildings and monuments that were constructed under the different reigns was also one feature of this book that I very much appreciated.
Each short biography starts out with photographs of busts and/or coin portraits of the individual emperors and quotations from Roman historians, and there are also sidebars with information about dates of birth, accession and death, and imperial titles – which gives you a quick overview - and their genealogical trees are given whenever it is relevant. The bias of earlier historians are discussed, and I thought this was handled really well also in connection with the tensions between paganism and Christianity. Scarre has done a great job in his descriptions and discussions of the personal qualities of each emperor; be it in warfare, in private, public and religious life, or as reformers or builders - and the waxing and waning of the empire is presented clearly and with good maps, though there could perhaps have been a few more of them. Then again there could have been more of almost everything (after all this book covers a period of nearly 500 years) but then that would also have been an entirely different book. This works perfectly well as it is, and as a basic introduction I’d recommend it for anyone.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )

I am generally not a fan of works which are surveys of large periods. Nonetheless, this book reads as well as one could expect when covering each emperor from Augustus until the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th Century.

Obviously each biography is very brief, although the materials are supplemented with helpful photographs, map and inserts containing interesting anecdotes. ( )

Excellent although very brief overview of the reigns and personalities of the men who claimed to be Emperors of Rome. ( )

2845 Chronicle of the Roman Emperors: The Reign-By-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Rome, by Chris Scarre (read 29 Feb 1996) This is really a reference book, lavishly illustrated, with time lines and genealogical tables. Very well done, but really not designed to be read from first page to last, as I did. ( )

Inexpensive and excellent. Naturally it is not going too deep, but it provides a very good overview of the history of the Roman Emperors. Definitely a recommendation! ( )