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Augustus exiled me to Tomis on the Black Sea in 8 AD, for a poem and a mistake — carmen et error. I was fifty-one years old. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, a witty guide to seduction written a decade earlier. The mistake he never specified. Scholars have speculated: I may have witnessed something compromising involving Augustus's granddaughter Julia, who...

I wrote under emperors. All Roman historians wrote under emperors, which is one reason so much Roman history is either flattery or careful allegory. I tried to write neither. I wrote the Annals and the Histories, covering the reigns from Tiberius to Domitian — the worst emperors Rome produced. I survived Domitian, who executed senators for writing...

The Vergilius Vaticanus — the Vatican Virgil — is the oldest illustrated book to survive from antiquity. It was made around 400 AD and contains pictures alongside the text of the Aeneid. The illustrations show Dido's banquet, the fall of Troy, the storm at sea. They are the earliest visual interpretations of my poem.

I spent eleven years on the Aeneid and...

Cesare Maccari painted this in 1889, and it captures something real about the scene: I am standing. Catiline is seated. Around him, the other senators have moved away, leaving him isolated.

In November 63 BC, I had evidence — letters, testimony, intercepted dispatches — that Lucius Sergius Catilina was planning to murder the consuls, fire the city, and...

The Senate dedicated the Ara Pacis — Altar of Peace — in 9 BC to commemorate my return from campaigns in Spain and Gaul. Peace was the theme; peace was the product I was selling.

I ended the civil wars that had torn Rome apart for a century. Julius Caesar had centralised power but had not found a form for it. I invented the Principate — not a monarchy,...

Brutus minted this coin after my assassination — the 'EID MAR' aureus, commemorating the Ides of March. He put two daggers on it, and a cap of liberty. He was announcing that he had freed Rome from a tyrant.

I would put a different interpretation on the two daggers. They stood for two consuls, Brutus and Cassius, who led the conspiracy. Within three...

The Meditations were never meant to be published. I wrote them in Greek — not Latin, which was unusual for a Roman emperor — during military campaigns on the Danube frontier. The German tribes were pressing and I was pressing back, and in the evenings I wrote reminders to myself about how to behave.

Do not waste what remains of your life in thoughts about...

I did not write the Discourses. My student Arrian wrote them down — he attended my lectures in Nicopolis around 108 AD and transcribed what I said. I am told he preserved the tone accurately. If so, readers will notice that I argued by example, by question, by the direct address of an imagined interlocutor. Lecture notes are not the same as polished prose....

Vincenzo Camuccini painted it in 1804 and got most of it wrong. I did not fall dramatically at the base of Pompey's statue — that detail is Plutarch's flourish and possibly not accurate. The wounds were twenty-three, of which only one was immediately fatal according to the physician Antistius. The others were superficial. My senators were not very good...

The equestrian statue on the Capitoline Hill has stood for nearly two thousand years. It survived because medieval Christians believed it depicted Constantine — the first Christian emperor — rather than a pagan. Had they known it was me, they would have melted it down.

I find this instructive. So much of what survives from antiquity survived by accident,...

The mosaic from Sousse — made three hundred years after my death — shows me seated with the Muses of history and tragedy on either side, holding a scroll of the Aeneid. I am reading the line: Musa, mihi causas memora — Muse, recall to me the causes. The beginning. The question that the whole poem is trying to answer: why do empires rise? What do they cost?...

For centuries this portrait was identified as me — the Stoic philosopher, tutor to Nero, forced to open his own veins in 65 AD. Scholars now believe it may be someone else entirely. I find this fitting. I spent much of my life wondering whether the Seneca who wrote about virtue was the same man who accepted money from an emperor who murdered his own...