Hugely enjoyable fictional recreation of the turbulent, traumatic period after Julius Caesar’s assassination. Iggulden is particularly good at showing how all the main protagonists believed, honestly, that they were acting honourably and for the good of Rome. A peculiarity of my reading is the extraordinarily long memory shadow cast by watching I, Claudius on TV in the seventies – it’s all but impossible for me to read about Augustus (Octavian in his youth) without seeing Brian Blessed.

In the excellent short story included at the end of the book, with Augustus at the end of his life fretting over who should rule the Empire after him, Livia was, inevitably, Sian Philips and Tiberius was George Baker. Still, they are fine shadows to have cast over a story!