Dynasty : the rise and fall of the house of Caesar / Tom Holland.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon --his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic--with Dynasty , a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors.

Dynasty continues Rubicon 's story, opening where that book ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman Emperors and it's a colorful story of rule and ruination, running from the rise of Augustus through to the death of Nero. Holland's expansive history also has distinct shades of I Claudius , with five wonderfully vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) Emperors--Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero--featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony, lust, incest, pageantry, decadence--the tale of these five Caesars continues to cast a mesmerizing spell across the millennia.