Veteran journalist and
author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Rose Mary Sheldon’s Kill Caerar:
Assassination in the Early Roman Empire for the Washington Times.
The truly professional
service officers sworn to guard chiefs of state and other dignitaries — notably
U.S. Secret Service officers — have a hard rule: Good intelligence is the key
to saving the subject’s life.
When intelligence
fails, the result can be disaster. And such certainly was the case in the Roman
Empire. Despite the detailing of up to 9,000 men to guard the emperors, 85
percent of the men who sat on the throne were assassinated.
Even Rose Mary
Sheldon, a professor of history at Virginia Military Institute, and
our foremost authority on ancient intelligence, was startled at the body count.
Why and how did the
Romans resort to assassination to rid themselves of rulers? Ms. Sheldon
explores the fate of Julius Caesar and his four immediate successors to explore
what went horribly wrong in Rome — how security failures and seemingly endless
family wrangles cost so many lives.
Her case studies show
that the Roman Empire was a boiling cauldron of conspiracy, where even an
emperor’s brothers or sons were not beyond suspicion. She lists four broad
groups an emperor had to control to feel safe: The aristocracy, the military,
the populace and his own family.
More unsettling, “the
very people who made up the emperor’s closest circle were also the ones who
could endanger his security.”
You can read the rest
of the review via the below link:
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