Joey, Do You Like Posts About....Gladiators?

No, but really, this is cool: De Imperatoribus Romanis, a compendium of everything you've always wanted to know about the Roman Emperors from the establisment of the Principate by Octavian after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC (in which he put the kybosh on Marc Antony) all the way up until the fall of Constantine XI Palaeologus before the gates of Constantinople, as he vainly sought to protect the city from the invading Ottomans in 1453 AD. (By the way, this is a very good history of the siege and conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed II. When I first realized that the Eastern Roman Empire officially came to an end a mere 40 years prior to Columbus's first voyage of discovery and was, in fact, one of the primary motivations for it, I got seriously massive shudders about the connectivety of history.)

A quick flip through the Julio-Claudians indicates some fair and balanced assessments, with the authors taking pains to differentiate between what we know and what we think. The entry on Caligula reminds me of a professor from the University of Texas (whose name escapes me) who used to come and give lectures at our JCL meetings when I was in high school. He was a Brit, a tall man with rather wild eyes and would get up on stage and say, almost spit, "Caligula....wasn't.... really..... crazy!!" We young thugs thought it endlessly funny to bug out our eyes and mockingly imitate the man. So much for Classical Education.

Yips! to Lynn S at Reflections in D minor.

UPDATE: Fer cryin' out loud, via TC Leather Penguin I find that using "B.C." and "A.D." now appears to be verboten among the P.C. crowd. Very well, just to cover the bases, the Battle of Actium would have been in the year 722 Ab Urbe Condita. If you can keep counting that way after Rome ceased to be part of the Empire, Constantinople would have fallen in the year 2206 AUC.