Peter Stothard
Biographic Data
| ID | 4327196 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Stothard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Stothard |
| SIGNATURE | STOTHARD P |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 49 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Horace
Water on dust
When Sejanus persuaded Tiberius to retire to the island of Capri, Aulus Vitellius, at the beginning of his teenage years, was an early arrival at the new court. To gossips who weren’t there he was one of the emperor’s playmates for princes, an object for sexual pursuit. He was one of many, it was said, no one special. Lucius Vitellius bought a house on Capri of his own. As a rising man of palace administration he needed to stay in touch. His brot…
Who killed the prince?
Four years after the near catastrophe on the northern German shore, Publius was a lucky man with a career still on the rise. He was back in Rome and in the service of Germanicus again. The difference this time was that Germanicus was dead, last seen on duty in distant Antioch, and Publius was prosecuting the man accused as his killer, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a close friend of Tiberius. To have won the brief was already a sign of his status; it wa…
Fill me up!
Galba had a tiny court, dominated by a male lover called Icelus. In Rome, while Vitellius was still in Germany, Galba was killed by Poppaea’s ex-husband, Otho, who successfully claimed the throne for himself. Vitellius had two ambitious junior officers, Caecina and Valens, who were now organising his campaign against Otho rather than Galba. Vitellius stayed behind for a series of coronation parties. Of Nero’s former courtiers in Rome, Acte escape…
Garden ornaments
The new emperor Claudius was content with the household being a government. He had few links to the clubs of Roman life. His nervousness in speech separated him from the senate. At key moments he had been deemed too weak to be even worth killing. The weapons of the weak, insincerity and flattery, were his own. Freed slaves, scribes and cooks, eunuchs for food-tasting or sex, were his people. Claudius gave out gold rings with his own portrait to d…
Flattery’s textbook
A lucky slave was a popular type for Roman readers. It was natural for a master to think that a man was lucky to be his slave or, at least, lucky not to be someone else’s. Sometimes that thought was justified. A loyal slave might be truly lucky, well paid and then freed, often staying on in the master’s house, still telling the master what he liked to hear about himself, maybe more likely to be believed, particularly fortunate if the household wa…
In Augustus’s temple
Vespasian’s brother, Sabinus, agreed to talk surrender terms in Augustus’s Palatine temple. Aulus brought there two of his most trusted friends, Cluvius Rufus, a historian and Silius Italicus who had been consul in the previous year. He needed a deal. This was not an occasion for freedmen trained to say no. His court was a shadow of that which had had run the empire for so long. Cluvius was already writing a history of the Caesars. Silius was you…
Of unshakable loyalty to his emperor
Claudius would at some point need a new wife. The issue was who it should be, the kind of question where senior freed slaves, intimates of the family, had a stronger responsibility than those, like Lucius, who had their own families. The whole household needed clarity on who would succeed to the throne. The prospects of Messalina’s son, Britannicus, were dimming with the demise of his mother. Three men, Narcissus, Callistus and Pallas, played the…
The fox and the crow
While men and women manoeuvred their way around the Palatine of Tiberius, surviving present dangers and thinking how to survive, there was one man keeping a written record. It was not a direct history of this time. It was instead a rejection of the reality of that, even its possibility. The fables by a writer who called himself Phaedrus were guides to the problems of court life. Like those of Aesop in Greek, they looked as though they were for ch…
Tutor in vice
The last time that an emperor had left Italy was when Claudius went to Britain in 43 CE, leaving Lucius Vitellius to manage Rome. Almost a quarter of a century later, when Nero left for a singing tour of Greece, Aulus did not get the chance to match his father. Every member of Nero’s entourage was in the wrong place to sense events that would bring Nero’s suicide and the year when four men were emperors, none of them an heir of Julius Caesar. The…
Lucius Vitellius and the Son of God
Pontius Pilate, like all servants abroad, needed to follow events in Rome much more closely than his masters ever followed the trials of Jerusalem. The Jews recognised that truth as well as their governor did, not just when the issue was the fate of a self-proclaimed king and son of god. The Jewish leaders had cultivated many allies on the Palatine. So had their rivals. A battle beneath Capitol Hill produced results; one by the Mount of Olives us…
Man talks to a Moon
Caligula said he was the Sun. Whether Caligula believed this was unimportant. A man who presented himself as the Sun might reasonably imagine himself alongside the Moon. This was a kind of logic. The Sun and Moon were like each other. They were both visible gods. The Moon was also the goddess that came to men at night in dreams. She had a temple on the Palatine. In the new realism of the court it might seem natural that the chariot-riding Emperor…
In the palace doghouse
In December, 69 CE, on one of the last days in a calendar like no other, only a mattress and a wooden door stood between the pale winter light and the panting body of that year’s third emperor of Rome. The mattress smelt of dogs but most of the dogs had gone. This was a small room in a palace of large rooms but even its smallest rooms looked large to Aulus Vitellius when there was no one anywhere left behind.
God-given mushrooms
When Lucius Vitellius died in 51 CE, his elder son had already achieved as much as his family had expected of him and more. Aulus was 39, a courtier who was also a former consul and senator. His father had been three times consul. This was a record which Aulus showed no wish to match. He did not live in the past, even the very recent past. He did not ape his older senate colleagues in distant nostalgia. Aulus lived in the present, with a survivor…
Out of the doghouse
Vespasian’s troops were in Rome. Vitellius found a Palatine room where the guards once kept their dogs. He heard clanking from down below. There was the smell of burnt marble. He would not be found dead. He had neither the will nor the sword. There was a crash against the door. Aulus felt the tying of his hands and the bite of an emboldened dog. Soon there were more captors and a climb to the remains of the ancient temple. The descent was shorter…
Care for cucumbers
The gastronomic rules of the court were unpredictable. It was pious to praise the people of Italy for living modestly on corn and vegetables even when these were soon to become merely a banquet’s ‘first course’. It was prudent to eat the second and third courses if the emperor was doing the same. As the heir to the throne Tiberius had feasted the people but also curbed excess in his dining rooms. He claimed his luxury was a cucumber. As emperor h…
Pen and knives
The coming man was a courtier soldier, Lucius Aelius Sejanus. His unique source of power was the Praetorian guard, an elite force that he had taken over from his father, a pioneer of foie gras, and hugely enhanced. Sejanus’s power was military but his skills were courtly, not confrontational in the conventional warrior way. He was a soldier trained in household service, more adept than those who burnished their independent pasts, a soldier whose …
Words for a palace
As the courtiers of Tiberius adjusted to his power, outside the gates of the Palatine, were ever more parades of gifts to him from abroad. A wise diplomat kept his flattery short and his offerings effusive. The mass of the Roman people appreciated the respect shown to their emperor by exotic slaves and animals, a man who was nine feet tall, a hunchback, a dwarf, a giraffe or a giant fish. Monsters massaged the egos of those citizens who, if not w…
Oedipus and actors
As a former consul, Aulus remained a senator. Early in Nero’s reign it became even easier to combine the roles of senator and courtier. A senate meeting was held at the palace so that Agrippina could listen from behind a curtain. When the senators used coins, they saw Agrippina on the obverse and Nero relegated to the back, sometimes together like a kissing couple. But like Seneca, Agrippina began running out of ways to control Nero. She looked f…
Goat worship
Gaius Caligula was not as glamorous as he wanted to seem. He was tall, heavy-bellied, thin-legged, hairier on his body than his head, a somewhat goatish figure, although to use the word goat in his presence was perilous accuracy. Caligula’s brief reign, marked by fantasies of his own divinity, was notoriously hard for those nearby to understand. It helped to know how during six years on Capri he had himself been so extremely adept at surviving. N…
Mr Stingy
The news of Nero’s death was at first uncertain. Not everyone believed that Nero was gone. Household members, few of whom were ever popular, took much of the blame. The dead emperor still retained respect on the streets he knew so well. There was hunger for food but not necessarily for a new Caesar. Nero’s nurse, Claudia Ecloge, and his long-time lover, Claudia Acte, arranged a suitable funeral pyre, dressing him in white robes embroidered with g…
Dish of Minerva
The scenes of Nero at dinner were all familiar, Halotus the food-taster, still hovering, two of Nero’s childhood tutors present, Anicetus and Seneca, Nero’s mistress, Poppaea, on the couch where Agrippina would have been if Anicetus had not run his sword through her womb and Seneca were not left with the task of explaining the murder. Nero himself, more panicked than liberated, was still seeing his mother with him as a very angry ghost. Not even …
Emperor Vitellius
Aulus Vitellius found the same easy popularity with the people of Rome as he had with the troops of Cologne. He discovered that the memory of Nero, his long-time companion of the streets, was still warm in the places where they had played together. He ordered that an altar be built to the last Caesar in the Campus Martius behind the Capitol. Nero’s priests were to come from the order that Tiberius had established in memory of Augustus. Caecina an…
Mr Glutton and Mr Fool
The death of the first emperor. A prized personal slave had the honour of the last combing of Augustus’s hair, the last holding of a bronze mirror before his Roman nose and thick, grey eyebrows (so very different from his official portraits), the last encouragements in his struggle to ensure that neither sickness nor foreboding of death would be on show to his friends. It was important to keep up appearances when one man’s appearance had become t…
Food and fire
When fire raged through Rome in the summer of 64 CE, it was not an unusual disaster for a city built of more wood than stone. The firefighters had better access to water than those who had done the job in the past. Nero’s corn managers organised food. Subsidies were paid and prices controlled. The emperor’s failure was what he saw himself as his instant success, his personal performance of a song about the fire at Troy. Audiences also watched Ner…
No prominent works on this page.
Water on dust
When Sejanus persuaded Tiberius to retire to the island of Capri, Aulus Vitellius, at the beginning of his teenage years, was an early arrival at the new court. To gossips who weren’t there he was one of the emperor’s playmates for princes, an object for sexual pursuit. He was one of many, it was said, no one special. Lucius Vitellius bought a house on Capri of his own. As a rising man of palace administration he needed to stay in touch. His brot…
Who killed the prince?
Four years after the near catastrophe on the northern German shore, Publius was a lucky man with a career still on the rise. He was back in Rome and in the service of Germanicus again. The difference this time was that Germanicus was dead, last seen on duty in distant Antioch, and Publius was prosecuting the man accused as his killer, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a close friend of Tiberius. To have won the brief was already a sign of his status; it wa…
Fill me up!
Galba had a tiny court, dominated by a male lover called Icelus. In Rome, while Vitellius was still in Germany, Galba was killed by Poppaea’s ex-husband, Otho, who successfully claimed the throne for himself. Vitellius had two ambitious junior officers, Caecina and Valens, who were now organising his campaign against Otho rather than Galba. Vitellius stayed behind for a series of coronation parties. Of Nero’s former courtiers in Rome, Acte escape…
Garden ornaments
The new emperor Claudius was content with the household being a government. He had few links to the clubs of Roman life. His nervousness in speech separated him from the senate. At key moments he had been deemed too weak to be even worth killing. The weapons of the weak, insincerity and flattery, were his own. Freed slaves, scribes and cooks, eunuchs for food-tasting or sex, were his people. Claudius gave out gold rings with his own portrait to d…
Flattery’s textbook
A lucky slave was a popular type for Roman readers. It was natural for a master to think that a man was lucky to be his slave or, at least, lucky not to be someone else’s. Sometimes that thought was justified. A loyal slave might be truly lucky, well paid and then freed, often staying on in the master’s house, still telling the master what he liked to hear about himself, maybe more likely to be believed, particularly fortunate if the household wa…
In Augustus’s temple
Vespasian’s brother, Sabinus, agreed to talk surrender terms in Augustus’s Palatine temple. Aulus brought there two of his most trusted friends, Cluvius Rufus, a historian and Silius Italicus who had been consul in the previous year. He needed a deal. This was not an occasion for freedmen trained to say no. His court was a shadow of that which had had run the empire for so long. Cluvius was already writing a history of the Caesars. Silius was you…
Of unshakable loyalty to his emperor
Claudius would at some point need a new wife. The issue was who it should be, the kind of question where senior freed slaves, intimates of the family, had a stronger responsibility than those, like Lucius, who had their own families. The whole household needed clarity on who would succeed to the throne. The prospects of Messalina’s son, Britannicus, were dimming with the demise of his mother. Three men, Narcissus, Callistus and Pallas, played the…
The fox and the crow
While men and women manoeuvred their way around the Palatine of Tiberius, surviving present dangers and thinking how to survive, there was one man keeping a written record. It was not a direct history of this time. It was instead a rejection of the reality of that, even its possibility. The fables by a writer who called himself Phaedrus were guides to the problems of court life. Like those of Aesop in Greek, they looked as though they were for ch…
Tutor in vice
The last time that an emperor had left Italy was when Claudius went to Britain in 43 CE, leaving Lucius Vitellius to manage Rome. Almost a quarter of a century later, when Nero left for a singing tour of Greece, Aulus did not get the chance to match his father. Every member of Nero’s entourage was in the wrong place to sense events that would bring Nero’s suicide and the year when four men were emperors, none of them an heir of Julius Caesar. The…
Lucius Vitellius and the Son of God
Pontius Pilate, like all servants abroad, needed to follow events in Rome much more closely than his masters ever followed the trials of Jerusalem. The Jews recognised that truth as well as their governor did, not just when the issue was the fate of a self-proclaimed king and son of god. The Jewish leaders had cultivated many allies on the Palatine. So had their rivals. A battle beneath Capitol Hill produced results; one by the Mount of Olives us…
Man talks to a Moon
Caligula said he was the Sun. Whether Caligula believed this was unimportant. A man who presented himself as the Sun might reasonably imagine himself alongside the Moon. This was a kind of logic. The Sun and Moon were like each other. They were both visible gods. The Moon was also the goddess that came to men at night in dreams. She had a temple on the Palatine. In the new realism of the court it might seem natural that the chariot-riding Emperor…
In the palace doghouse
In December, 69 CE, on one of the last days in a calendar like no other, only a mattress and a wooden door stood between the pale winter light and the panting body of that year’s third emperor of Rome. The mattress smelt of dogs but most of the dogs had gone. This was a small room in a palace of large rooms but even its smallest rooms looked large to Aulus Vitellius when there was no one anywhere left behind.
God-given mushrooms
When Lucius Vitellius died in 51 CE, his elder son had already achieved as much as his family had expected of him and more. Aulus was 39, a courtier who was also a former consul and senator. His father had been three times consul. This was a record which Aulus showed no wish to match. He did not live in the past, even the very recent past. He did not ape his older senate colleagues in distant nostalgia. Aulus lived in the present, with a survivor…
Out of the doghouse
Vespasian’s troops were in Rome. Vitellius found a Palatine room where the guards once kept their dogs. He heard clanking from down below. There was the smell of burnt marble. He would not be found dead. He had neither the will nor the sword. There was a crash against the door. Aulus felt the tying of his hands and the bite of an emboldened dog. Soon there were more captors and a climb to the remains of the ancient temple. The descent was shorter…
Care for cucumbers
The gastronomic rules of the court were unpredictable. It was pious to praise the people of Italy for living modestly on corn and vegetables even when these were soon to become merely a banquet’s ‘first course’. It was prudent to eat the second and third courses if the emperor was doing the same. As the heir to the throne Tiberius had feasted the people but also curbed excess in his dining rooms. He claimed his luxury was a cucumber. As emperor h…
Pen and knives
The coming man was a courtier soldier, Lucius Aelius Sejanus. His unique source of power was the Praetorian guard, an elite force that he had taken over from his father, a pioneer of foie gras, and hugely enhanced. Sejanus’s power was military but his skills were courtly, not confrontational in the conventional warrior way. He was a soldier trained in household service, more adept than those who burnished their independent pasts, a soldier whose …
Words for a palace
As the courtiers of Tiberius adjusted to his power, outside the gates of the Palatine, were ever more parades of gifts to him from abroad. A wise diplomat kept his flattery short and his offerings effusive. The mass of the Roman people appreciated the respect shown to their emperor by exotic slaves and animals, a man who was nine feet tall, a hunchback, a dwarf, a giraffe or a giant fish. Monsters massaged the egos of those citizens who, if not w…
Oedipus and actors
As a former consul, Aulus remained a senator. Early in Nero’s reign it became even easier to combine the roles of senator and courtier. A senate meeting was held at the palace so that Agrippina could listen from behind a curtain. When the senators used coins, they saw Agrippina on the obverse and Nero relegated to the back, sometimes together like a kissing couple. But like Seneca, Agrippina began running out of ways to control Nero. She looked f…
Goat worship
Gaius Caligula was not as glamorous as he wanted to seem. He was tall, heavy-bellied, thin-legged, hairier on his body than his head, a somewhat goatish figure, although to use the word goat in his presence was perilous accuracy. Caligula’s brief reign, marked by fantasies of his own divinity, was notoriously hard for those nearby to understand. It helped to know how during six years on Capri he had himself been so extremely adept at surviving. N…
Mr Stingy
The news of Nero’s death was at first uncertain. Not everyone believed that Nero was gone. Household members, few of whom were ever popular, took much of the blame. The dead emperor still retained respect on the streets he knew so well. There was hunger for food but not necessarily for a new Caesar. Nero’s nurse, Claudia Ecloge, and his long-time lover, Claudia Acte, arranged a suitable funeral pyre, dressing him in white robes embroidered with g…
Dish of Minerva
The scenes of Nero at dinner were all familiar, Halotus the food-taster, still hovering, two of Nero’s childhood tutors present, Anicetus and Seneca, Nero’s mistress, Poppaea, on the couch where Agrippina would have been if Anicetus had not run his sword through her womb and Seneca were not left with the task of explaining the murder. Nero himself, more panicked than liberated, was still seeing his mother with him as a very angry ghost. Not even …
Emperor Vitellius
Aulus Vitellius found the same easy popularity with the people of Rome as he had with the troops of Cologne. He discovered that the memory of Nero, his long-time companion of the streets, was still warm in the places where they had played together. He ordered that an altar be built to the last Caesar in the Campus Martius behind the Capitol. Nero’s priests were to come from the order that Tiberius had established in memory of Augustus. Caecina an…
Mr Glutton and Mr Fool
The death of the first emperor. A prized personal slave had the honour of the last combing of Augustus’s hair, the last holding of a bronze mirror before his Roman nose and thick, grey eyebrows (so very different from his official portraits), the last encouragements in his struggle to ensure that neither sickness nor foreboding of death would be on show to his friends. It was important to keep up appearances when one man’s appearance had become t…
Food and fire
When fire raged through Rome in the summer of 64 CE, it was not an unusual disaster for a city built of more wood than stone. The firefighters had better access to water than those who had done the job in the past. Nero’s corn managers organised food. Subsidies were paid and prices controlled. The emperor’s failure was what he saw himself as his instant success, his personal performance of a song about the fire at Troy. Audiences also watched Ner…
Lucius rules the world
Two years into his reign Claudius divided the senior men of Rome into three groups, those whom he needed for the conquest of Britain, the island of dogs, slaves, oysters and possibly gold, the task in which even Julius Caesar had failed. There were those whom he needed with him to stop them exploiting his absence by a coup, and those whom he trusted to run the city and empire while the emperor was away. The leader of the third group, consul in 43…
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