Publisher's Synopsis
The book examines the Julio-Claudian family and shows how the successors of Augustus were undermined by psychic traumas or mental disorders dating back to childhood or adolescence, which caused their decision-making instability, flight from reality and constant fear of conspiracies against them in the government of the state, to which they reacted, in order to reassert their role, with bloodbaths involving, first and foremost, their own relatives. Their women, on the other hand, repeatedly possess the political perception and energy they lack, either to make their widowhood a manifesto against the system, or, if consorts of autocrats, to impose their first-born sons as their successors using hypocritical mixtures of love and venom.
