“The story I now commence is rich in vicissitudes, grim with warfare, torn by civil strife, a tale of horror even during times of peace”. So reads page one of The Histories by the Roman historian Tacitus and it doesn’t disappoint.

Tacitus’ Rome is a hotbed of sex and violence, of excessive wealth and senatorial corruption. His work is a pungent study in tyranny and decline that has influenced depictions of Rome, from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

From BBC Radio 4's superb series, In Our Time, the last program of the current season: Tacitus and The Decadence of Rome. Host Melvyn Bragg wrote in his program newsletter:

I fear I’ll be accused of being the man who asked three women scholars to talk about the finer, or rather the grosser, details of Roman sexuality. I’m sure you’ll accept that I simply did it in the interests of a fuller description of what Tacitus was meaning! And that’s true (no exclamation mark). The thing is that Tacitus believed that if a man (particularly a senator) could not control his own physical appetites, then there was no reason at all to trust him with the appetites brought on him by the possession of power and this, of course, went to an extreme case when you had the great power of the emperor, so he saw a direct connection there and that connection has been pursued, one way and another, in many societies ever since. I should have brought that out more keenly.

Contributors: Catharine Edwards, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck, University of London; Ellen O’Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol; Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London;