“Secrets of the Colosseum: Ancient Roman Gossip Book Reignites Scandal in the Modern Bestseller Charts!”
“It is full of scandal, and extraordinary detail, but it is also very psychologically astute,” he told The Guardian. “It has the quality of a very highbrow gossip column.”
Notably, it is also the first hardback nonfiction book from Penguin Classics that has appeared on the bestseller list of the Sunday Times, marking a major achievement for the publisher. Regarding the book’s placement on the charts, Holland said he was “delighted for Suetonius, to see the lad is capable of getting on the bestseller list after two millennia.”
Why A Gossipy Roman Book Became A Bestseller 2,000 Years Later
It may seem strange that a second-century C.E. book about Roman emperors is landing on today’s bestseller charts, but there several reasons why people in 2025 are still fascinated by ancient Rome.
“We see the Caesars eat, drink, marry, divorce, get angry, make jokes, take exercise, urinate, listen to people break wind, tie up their sandals,” Holland wrote in The Times. “So scandalous are the details of their sex lives that entire paragraphs, in Victorian editions, might be reduced to asterisks. What happened at an emperor’s table or in his bedroom, Suetonius sought to demonstrate, was bound to inform what happened across the vast expanse of the empire.”
De Balie/Wikimedia CommonsTom Holland, the author and podcast host behind the new translation.
“He did not just stamp for ever the way that posterity would remember Caligula or Nero,” Holland continued, “he played a key role in ensuring that posterity would remember them in the first place.”
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