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Historical person
60 BCE–29
Livia was the wife of Augustus and a central matriarch of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Her long public career linked the household of Augustus to the succession of Tiberius, while later sources made her a powerful and sometimes sinister symbol of female influence at court.
In Fiona Forsyth’s Death and the Poet, Ovid’s wife Fabia arrives from Rome carrying a cryptic message from Livia and becomes an active participant in the investigation. In Fiona Forsyth’s Written in Blood, Livia secretly entrusts Ovid with a boy named Gaius whose imperial descent could make him useful or dangerous to rival factions in Rome. Other novels featuring Livia include Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
In non-fiction, Livia is discussed in Lindsay Powell’s Eager for Glory. Lindsay Powell’s Eager for Glory approaches the subject through family, marriage and personal loyalty, empire, conquest and resistance, and social change and the pressures of ordinary life.
Series
The Publius Ovidius Mysteries reimagine the exiled poet Ovid as an unwilling investigator in Tomis on the Black Sea. His self-importance, literary knowledge and connections to Rome make him both useful and dangerous to Marcus Avitius, the provincial adviser responsible for maintaining order. The frontier setting places local…
All books in this series
The Claudius Series is Robert Graves’s two-volume fictional memoir of the Roman emperor Claudius and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. I, Claudius follows the imperial family from Augustus to Caligula through Claudius’s wary, observant voice, while Claudius the God covers his own reign and the forces that undermine it. Together…
All books in this series
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
