Video chat: Josiah Osgood on how to be a bad emperor

Episode 12 of “Meet the Greco-Romans”

Welcome to another entry in our occasional series of video chats with authors and translators who have written about the philosophy, culture, and history of the Greco-Roman tradition.

In this episode I talk to Josiah Osgood, a historian of Rome who researches the fall of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. His first book, Caesar’s Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2006) explores the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar and its memorialization in literature. In subsequent books and articles Josiah has continued to look at political violence and civil war. Turia: A Roman Woman’s Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2014) tells the story of a woman of the first century BC who helped her family survive waves of unrest.

Josiah’s latest book is Uncommon Wrath: How Caesar and Cato’s Deadly Rivalry Destroyed the Roman Republic (Basic Books, 2022). He has also co-edited several volumes on Roman history, historiography, and literature. For Princeton University Press’ popular Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, he has translated How to Be a Bad Emperor (Suetonius) and How to Stop a Conspiracy (Sallust). Josiah regularly writes and speaks about the value of studying Classics in democracies today and has contributed to such outlets as The Washington Post, Open Mind, and Medium as well as a number of podcasts.

Josiah and I have chatted about Suetonius and bad Roman emperors. Here is our conversation: