“As this book triumphantly demonstrates, there is no one on the face of the planet better qualified than Mary Beard to guide us through the great hall of mirrors, labyrinthine and treacherous as it is, that separates us from the Twelve Caesars.”—Tom Holland, author of Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic“Deftly weaving together past and present, this elegantly written book analyzes the allure of Roman imperial iconography from the early modern period up to the present day. Often reading like a detective novel, it focuses on the formation of a canonical group of twelve Caesars that were invented and reinvented, interpreted and reinterpreted, for purposes that varied from a simple lust for collecting to political self-fashioning.”—Patricia Fortini Brown, author of The Venetian Bride: Bloodlines and Blood Feuds in Venice and Its Empire“An exceptionally well written and lively book, there is nothing like Twelve Caesars. The book is consistently informative and entertaining. The range of reference across art history from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, as well as in the author’s more expected arena of command in antiquity, is staggering and deeply impressive.”—Jaś Elsner, author of Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text“Ancient Rome emitted a haze of distorting myth throughout all of later Western history. It was the task of most classicists to fight their way back through the intervening murk of multiple ‘Romes’ to the actual Rome. But Mary Beard, who has been a great fog dispeller from real Rome, knows that later ‘Romes’ were real to the cultures that harbored or dreamed them up. Thanks to her experience with TV cultural education, Beard is a superb visual teacher. A good example is this book’s chapter on later reverence for ancient coins. Nothing could be drearier than classical treatises on Roman coins, crowded with tiny black blurs on a page, so small as to seem indistinguishable until one takes up a magnifying glass to discern the imperfections of the minting process. Here one finds later creative uses of coins—as models for other works of art, or as set in brilliant jewelry, or as promoted by daft but wealthy collectors. What a relief.”—Garry Wills, author of Rome and Rhetoric