The Year of Four Emperors, was one of the most chaotic, violent, and frightening periods in all Roman history. This book offers a fresh look at this period. This narrative history features portraits of the leading participants and insights into the nature of the Roman military.

We meet Galba, old, tightfisted and conservative, who was declared emperor in June 68 and assassinated in January 69. Otho, once Nero's boon companion, who was responsible for murdering Galba, seized power in a coup in Rome in January 69 and, to everybody's surprise, committed suicide three months later in a vain attempt to end the civil wars. Vitellius, as indolent as he was extravagant, who was put forward by two ambitious lieutenants, recognized by the senate in Rome once they heard of Otho's death in April, and cut down by Vespasian's partisans in the last days of December. And then there is Vespasian, the candidate who looked least likely to succeed, but (according to Tacitus) was the first to be improved by becoming emperor. A strikingly vivid history of ancient Rome, "69 AD" is an original and compelling account of one of the best known but perhaps least understood periods in all Roman history.