What an Artist Dies in Me

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue
2. Chapter One - The Boy Behind the Curtain
3. Chapter Two - Crown of Thorns and Silk
4. Chapter Three - Mother, Interrupted
5. Chapter Four - Art, Lust, and the Lyre
6. Chapter Five - Rome Burns
7. Chapter Six - The Blame Game
8. Chapter Seven - Seneca’s Silence
9. Chapter Eight - The Theater of Cruelty
10. Chapter Nine - The Ghost of Augustus
11. Chapter Ten - Revolts and Rumbles
12. Chapter Eleven - The Four Emperors
13. Chapter Twelve - The Artist in Ruins
14. Chapter Thirteen - Exit Stage Left
15. Chapter Fourteen - The Cult of Nero

Excerpt

PROLOGUE “QUALIS ARTIFEX PEREO.” What an artist dies in me. The words don’t belong to a madman. Not in his mind, anyway. As Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus sat in the dirt, surrounded by a shrinking circle of allies and enemies and no one in between, he wasn’t thinking like a fallen emperor. He was thinking like a star whose audience had abandoned the theater. He wasn’t a tyrant dying in shame. He was a performer dying without applause. And maybe that’s what makes Nero so dangerous — even now, almost two thousand years later. Because for all the blood on his hands, for all the fires and floggings and forced suicides, for all the betrayal and paranoia and madness, Nero never saw...