If you are to read this enigmatic work, you are already a Roman History buff, so beware to sort the fiction from actual history. Historia Augusta, in its better moments, renders the same flavor as a well-accomplished Xena episode; one feels befuddled by the mix between History, sheer invention and tongue-in-cheek humour; eventually, one wants to read more (well, supposing you are a Roman history buff and a xenite...) Therefore I regret very much the absence of an integral version of the whole work, that is the second half - the histories of the emperors after Heliogabalus - where fiction predominates, and which is perhaps the most intersting part in historical terms, as it is pratically the only written source for the most troubled years of the Roman Empire. Reading the work puts a most intriguing question: why it was that Late Antiquity found it necessary to look at its own past this way? Not a entirely otiose question in our postmodern days, I daresay.

This book is meant to be a continuing off of the Suetonius book, ending with Elagabalus (Heliogalabalus). This book is written similarly to Suetonius and includes the cover and inside grittiness of each emperor. a must read for people interested in the personal lives of the emperors.

The Augustan History is probably one of the most enigmatic and controversial historical documents to reach the present. Birley gives an excellent introduction on the current state of knowledge - according to which the book was a fraud or joke of sorts - and his notes are careful to point out what is likely to be true or not. The ancient text itself can be quite irritating to read, though. Birley's own lives of Nerva and Trajan are rather more interesting.

Septimius Severus (A.D. 146-211) hailed from Lepcis Magna, an African city which traced its ethnic and linguistic roots to Phoenicia and Carthage. Some of his townsfolk still had names that sounded disturbingly like Hannibal. He rose through the Army to become Emperor, following the disastrous reign of idiot-Emperor Commodus and the assassination of Pertinax. The mere fact that an African from the once-hated Phoenician coast could ascend to the principate speaks volumes of how the Roman system had evolved from city-state to universal empire. The early chapers on Lepcis Magna are a fascinating study in how the Roman provinces worked, socially and economically, and how Rome interacted with the outside world (Lepcis Magna greatly profited from its trade with Sub-Saharan Africa.)

Birley's assessment of Septimius's reign is ambivalent. Septimius was a vast improvement on Commodus, and, at massive cost in blood and treasurer, restored internal stability. His campaigns in Mesopotamia and Scotland were spectacular. Birley makes a plausible case that Septimius's ancestors retained a modicum of stability until at least Severus Alexander (208-235), but really the first signs of the cycle of contested rule, internal bloodshed and barbarian invasion that blighted the mid third-century can all be seen in Septimius's reign.

Anthony Birley does an outstanding job at presenting the life of a man who survived the insane rule of Commodus and founded a new imperial dynasty. Birley give one of the best accounts of the Empire under Commodus and the consipracy leading to his assassination. The brief rule of Pertinax is also delt with and the following civil war.

The begining section on the origins of Lepcis Magna are a bit slow. However, it provides a wealth of knowledge on what life was like in the Empire outside of Rome and Italy. Very few books manage to do this as well this one.

Showing the reign of Septimius Severus in great detail the reader can get an idea of how the 'Crisis of the Third Century' was to become almost inevitable. Septimius Severus favoring the soldiers over all else and his advise to his sons: "Be good brothers, grease the palm of the army and to hell with the rest."(not an exact translation of course) The life of Septimius Severus gives the reader a glimpse into what may have made Caracalla such a tyrant.

Prof. Birley has written the biographies of three Roman emperors: Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus and recently Hadrian. "Septimius Severus: the African Emperor" is his finest work thus far. His fluent narrative and relevant remarks make the life of Severus even more interesting. We follow Severus from his native town of Lepcis Magna (in today's Lybia), the member of a family of Phoenecian origin but Romanized for generations. Severus starts his career in an unremarkable way during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, giving us a glimpse of what life was for individual members of the senatorial class. We then follow Severus's life throughout the reign of Marcus's insane son Commodus, Birley giving the best treatment of his reign that I have ever seen in English. The events leading to the conspiracy to topple Commodus, resulting in civil war and Severus's acession as first Emperor for whom Latin was a foreign language, read like a first-class thriller, all the more fascinating because true. As emperor Severus shows himself to be competent and ruthless, and apparently somewhat disdainful and resentful of the traditional elites of Italian background, which led to his starting to convert the empire into a military dictatorship. On the other hand, his support of the great jurists Papinian and Paul make his reign one of the great ages of Roman jurisprudence, which was to have so much influence on Western law. Severus's military pursuits in Mesopotamia and Scotland are also vividly described. To be sure, the first chapters on the origins of Lepcis Magna are a bit slow, but all the rest is fascinating. I could not recomment this book more.