Caligula: Divine Carnage

Caligula: most notorious of the Roman Emperors, who married his own sister, installed a horse in the Roman Senate, turned his palace into a brothel, tortured and killed innocent citizens on a whim, and committed countless other acts of madness, cruelty and deviancy.

Award-winning writers Stephen Barber and Jeremy Reed document in full the atrocities of Caligula and also the other mad Emperors, particularly Commodus-villain of the recent Hollywood blockbuster Gladiator-and Heliogabalus, the teenage ambisexual "sun-god" whose arch-decadent proclivities would centuries later inspire Antonin Artaud to eulogise him in prose. The book also includes a visceral history of the Gladiatorial Games.

Caligula: Divine Carnage is a catalogue of transvestism, treachery, incest, torture, slaughter and perversity brought to life with superb authorial skill, making it a vivid and essential historical document of murderous decadence.

Stephen Barber is a noted cultural historian and the leading authority on Antonin Artaud. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including: Burning World, the best-selling biography of Edmund White; Tokyo Vertigo; the wide-selling Caligula: Divine Carnage; and Artaud: Blows And Bombs, the definitive biography.