Books by R. L. Thornton

With a totally original and creative approach this work provides persuasive and defensible alternative evaluations of the separate Julio-Claudian emperors, sometimes to support and sometimes to denigrate the highly political and possibly biased reporting by the standard literary sources. Using a quantification and an evaluation of their social goals the book melds together the needs of the city, the personality of the emperors and their ability to choose loyal subordinates as bases for judgments. From this melding the book furnishes valuable new understanding of the political and economic forces which shaped the Early Empire. In the process the labor supply of the city becomes the important measure of the depth of commitment and the focal quantification is expressed in construction manpower terms.