Lives of the Later Caesars / Anonymous

For the emperors from Hadrian to Heliogabalus (AD 117–222) our main source is an extraordinary literary curiosity, the Augustan History. Written in the late fourth century by an anonymous author pretending to be a team of six much earlier biographers, it contains a solid core of historical fact but also makes lavish use of faked documents and includes many fictitious (but highly entertaining) anecdotes about the luxury and depravity of the emperors.