New Book Explores Reasons Behind ‘Hoax’ of Roman Emperors

Much of what we know about the fall of the Roman Empire – the decadence of the emperors, their outlandish appetites for food and sex – comes from a book known as the Historia Augusta.
And a lot of it is complete nonsense.
Scholars have known that for many years, but why the author did this – why he wrote a fiction cloaked in a history – was a mystery. David Rohrbacher, professor of classics at New College, offers a new explanation in his book, “The Play of Allusion in the Historia Augusta,” published in January by University of Wisconsin Press….