BATH Literature Festival has announced its first event, a pre-festival evening with historian Tom Holland, co-host of the hit podcast The Rest is History, at Bath Forum on Friday 22nd May at 7pm.

Travel back to the Roman Empire as Tom Holland celebrates his translation for Penguin Classics of Suetonius’s influential Lives of the Twelve Caesars.

Ancient Rome was the supreme arena where emperors had no choice but to fight and to thrill. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world.

No historian understood this more clearly than Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, who lived and worked in Rome in AD 121, and whose astonishing narratives bring the emperors’ daily struggles to life.

Holland’s electrifying new translation of this, one of the most influential works of history ever written, delves into the lives of Caesar, Augustus, Caligula and Nero, exposing their shortfalls, laying bare their sex scandals, and revealing their outrageous tastes, foibles and eccentricities.

His Lives of the Caesars transports us to a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own.

Already an acclaimed, bestselling author when the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History made superstars of him and his co-host Dominic Sandbrook, Tom Holland guides his readers (and audience) through history with humour, insight and expertise. Tom is a regular speaker and participant at the Chalke Valley History Festival, which his brother and fellow historian, James, co-founded.

The programme for both the Bath Literature Festival (Saturday 16th to Sunday 24th May) and Bath International Music Festival (Saturday 30th May – Sunday 7th June) will be announced in the new year.