The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, details everything from ancient policy failures to sex scandals

A gossipy account of the lives of Roman emperors has entered the bestseller charts – 2,000 years after it was written.

Sex scandals and foreign policy failures don’t only beleaguer the modern politician, it turns out: in the early second century, the scholar Suetonius chronicled the dramas of the first set of Roman emperors, and now, their indiscretions and eccentricities have been dug up in a new translation which is proving popular in bookshops.

The Lives of the Caesars, translated from Latin by The Rest Is History podcast co-host Tom Holland, made the Sunday Times hardback nonfiction chart this week. Publisher Penguin Classics said that the book is the first of their hardback nonfiction classics to appear on the list.