Agrippina: Empress of
Depravity by Frederick W. Farrar, (400 pages, reprinted 1978 by Zebra)
I have been viewing the 1976 BBC series I , Claudius for my Daily DVD for the past few days, and it reminded me that for a while I had this rather trashy paperback. Well, it was packaged trashily, and rather sensationally, and subtitled in rather large letters that it was about the Court of Claudius, no doubt to try to tie-in to the enormously popular series. It is, in fact, described as the fifth novel in a series about Rome. All reprints? Hard to say at this distance. I was a little leery and shamefaced to buy it, but I was interested in the “And what happened then?” aspect of the Claudius story. Alas, disappointing on both historical and depravity grounds.
“The title is very misleading, as Agrippina dies at about page 50 (so the book isn't even really about her), and shows very little depravity. This is really about Christians in Nero's Rome. The Christians, of course, are pure as the driven snow, and therefore quite dull. Essentially this book is re-stating the Bible and the historians Suetonius and Tacitus, with nothing much added. The writing style is very old fashioned, which makes sense since it was actually written in the mid-1800s, under the title "Between Darkness and Dawn". – Keith T. Gibson, Amazon Review.
“Zebra Books was launched in
1975 by Walter Zacharius, who had
founded Kensington Publishing the previous year, and Roberta Bender Grossman. Both of them
had previously worked for paperback house Lancer Books, co-founded by Zacharius
in 1961. At the time of launching Zebra, Grossman became the youngest president
of a publishing house. By keeping a low budget, small staff, and hiring overlooked
if not desperate authors, they built Zebra into a powerhouse of cheap,
consumable literature, with $10 million in sales annually by the early 1980s.
“Zebra was built mostly on
the historical romance genre. It later expanded
the romance genre to embrace paranormal romance, adult Western romance and
romance titles aimed at Hispanic, black and gay readers.
“If romance novels built the
house of Zebra in the 1970s, horror made it famous in the 1980s. The imprint's
first hit horror title was William W. Johnstone's The Devil's
Kiss in 1980. Knowing their authors were not famous enough to sell
books on name alone, Zebra focused on sensational covers. Skeletons were
such a recurrent theme in Zebra's covers that the imprint is nicknamed
"the skeleton farm" among collectors.” – Wikipedia.
Looking around a bit I found three other volumes in their “Golden Age of Rome” series: Nero: Butcher of Rome (1889!), Sejanus: Secret Ruler of Rome (1889!), and The Pearl Maiden by H. Rider Haggard (1903!), so obviously books not originally planned as a series, but inexpensive reprints with sensational packaging, sex and sandals, as it were.
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