This is an unusual history of a time that still defines our world - a view of the early Roman empire that its historians never intended us to see. Beginning sixty years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, it graphically depicts a story parallel to that of Caligula and Nero, and shows us those struggling to survive around them.

This is the Roman imperial world seen through the eyes of men and women in a single house on Rome's Palatine Hill. Amid a household of servants and soldiers, self-appointed lawyers and the fabulously extravagant who once were enslaved, it examines the lives of one pair of flatterers and gluttons - namely, a father and son.

The first is Lucius Vitellius (10BC-AD 51), an exceptionally sycophantic courtier; the second is Aulus Vitellius (AD12-69), a genial sluggard who for eight mad months became an emperor of the Roman world, and against some tough competition set his own standard for gluttony, brutal indolence and dramatic death.

Palatine has the drama and pace of a thriller whilst casting an entirely new light on an extraordinary family in imperial Rome.