There are two histories of Rome’s first imperial family, the Julio-Claudians, says Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati.

The dynasty begins in 31 B.C., when Augustus seized absolute power in the wake of Julius Caesar’s death, promising a new age in Roman history in which order and peace would be restored to an empire weary of decades of bloody civil war.

And so, as the story goes, over the next nearly 100 years, the Julio-Claudians — Augustus and his four successors — acted as divinely ordained bringers of peace who built massive monuments, extended Rome’s borders and wealth and ushered in a golden age of Roman literature and arts.

But in the years after the 68 A.D. suicide-death of Nero, the last of the line, another narrative emerged, one that challenged this rose-colored view of the infamous Roman emperor Nero and the Julio-Claudian dynastic legacy that produced him.

“Octavia,” the only surviving historical drama from ancient Rome, portrays the Julio-Claudian regime not as saviors of an imperiled state, but rather as autocrats prone to self-indulgence, Machiavellian backstabbing and tyrannical cruelty.

Reading the larger messages between the play’s 982 lines has been a decade-long undertaking for Ginsberg, who reveals her findings in her new book, “Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia.”

The book, published by Oxford University Press, examines how the play uses the dramatization of the three-day period in which Nero divorces and exiles his popular wife Octavia — a move that launched riots among Romans loyal to their beloved empress — as a wider lens to expose the dark legacy of Rome’s first imperial family.

