Being an emperor in ancient Rome was a dangerous business. In the abstract, it sounds like a great gig, but it wasn’t all bacchanalia and parties in the hippodrome; it was a horrible job filled with violence and treachery. The emperor’s survival was predicated on an unthinkable (to us, at least) level of personal and public brutality. Et Tu, Brute? is an illustrated compendium of the deaths of the Roman emperors from the establishment of the Roman Empire to the fall of Rome. A selection of these illustrations is presented below. —Jason Novak

Jason Novak is a cartoonist in Oakland, California.

Excerpted from Et Tu Brute?: Deaths of the Roman Emperors by Jason Novak. © 2018 by Jason Novak. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.