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.

The book is a collection of 12 biographies covering the rule of Julius Caesar and the first 11 Roman emperors. On hearing that it was in the charts, Holland was “delighted for Suetonius, to see the lad is capable of getting on the bestseller list after two millennia”.

The book, published on 13 February, comes 18 months after ancient Rome became the centre of a major internet pop culture moment, when women began asking men how often they think about the Roman empire, and posting their responses online.

Holland cites several reasons for the continued fascination. Rome has “always” been the ancient civilisation that people in Britain and the west have been most interested in, partly because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and the English alphabet is Latin. “We feel closer to the Romans, perhaps, than we do to the Egyptians or the Assyrians.”

However, “it’s also partly because our understanding of power derives from Rome more than anywhere else”. The US “Republican system was modelled on that of ancient Rome, but the [Roman] Republic ended up becoming an autocracy, and so in America, there’s always been this anxiety that a Republican system of government may end up an autocracy, and I guess that at the moment, that anxiety has a particular salience.”

Suetonius wrote The Lives of the Caesars, commonly known as The Twelve Caesars, in the early second century AD during the reign of Hadrian. “I think the reason that it’s always been popular is the fact that it is full of the most sensational gossip. It is kind of ancient Rome’s Popbitch. It is full of scandal, and extraordinary detail, but it is also very psychologically astute,” says Holland. “It has the quality of a very highbrow gossip column.”

“Had there been bestseller lists in second-century Rome, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars would undoubtedly have been on them,” said Stuart Proffitt, publishing director at Penguin Press.

Holland says the reach of The Rest Is History will have helped the book’s sales. The podcast released four episodes on Suetonius and the same month had 17.5m downloads.

He compared the process of translating Suetonius’ work to a marriage. “You spend a long time, a long period with someone who you think you’re going to enjoy the company of, so it’s always good to discover that actually you do.”