Character Assassination Across the Ages

Character assassination—the deliberate destruction of an individual’s reputation—has been a persistent feature of public life across time and cultures. This revised and expanded edition offers a comprehensive investigation into how reputations are attacked, damaged, and destroyed, with case studies ranging from ancient Rome to the present-day United States. Political and religious leaders, officials, celebrities, scientists, athletes, and other public figures emerge as frequent targets, with their private lives, values, and identities subjected to strategic scrutiny and distortion.

Bringing together contributions from history, political science, and psychology, the volume highlights both the common patterns and the unique variations of character assassination as it has unfolded across different cultural, political, and technological contexts. The comparative case studies demonstrate how reputational attacks are not only timeless but also deeply shaped by the media and institutions of their era. This completely revised edition includes a newly written introduction situating the volume within recent theoretical developments in character assassination research. Two new chapters expand the thematic and chronological scope of the work.

An essential resource for understanding the enduring and evolving power of reputational warfare, this book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including history, political science, and political psychology.

Martijn Icks is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is the author of The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (2011). Additionally, he has co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management (2020) and co-authored Character Assassination and Reputation Management (2022), also published by Routledge.

Eric Shiraev is a professor and researcher at George Mason University, USA. His multi-disciplinary approach emphasizes the role of culture and identity in social behavior and politics. He is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management (2020) and has co-authored Character Assassination and Reputation Management (Routledge, 2022) and Cross-Cultural Psychology (6th edition, Routledge, 2024).