Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
My choice as well. Although honestly, based on what I saw, I think he would have screwed up pretty badly. That whole Persian expedition was a floundering mess. But he remains my historical folk hero, the only one of whom I actually have a little statue.
The Persian thing was definitly a mistake. His social reforms/attempted reforms are what make him my favorite.
I think I will present my case on each of these gentlemen so that my pick is justified
Julius Caesar:
He was not an emperor. He may have been a dictator/despot. But he didn't know that he was one. Dictatorship/despotism have been corrupted in translation over 2000 years. Hitler and Caesar won't ever be the same dictators.
But if Caesar is on this list, where is my man, Sulla?
Sulla was, by far, the torchbearer of the Empire. He showed the generals that it could be done. He crossed the Rubicon for the first time. He spared the life of Caesar, he could have done away with him. He was also the forerunner of proscriptions. He had absolute power. But he was very much an optimate, unlike the optimo-populare that Caesar was.
He then retired to his life of fun, sex and wine. He had no time or patience for the boring vagaries of political life, tribunes and magistrates. This very reason kept him from becoming what Caesar became or how we in posterity have known Caesar to be.
On the whole, he enjoyed his life, achieved his objective, provided the roadmap to his successors, he was "not assassinated" which is an achievement and he died naturally. He was an Alexander in his own right.
Augustus:
True to his name. Augustus. The great one. He has no equal. To this day. Every politician wants to be him. He's the benchmark. But nobody has become him, all these years. This man is Alexander/Napoleon/Talleyrand/Metternich all rolled into one.
No wonder the Senate greeted every new emperor, after Trajan, with FELICIOR AVGVSTO MELIOR TRAIANO, which translates as "may he be luckier than Augustus and better than Trajan". I never digested why they would put Octavian and Trajan on the same line, but it makes some sense. Octavian was indeed lucky to escape from Pompey, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Cleo and a lot others.
Augustus is the kind of world leader any aspiring hegemon needs. The nice facade with the cunning/artful back end. If I have to borrow from Gibbon, "that artful prince"; "that disguised tyrant". The people loved him, as he screwed them. The senate loved him, as he unfanged them. They knew he was unfanging them, yet they had to love him. How he pulled the strings between Agrippa, Mycaenas and Antony himself is mind-boggling.
Growing up as a kid, stacked behind the murder of an uncle, and overgrowing Antony himself is no easy task. And how he manipulated the opinion of the Roman public. During one of the public rites, he pointed at a mysterious star in the sky which appeared out of nowhere, he declared to the masses that his uncle Caesar was watching over Rome, while he turns to his advisors and declares with pride that the star is indeed "himself".
Long story short, those who love you don't realise you are screwing them in return; your enemies think you are naive and you take them unawares and even make them jump into your bandwagon on their own will.
Tiberius:
The accidental emperor
Caligula:
It's a shame the purple had to be on him. When I was in my teens in school in the late-nineties, my classmates used to float porn cd's around. Most of them had the title "Caligula". This is his true legacy. He's the Elagabalus of the first century and worse.
Claudius I:
Conquest of Britian, if Britian is that important in Rome's scheme of things. It was only a land of mysterious barbarians, as Caligula used to call. I am not sure if this is true, there is a tale where Caligula forced some of his most powerful generals to collect seashells for him along the coast of Britain
Nero:
He was not evil. He did not play the fiddle as Rome burned. Fiddle is an anachronism here. A lyre, maybe. He didn't throw christians into the fire and animals "because" they were christians. Most of the Nero stuff is made up and typical post-imperial propaganda. Who are the main sources here - Suetonius, tacitus and the senatorial/equestrian order who hated Nero to the core. I wonder even if Poppaea existed.
One thing to note about Nero is the grand villa he built on palatine hill. Right in the midst, he erected a golden statue of himself. Pliny has argued that it was only marbe. He called it Colossus Neronis (sounds familiar? ). It was designed by Zenodorus, a greek. It was widely whispered that he got a Greek to build his golden bust, as a sign of disdain towards how Rome had swallowed Greece. But knowing Nero, he was not that brilliant for such venom. He's more like the joaquin phoenix character in Gladiator.
Again this must have been propaganda too, in the Greek school of thought (people like Plutarch) in the Roman empire, those who whined over the lost glory of Greece.
<the rest, after I get back from the gym, a long post might bore you guys, guess it's already boring >
This is a bogus poll, for it does not include Marcus Aurelius, who probably represented the high-water mark for the Romans. I think the decline of the Roman Empire definitely began with his son Commodus.
On the other side of the coin, Trajan is probably the most intriguing "What ifs" in Roman history. Trajan, according to Roman chroniclers of the time, evidently banned any number of astonishing new inventions by Roman scientists/engineers of the period, fearing that they would create massive unemployment. What if he had inadvertantly snuffed out the Industrial Revolution, 1500 years before Watt?
I am enjoying this thread very much! Unfortunately, I have a very limited knowledge of the many who are written about here but am learning. I chose Julius Caesar because my second year high school Latin class consisted of reading his book The Conquest of Gaul in its original language. The battle strategies and tactics were very interesting to this kid.
This is a bogus poll, for it does not include Marcus Aurelius, who probably represented the high-water mark for the Romans.
It isn't bogus at all. The poll question did not ask who was the best Roman emperor. It asked who was one's favorite, and it provided an 'other' option. If this board is similar to another one I participated in, the number of poll options is limited, so someone's bound to be left out.
Constantine:
Without belittling Diocletian's tetrarchy, the act of breaking something up complicates any follow-up act of pasting it together. I can only imagine how well one can paste the shards of broken glass back to its former self.
But Constantine merged all tetrarchs into one. Given the politics of Rome, this is no little achievement.
It was ridiculously held together from Gaul to Italia to Illyricum to Africa to Bythinia by the brutal yet transitory yoke of the legions, a framework of short-lived loyalties, diverse spheres of influence of the nobility, the occult of the pagan deities amidst the million slaves waiting to revolt, the emerging barbarians (goths, vandals, lombards and other germanic/norse tribes) and the eternal enemies of the empire (persians/parthians) fuming to explode at any point in time.
Add this to the frequency of regicide higher than getting mauled by a tiger when in the tiger's lair, with such scanty scarcity of usurpers and imperial impostors sprinkled all over the empire.
Keeping christianity out of this, Constantine's moves were extremely manipulative. He un-chaos-ed the empire with something noone had ever known before, something which people thought fell down from the sky which was scarier than Jupiter - the chi-rho.
Apart from the chi-rho, he had his troops unfurl gigantic banners of a rough figure of Christ, in the middle of battles with the other tetrarchs, the very act which sent the enemy legions into frenzied panic. This was the new Aquila.
And what can win battles better than fear and superstition? We can recall how many Persians fled Gaugamela owing to superstition with celestial events of the time (conflicting with Greek propaganda that Darius fled, hence his Persians fled with him)
That the people embraced the new Aquila was mostly out of fear of the new unknown - the new God of the Christians. Coupled by fear of Constantine himself. I saw a documentary once where the speaker proclaimed that people were so scared to go look at C's body immediately after his death. Anyone seen his huge head in the vatican museum. That's one intimidating face.
On the other hand, his mother Helena embraced Christianity more. Constantine tried to be obedient with her. His refusal to get baptized till the end puts his religious intentions under doubt.
Constantinople was another disaster for the empire. It solved a temporary problem for Constantine, but sowed the seed of Byzantium (which also drew from Diocletian's reforms). A new capital is empire suicide. Rome is still Rome, as I type, while Constantinople is history.
And the concept of the deity emperor was at the heart of the empire since Augustus. Christianity moved this focus from the purple into the heavens above. The real Rome went to Elysium, Constantinople was the new usurper - the middle ages had thus begun.
Diocletian:
If C takes the credit for neutering tetrarchy, Diocletian takes the credit on the flip side. They were truly the opposite sides of the coin, yet achieved an identical outcome, a successful one yet destructive in the long run. If either one of them had taken the other's place, by fate, the empire would have collapsed almost immediately.
Diocletian didn't inherit a total disaster though. After the crisis of the 3rd century had screwed the empire to kingdom come, two gentlemen take the credit for fixing it - Aurelian and Probus (they should be on this poll too). Diocletian's main problem was very much what Obama's is today - collapsed Roman economy, capsized currency and inflation.
The fixing of Rome's economy and the correction/reform of the monetary/tax system is Diocletian's sole stellar achievement and he stands out in the whole empire. To dwell deep into this will make a longer/definitely more boring post.
A.H.M. Jones, among many others, gives all the numbers behind Diocletian's economic reforms. The A.H.M. Jones work in particular makes dry reading. He concentrates too much on stats yet very interesting for Rome geeks as me.
There's another work which goes like "Diocletian and the Roman recovery". I don't remember the author's name, I read that long ago. I also happened to come across Diocletian's very own edict of fixing prices of commodities throughout the empire. And how he came up with a new system of measuring land and appropriately fixing taxes for landowners across the empire.
He was very much a Ben Bernanke of his time.
Maxentius:
Completely overshadowed by Constantine. He was an able administrator. Much of the harangue against him and his alleged incompetence was propaganda spread by Constantine's minions post the battle of the milvan bridge. He does not deserve a place in this poll, like Domitian, but Max was a better man.
Aurelian and Probus:
Think about a Caesar in all his pomp and glory of absolute power. Can you imagine replacing the imperial palace with the walls of a Persian prison? How amusing would you find the term "imperial slave". LOL.
Never since the seat of Caesar was put on sale, which was foolishly bought by Didius Julianus only to be tragically executed by the Praetorian guard, who offered the sale in the first place anyway, did the seat of the emperor get vilified so much as with Valerian.
Valerian does not deserve this though, he was a fairly good emperor and all of a sudden he found himself stranded in battle with the Persians.
He simply could not flee. Before he could run to his chariot, Shapur had his hand on his tail.
Shapur I of Persia captured Valerian and paraded his imperial slave before his own legions in every future battle with his Roman enemies. Can one imagine a Roman adversary mounting on to his horse using the back of Caesar himself? Julius Caesar did that to the King of Gauls. It's funny how fate oscillates in history.
The emasculation of the empire was thus complete. Collapse was imminent. But Aurelian showed up just in time.
Aurelian was among the first of the efficient "barracks emperors". He quickly fought a series of battles. He was a brute known for his mercilessness and this disciplined the P. guard and the legions temporarily. He still got assassinated by them, though.
Probus carried on Aurelian's campaign effectively from where he left off.
These two guys effectively restored Rome to 60% of its old glory.....
Guess the only guys in the poll left now are the Flavians. I never liked them a lot anyway. They were lucky they closely followed Augustus and were lucky again for the "Five Good Emperors" to closely follow suit. It's therefore very difficult to assess their true skills as emperors as they are well placed chronologically, but I still wanna give it a shot some time later.
<back to work>
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
). It was designed by Zenodorus, a greek. It was widely whispered that he got a Greek to build his golden bust, as a sign of disdain towards how Rome had swallowed Greece. But knowing Nero, he was not that brilliant for such venom. He's more like the joaquin phoenix character in Gladiator.
