HISTORIA ROMAE

Touring his new provinces, Augustus found Gaul between revolt and anarchy after years of neglect and Spain just as chaotic. He fell severely ill soon after crossing the Pyrenees and spent over a year recovering by the mountain springs while his lieutenants fought on without him, finally bringing Spain under firm Roman, or more accurately Augustan, control.

ParticipantsAugustus

Against Livia's advice, Augustus favoured his nephew Marcellus over his stepson Tiberius, marrying him to his daughter Julia and pushing through special legislation waiving the minimum age requirement so the 21-year-old could be elected aedile for 23 BC.

ParticipantsMarcus Claudius Marcellus, Julia

A plot against Augustus, either uncovered or invented, implicated the consul Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, Maecenas's brother-in-law. Maecenas discussed the affair at home, his wife warned her brother, and Murena fled, permanently rupturing Maecenas's closeness with Augustus.

ParticipantsAugustus, Gaius Maecenas

Alongside his own settlement, Augustus had Agrippa granted similar at-large proconsular authority, making him something of a co-emperor, then sent him east to Samos, most likely as the one man he trusted to negotiate with Parthia over Crassus's lost legionary standards.

ParticipantsMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa

Just as his aedileship was winding down successfully, the 22-year-old fell suddenly ill and died within the year, leaving Augustus without a designated heir.

ParticipantsMarcus Claudius Marcellus

A grain shortage after plague crippled the Italian farms set Rome rioting, and the crowd demanded Augustus take the dictatorship. He refused, citing Mark Antony's abolition of the office after Caesar's assassination, and said he would rather be stabbed in the throat than hold it.

ParticipantsAugustus

Augustus sent his 22-year-old stepson Tiberius to restore Roman influence over Armenia, the buffer kingdom between Rome and Parthia. A native revolt deposed the pro-Parthian king before the legions arrived, leaving Tiberius only to crown Rome's chosen successor.

ParticipantsTiberius

Armenia

Augustus backed a show of legionary force in Syria with a diplomatic overture, and the King of Parthia agreed to return the legionary eagle standards lost at Carrhae, along with Roman prisoners, in exchange for a lasting peace.

ParticipantsAugustus

The Senate acknowledged that the at-large proconsular authority it had granted Augustus at the Second Settlement had never been meant to exclude Italy, giving him lawful command of the troops he kept stationed around Rome.

ParticipantsAugustus

Rome

Having failed to shrink the Senate by purging its rolls, Augustus raised the wealth qualification for membership instead, then created a standing committee of thirty men to steer its legislative business, with himself as its only permanent member.

ParticipantsAugustus

Rome

Alarmed by a falling birth rate, Augustus offered legal privileges to Romans who married and had children, and penalised those who would not marry, hoping to make single life so unpleasant that marriage looked like a reprieve.

ParticipantsAugustus

Rome

Augustus made adultery a criminal offence against the state rather than a private matter of family honour, with the death penalty possible in certain cases, though his own well-known infidelities left the law widely ignored.

ParticipantsAugustus

Rome

Julia and Agrippa's sons gave Augustus the blood heirs his succession plan had never had. He adopted both as infants, took them into his own household and oversaw their upbringing himself, which quietly reduced Tiberius and Drusus to stand-ins holding the place until the boys grew up.

ParticipantsGaius Caesar, Lucius Caesar, Julia, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa

Rome

Noricum, covering much of modern Austria, had been friendly to Rome since at least 170 BC and had supported Caesar during his civil wars. Augustus took it without a campaign, simply sending a proconsul in to occupy the territory and completing the annexation of the land south of the Danube.

ParticipantsAugustus

Tiberius and Drusus spent a single summer subduing the tribes of the Alpine region that became the province of Raetia, on the pretext that Roman travellers had been ill-treated in the passes. Rather than simply taxing the defeated, they deported the men, selling many into slavery and marching the rest off their land, and left the women, children and old men behind.

ParticipantsNero Claudius Drusus

Seeing what Roman intentions were, the Pannonian tribes rose against annexation. Octavian had beaten them during his Illyrian campaigns twenty years earlier without formally incorporating their territory, and the same fierce independence that made them resist Rome kept them from combining against it, so the legions picked them off one tribe at a time.

ParticipantsMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa

Lepidus had held the office of Pontifex Maximus since Caesar's death, and kept it through the twenty-three years of obscurity that followed his expulsion from the triumvirate. It was the one honour Augustus could not simply take, and on Lepidus's death he assumed it, becoming the formal head of Rome's religion as well as its state and its army.

ParticipantsMarcus Aemilius Lepidus

Rome

Sent to bring the annexation of Pannonia to a close, Agrippa wintered in the Balkans planning the next summer's campaign and fell ill. He turned for home in March, worsened on landing at Brundisium, and was dead at 51 by the time Augustus reached him. Augustus laid him in his own mausoleum.

ParticipantsMarcus Vipsanius Agrippa

Given the armies of the Rhine, Drusus drove east year after year and reached the Elbe, the river Augustus wanted for a frontier. Every winter he had to fall back into Gaul, and the tribes he beat in the field never behaved like a conquered people, so the ground was never actually held.

ParticipantsNero Claudius Drusus

With Julia widowed a second time, Augustus refused to marry her outside the family and settled on Tiberius, who was happily married to Vipsania and had a young son by her. Tiberius was made to divorce her anyway. The new marriage was a disaster: Julia answered her father's dynastic bookkeeping with open affairs, and after their only child died in infancy Tiberius gave up on her entirely.

ParticipantsJulia, Vipsania

Winding down a successful consulship and about to follow his brother up the chain of command, Drusus fell from his horse on campaign and could not recover from the injuries. Tiberius rode 200 miles through hostile country with a single Gallic guide and reached him before the end, then led the body back to Rome. Livia never got over it, and Antonia never remarried.

ParticipantsNero Claudius Drusus

Maecenas died in October, four years after Agrippa. Augustus, who had spent his youth fighting his elders for power, was now the elder himself, surrounded by younger men whose every dealing with him was coloured by the fact that he held all of it. The advisers who had known him before power and could still speak to him plainly were gone.

ParticipantsGaius Maecenas

Fresh from a consulship and newly granted the same tribunician power Augustus held, Tiberius was slated to go east and settle Armenia again. Instead he announced that he was leaving public life altogether and sailed for Rhodes. Ancient and modern writers have offered the same three explanations ever since: that he saw he was only a placeholder, that he was clearing the stage for Gaius and Lucius, and that he was escaping Julia.

ParticipantsTiberius

Augustus had thought his daughter a model of the virtue his marriage laws demanded, while Rome knew she had spent years carrying on affairs with men of every rank, among them a Gracchus and Mark Antony's son Iullus. When it finally reached him he banished her for life. Her named lovers were exiled or forced to suicide, and when the crowds begged him in the street to relent he refused. Julia was dead to him.

ParticipantsJulia

Rome

Augustus swallowed his misgivings and sent his eighteen-year-old grandson east to deal with Parthian meddling in Armenia, basing him on Samos. Gaius brokered a compromise: Parthia's candidate took the Armenian throne, and Parthia acknowledged that Armenia lay in Rome's sphere. Not everyone in Armenia accepted it, and in the revolt that followed Gaius took a wound besieging a small town. It never healed, and he died on the coast of Anatolia at twenty-four.

ParticipantsGaius Caesar

Nineteen years old and due to hold the consulship the following year, Lucius was travelling to Spain on assignment when illness took him in Gaul. He was dead before word that anything was wrong could reach Rome. Augustus had raised him as his own, and every hope for a Julian dynasty now rested on his brother alone.

ParticipantsLucius Caesar

Eighteen months took Tiberius from forgotten exile to heir apparent. With Lucius and then Gaius dead, Augustus had no one else, and the letters from Rhodes he had refused to open were finally answered. Tiberius came home, was adopted, and had his at-large powers granted afresh. The price was that he adopt his own nephew Germanicus, who carried Julian blood through Antonia, so that after a detour through a Claudian the throne would return to a Julian.

ParticipantsGermanicus

Rome

Agrippa Postumus, the last surviving son of Agrippa and Julia, grew violent and cruel, and after years of complaints Augustus banished him to an island that was little more than a rock. The year after, Julia the Younger followed her mother into a string of affairs and then into exile, though rumour held the real charge was a part in a plot against the regime. Her first husband had already been executed for treason.

ParticipantsAugustus, Agrippa Postumus

In the spring of AD 14 Augustus made an unexplained visit to the grandson he had exiled seven years earlier. Within months Augustus was dead, and imperial agents reached the island and killed Postumus almost at once. Augustus, Livia and Tiberius were all suspected of giving the order, and when the accusations landed on Tiberius he loudly opened an inquiry to clear his name, which the old inner circle moved just as quickly to shut down before it aired anything.

ParticipantsAgrippa Postumus

Augustus was barely dead before legions in Pannonia and on the Lower Rhine seized their camps, drove out their officers and demanded shorter service and the bonuses the old princeps had promised. Tiberius would not go himself. He sent his son Drusus to Pannonia with two cohorts of Praetorians and Sejanus as adviser, and Drusus conceded nothing, working the men over one by one through the night until they handed up their ringleaders for pardon. On the Rhine, Germanicus was offered the throne by his own troops, refused it, and then simply granted their demands, paying the discharge bonuses out of his own pocket.

ParticipantsDrusus Julius Caesar, Germanicus, Lucius Aelius Sejanus

Germanicus had decided that idleness was what turned soldiers mutinous, so he sent them across the Rhine, telling them that whatever they plundered would stand in for the bonuses they had been promised. There was no strategic aim beyond revenge for the Teutoburg Forest. He took upwards of 100,000 men in the spring of 15, captured Arminius's wife, won on the Ems, and reached the Teutoburg battlefield to find the dead still unburied with skulls nailed to the trees, which he had covered by a funeral mound. Arminius trapped him in a swamp and threw the advantage away, and a storm wrecked his fleet in the North Sea on the way home, though the stories of him dragging survivors ashore only made him more loved. He never brought Arminius to a decision.

ParticipantsGermanicus, Arminius

Tiberius could not simply cancel campaigns whose victories reflected well on his regime, so he promoted the man conducting them instead. Germanicus was recalled and given a triumph, displaying two of the three legionary standards lost with Varus, and was then sent east with at-large proconsular authority. It was framed as the next step for a man destined to succeed, and meant as a way of getting him away from the armies that loved him.

ParticipantsGermanicus

Rome

Agrippina said openly that Piso had killed her husband and that Tiberius was behind Piso, and once the charge was public the emperor could not refuse a trial without appearing to confirm it. Piso faced the Senate defiant, calling the death a sad twist of fate, and found the body unsympathetic. When Tiberius declined to use his prerogative to save him, Piso killed himself, unless he was killed to stop him talking. Rome drew its own conclusion about who had wanted Germanicus dead.

ParticipantsGnaeus Calpurnius Piso, Agrippina the Elder

Rome

Worn down by Sejanus's steady drip of treason charges against Agrippina's circle, Tiberius retreated to his villa on the island of Capri in AD 26. He would send word for years that he was coming back to Rome, but he never set foot in the city again, ruling in absentia for the rest of his reign while Sejanus ran the capital in his name.

ParticipantsLucius Aelius Sejanus

In AD 31 Sejanus reached a shared consulship with Tiberius, the formal power he had sought for years, and was undone within months. Warned that his prefect had turned against him, Tiberius first arranged a replacement Praetorian Prefect, then had a letter read before the Senate that turned from routine business into a denunciation demanding Sejanus's trial and execution. Sejanus, stripped of the Guard's protection, was arrested and strangled the same day. Rome rioted at the news, tearing his body apart and hunting down his known associates; a slave's letter soon after exposed his and Livilla's part in the murder of Drusus nine years earlier.

ParticipantsLucius Aelius Sejanus

Rome

A man claiming to be the Son of God was executed in the Roman province of Judea. It had no immediate impact on Roman affairs, but within a few years Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus began the spread of Christianity, which would eventually become the empire's official and then dominant religion.

Crowds lined the road for twenty miles to welcome Caligula to Rome, and he moved fast to give them a clean break from Tiberius's terror: the treason trials were cancelled, the informers' records burned in a public bonfire, and the exiled recalled and pardoned. Tiberius's will had named Tiberius Gemellus, Drusus and Livilla's son, as Caligula's joint heir, but the Praetorian Guard declared for Caligula alone and Gemellus was frozen out of the succession, then executed within the year. Caligula also brought the remains of his mother and brothers back to Rome for burial in the imperial mausoleum, and renamed the month of September for his father Germanicus.

ParticipantsCaligula

Rome

Wanting the military glory his office was supposed to carry, Caligula led legions across the Rhine in AD 39, staged a mock battle against allied Gauls dressed as Germans, and fled back across the river when real Germans were reported nearby. A conspiracy involving a Roman governor was uncovered during the campaign; his brother-in-law was executed and his two surviving sisters, Agrippina and Julia Livilla, were exiled. The following year he lined up his legions on the Channel coast, ordered them to collect seashells as spoils of a "victory" over Neptune, and returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph for both campaigns.

ParticipantsCaligula, Agrippina the Younger

By early AD 41 a member of the Praetorian Guard, Cassius Chaerea, whom Caligula had endlessly mocked over an old injury, had begun plotting with senators who wanted the emperor gone. The Praetorian Prefect, himself under investigation for treason, tacitly let the plot proceed. Chaerea and two accomplices cornered Caligula after a theatrical performance in January AD 41 and stabbed him to death. The assassins went on to kill his wife Caesonia and infant daughter so that no blood heir would survive him. Chaerea hoped the killing might let the Senate restore the Republic, but the Praetorian Guard had other ideas: they found Caligula's uncle Claudius in hiding and declared him emperor before the conspirators could reach him.

ParticipantsCaligula, Claudius

Rome

With Caligula dead, the Senate argued over which of its own members should become princeps and could not agree, revealing how entrenched one-man rule had already become: nobody seriously proposed restoring the Republic itself. While the Senate talked, the Praetorian Guard settled the matter on its own and declared for Claudius, whom it expected to control. The Senate extracted one concession: an amnesty for Caligula's wider circle of assassins and conspirators, many of them senators. Claudius honoured it, but refused to spare the lead assassin, Cassius Chaerea, who was tried and executed, a warning against ever repeating the act.

ParticipantsClaudius

Rome

Within a year of Claudius's accession, the governor of Dalmatia conspired with a Roman senator to march his legions on Rome and depose him. When the moment came, the troops refused to join a march against the emperor, and the exposed governor committed suicide. Claudius had already taken the precaution of bribing the army for its loyalty on taking office.

ParticipantsClaudius

The office of censor had sat vacant since Augustus. Claudius revived it in AD 47, sharing the post with Lucius Vitellius, and used its authority over the senatorial rolls to purge families suspected of plotting against him. He went further, admitting Gallic provincials to the Senate over fierce conservative objection, arguing that the empire's multinational character had to be embraced if it was going to survive the way Rome itself had once absorbed the Latins and then the rest of Italy.

ParticipantsClaudius

Rome

Messalina, feeling her position slip as Agrippina and her son gained ground as an alternative Julian line, had taken a lover, the consul-designate Gaius Silius, and pushed a plot to marry him and replace Claudius. In AD 48, while Claudius was away in Ostia, she married Silius in a lavish public ceremony. Narcissus, who had worked alongside Messalina but kept his deeper loyalty to Claudius, decided the emperor had to know and told him directly, then blocked every attempt she made to reach Claudius privately before he could be talked round. Confronted with the evidence, including imperial property already moved into Silius's house, Claudius wavered over her fate; Narcissus used the emperor's own seal to send the execution order before he could be swayed, and Messalina died by a soldier's sword after failing to take her own life.

ParticipantsValeria Messalina

Rome

Aulus Plautius governed the new province until 47, consolidating the conquest with veteran settlements and new tax arrangements. His successor, Ostorius Scapula, pushed the frontier west into Wales, where Caratacus had retreated to run a guerrilla war against the occupation. In AD 50 Ostorius finally drew him into a set battle at a fortified position Caratacus had prepared, and the Romans stormed it, capturing his wife and brothers. Caratacus himself escaped.

ParticipantsCaratacus

With Claudius dead, Agrippina the Younger moved before anyone could contest the succession. She had already sent Narcissus, Britannicus's strongest backer, away from Rome on business, and Claudius's will was suppressed to keep Britannicus from his inheritance. Britannicus and his sisters were kept confined in the palace while Nero alone was marched out before the Praetorian Guard, whose Prefect Burrus ordered the soldiers to hail him as emperor. A hastily convened Senate session confirmed what the Guard had already decided, and the sixteen-year-old Nero became Rome's fifth emperor with no serious opposition raised.

ParticipantsNero, Agrippina the Younger, Britannicus, Burrus

Rome

Agrippina the Younger's hold over her son did not survive his adolescence. In early AD 55 Nero fell for the freedwoman Claudia Acte, and when Agrippina tried to forbid the affair he shut her out instead of giving up his mistress. Seneca and others close to Nero encouraged the affair, since it was useful in quashing rumours about Nero's true relationship with his own mother. From this point Agrippina's influence over her son collapsed.

ParticipantsNero, Agrippina the Younger

Rome

Losing her influence over Nero, Agrippina the Younger reversed course and began courting Britannicus, hinting he had as much right to the throne as his adoptive brother and threatening to take him to the Praetorians and confess her own part in Claudius's death if Nero ignored her. She made the threat months before Britannicus came of age, giving Nero time to act first. The day before Britannicus was to take the adult toga that would have let him contest the throne, he was invited to dinner at the palace, poisoned, and died on the spot.

ParticipantsBritannicus, Nero, Agrippina the Younger

Rome

By AD 59 Nero had decided his mother had to die, most plausibly because Agrippina had thrown her support behind his cousin Rubellius Plautus as a rival emperor. Several attempts to stage her death as an accident failed, including a shipwreck she survived by swimming to shore, so Nero finally sent an assassin to stab her outright. She is said to have died bidding him strike her womb. Nero announced that his mother had been caught plotting against him and had taken her own life; no one believed it, but it stood as the official account.

ParticipantsAgrippina the Younger, Nero

Nero had never been happy in the arranged marriage to Claudius's daughter that tied the Julian and Claudian wings of the dynasty together, and by AD 62 his mistress Poppaea Sabina was pressing him to make her his wife instead. When she announced she was pregnant, Nero divorced Claudia Octavia on grounds of infertility, banished her to the island that had held Agrippina the Elder, and married Poppaea eighteen days later. The public, who had liked Claudia Octavia and thought well of her, carried statues of her through the streets demanding her recall. Nero wavered, then had her killed and the death dressed up as a suicide. It was the first time the people turned on him, and the goodwill never came back.

ParticipantsPoppaea Sabina

Rome

Discontent among the aristocracy hardened into a plot around Gaius Calpurnius Piso, a senator and orator well regarded at every level of Roman society, who concluded that the best available replacement for Nero was himself. Faenius Rufus, one of the two Praetorian Prefects, agreed to present him to the Guard once Nero was dead, and dozens of senators, bureaucrats and officers joined by word of mouth, Seneca among them. It never got as far as an attempt: a young officer whose career had stalled was sounded out, decided informing would serve him better than joining, and a freedman's secretary supplied the details in April AD 65. Piso and the rest were ordered to kill themselves or exiled, and a frightened Nero went back to running treason trials.

ParticipantsGaius Calpurnius Piso, Seneca, Nerva

Rome

Poppaea Sabina died in the summer of AD 65, pregnant with Nero's second child. The tamer account has her dying naturally in childbirth; the version Suetonius and Tacitus preferred has Nero kicking her to death in a fit of rage during an argument. Grief-stricken or guilt-stricken depending on which story is believed, Nero had her embalmed rather than cremated so he could keep visiting her in the imperial mausoleum.

ParticipantsPoppaea Sabina, Nero

Rome

Vindex, the Roman governor of a Gallic province, declared in March AD 68 that he would no longer take orders from Nero, whose tax demands to cover his own extravagance had become intolerable. Rather than claim the throne himself, Vindex backed Servius Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Spain, though Galba stayed noncommittal and left him exposed. Nero ordered Verginius Rufus, governor of Upper Germany, to put the revolt down, which he did in a short, decisive battle; Vindex took his own life rather than be captured. Verginius's own troops then hailed him imperator on the spot, offering to back him against Nero, but he refused and stayed loyal, quietly outliving the chaos that followed by three decades.

ParticipantsVindex, Verginius Rufus

Before his death Nero had raised a new legion, mostly from marines and sailors, who ranked far below full legionaries. Unwilling to lose their new status, they met Galba at the Milvian Bridge as he approached Rome and demanded that he confirm their promotion. When they refused his order to disperse and a few drew swords, Galba ordered his own legion to attack, and thousands were killed. He then revived the long-abandoned practice of decimation on the survivors. He was within the letter of military law, but his own men were disgusted and Rome was horrified, and he entered the city a feared and hated man.

ParticipantsGalba

Rome

On 10 January 69 Galba presented his adopted heir, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, to the Praetorian Guard, with no word of the payment they had been denied. Otho, passed over and borrowing heavily against a succession that would now never come, spent the last of his money buying twenty-three guardsmen. Five days later he slipped out of a ceremony at the Temple of Apollo, rallied the Guard in their camp and sent cavalry to find Galba, who had been carried out into the Forum in his litter. The riders overturned it and stabbed him to death. Vinius was killed with him, and Piso was cornered and killed at the Temple of Vesta. Galba was seventy and had ruled just over seven months, and within hours the Praetorians and the Senate had made Otho emperor.

ParticipantsOtho, Titus Vinius

Rome

In August or October AD 79, months into Titus's reign, Mount Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples erupted and buried the surrounding countryside in sixty feet of ash and volcanic rock. Pompeii was destroyed along with numerous other Campanian towns, and between 10,000 and 25,000 people died, among them the naturalist Pliny the Elder, attempting a rescue. The fallout preserved Pompeii as a near-perfect time capsule of first-century life. Titus appointed two ex-consuls to lead the relief and paid for the clean-up and rebuilding from the imperial treasury.

ParticipantsTitus

A great fire in the spring of AD 80, smaller than Nero's but serious, which felled a number of important buildings in Rome, among them the original Pantheon built by Marcus Agrippa. Titus hurried back from Pompeii and again put the imperial treasury behind the victims.

ParticipantsTitus

Rome

When Titus died on 13 September 81, Domitian left his brother's body and hurried to the Praetorian camp to be hailed emperor, and the Senate confirmed him as Augustus the next day. His first act was to deify Titus by his own edict, without waiting on the Senate, which had taken six months to approve Vespasian's godhood.

ParticipantsDomitian

Rome

Conducting a census in Chatti territory with a newly raised legion, Domitian found himself conveniently attacked, spent a year building roads and forts there, declared victory before winter, and came home to the triumph he had craved all his life, taking the title Germanicus. Tacitus, speaking for the aristocracy, called it a mock triumph, but the crowds enjoyed the games, and Domitian capped it by raising the soldiers' pay by a third, which bought the legions' loyalty for the rest of his reign.

ParticipantsDomitian

Rome

Exactly twenty years after Vitellius's revolt, the governor of Upper Germany, Lucius Antonius Saturninus, led his two legions in refusing to renew their oath to Domitian, counting on the Chatti to cross the frozen Rhine and reinforce him. An unheard-of early thaw left the Chatti stranded on the far bank, and 24 days in, Saturninus surrendered to Lappius Maximus, governor of Lower Germany, who burned his correspondence before Domitian arrived. Saturninus and his officers were executed. The crisis forced Domitian's hasty peace with the Dacians, and it hardened his suspicion of the Senate for the rest of his reign.

ParticipantsLucius Antonius Saturninus, Domitian

Organised by Domitian's chamberlain Parthenius, with his freedman Maximus working the palace doors and the attendant Stephanus as the killer. Stephanus hid a dagger in a sling worn for a faked arm injury. Domitian, told by an astrologer that he would die at noon, was assured the hour had passed when it had only just arrived, and admitted Stephanus to hear of a supposed plot. Stabbed, he fought back until others rushed in and finished him with seven wounds, aged 44. The Senate named Nerva emperor the next day; the legions, who loved Domitian, howled for vengeance, and the killers Nerva let go were executed a year later, when the Praetorians forced his hand.

ParticipantsDomitian

Rome

With Nerva in place, the Senate let fifteen years of anger loose in a series of edicts damning Domitian's memory: his name was struck from the monuments and buildings he had raised, and his statues and reliefs recarved as Nerva. It worked no better than Augustus's attempt to erase Antony, and in the provinces and above all the legions, where Domitian was still loved, it was impossible.

ParticipantsDomitian, Nerva

Rome

Resentful at being left out of Nerva's selection and furious that he had let Domitian's killers go free, the Praetorians under their new prefect Casperius Aelianus besieged the palace in October 97 and took the emperor hostage. Nerva gave in at once: Parthenius, Maximus and the other conspirators were hunted down and executed, and he publicly thanked the Guard for reminding him of his duty.

ParticipantsNerva

Rome

After the Praetorian siege, with no support in the legions and his reputation in ruins, Nerva dropped his coyness about the succession, set aside the idea of adopting the governor of Syria, and announced his adoption of Trajan, the most popular general of the day. He gave Trajan the consulship for 98 and a share of his tribunician power, making him practically co-emperor, and the threat of civil war vanished overnight. Only the Senate, cheated of its horse-trading over the succession, was put out.

ParticipantsNerva, Trajan

Rome

Governor of Syria when Trajan died in August 117, Hadrian was told first through Plotina and sat on the news until his position was secure. He then announced Trajan's death to his Syrian legions, who hailed him emperor as they had likely been told to, and wrote to the Senate apologising for the haste that had cut it out of the process and promising to keep senators safe. Faced with a dead emperor, a named heir and an acclaimed one, the Senate ratified Trajan's "last wishes". He refused his old guardian Attianus's call to execute plotting senators, but removed Lucius Quietus, Trajan's aggressive commander in Mesopotamia, from his command.

ParticipantsHadrian

Early in 118, on his Praetorian prefect Attianus's claim of a plot, four ex-consuls were seized and executed without trial: Cornelius Palma, Publius Celsus, Lucius Quietus and Avidius Nigrinus. Whether Hadrian ordered it or Attianus acted alone was never settled. The Senate was made to sign the death warrants itself, as under Domitian, and believed none of the charges. Hadrian protested his innocence, blamed his subordinates, removed Attianus, and spent the rest of his reign trying to live the affair down.

ParticipantsHadrian

Arriving in Rome in July 118 to a hostile Senate, Hadrian courted the people by cancelling every debt owed to the state from the previous fifteen years, having the Praetorians burn the loan records in a great pyre in Trajan's Forum. He extended the alimentary scheme of Nerva and Trajan, took on costs the towns had borne, and gave lavish games.

ParticipantsHadrian

Rome

Passing through the ruins of Jerusalem on his way to Egypt in 130, Hadrian set out to remake the devastated province as a Hellenistic colony. He ordered the city rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina, after his own family name and Jupiter of the Capitol, with a temple on the site of the old Jewish Temple, and banned circumcision: the provocation that brought on the Bar Kokhba revolt two years later.

ParticipantsHadrian

Judea

In October 130, while Hadrian's flotilla was moored at Hermopolis on its way up the Nile, the drowned body of Antinous washed up on the bank. Whether he died swimming, killed himself, or was sacrificed on the advice of Egyptian holy men that another's death would lengthen the emperor's life, the sources cannot agree. The grieving Hadrian founded the city of Antinoopolis at the spot, declared a new star to be Antinous, and made him a god.

ParticipantsAntinous, Hadrian

Passed over for the succession in favour of Lucius Aelius, Hadrian's teenage great-nephew Pedanius Fuscus, his only living male relative, was said to be plotting to seize power. In late 137 Hadrian ordered him to kill himself, and then turned on Fuscus's grandfather Servianus, past ninety and long at odds with the emperor, ordering his suicide too. Servianus protested his innocence and obeyed, but first prayed that Hadrian would long for death and be unable to die. The case against Servianus looks trumped up; the plot itself cannot be known, given the sources' hostility to Hadrian.

ParticipantsHadrian

Rome

When Lucius Aelius died on 1 January 138, Hadrian turned to Antoninus, a well-liked but unremarkable senator, on condition that Antoninus in turn adopt both the teenage Marcus Aurelius and the dead Lucius Aelius's young son. Antoninus asked for a few days to consider before accepting, and on 25 February became Hadrian's heir, granted tribunician power and full imperium. The arrangement made clear that Hadrian was planning a generation ahead, with Antoninus the bridge to Marcus.

ParticipantsHadrian, Antoninus Pius

When Antoninus died in March 161 the Senate offered power to Marcus alone, but Marcus would accept only if his adoptive brother Lucius were made emperor with him. For the first time Rome had two emperors at once, equal in tribunician and proconsular power, though Marcus was the senior partner and alone pontifex maximus. The pair then promised the Praetorian Guard the largest accession donative yet, nearly three years' pay, to secure men who had no rapport with either of them.

ParticipantsMarcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus

In the winter of 174-175 the empress Faustina, fearing for the succession while Marcus was ill and Commodus still a boy, corresponded with Avidius Cassius, governor of Syria, perhaps offering him her hand to protect Commodus's claim. Cassius seems to have taken Marcus for dead, and in spring 175 let the Syrian legions hail him emperor, followed by Egypt and Palestine, though Martius Verus in Cappadocia refused and warned Marcus. Faustina died on the march east. Learning Marcus was alive, Cassius persisted; the Senate declared him a public enemy against Marcus's wish to pardon him, and after three months and six days a centurion killed him and sent his head to Marcus, who had it buried with honours. Marcus snubbed Antioch, banned its games, and barred senators from governing their home provinces.

ParticipantsAvidius Cassius, Faustina the Younger

Displaced as first lady by Commodus's wife Crispina, his sister Lucilla plotted with her lover Quadratus and some senators to kill him. Early in 182 her husband's nephew Quintianus leapt at the emperor in a passage of the Colosseum, but paused to cry "This is what the Senate sends you!" and was seized. Quadratus and Quintianus were executed and Lucilla exiled to Capri and later killed, but the plot's other half succeeded in murdering the chamberlain Saoterus. The Praetorian prefect Perennis, secretly part of it, betrayed his fellow plotters, and Commodus turned on the Senate and his father's men in the bloodiest purge since Domitian.

ParticipantsLucilla, Commodus, Tigidius Perennis

Rome

Unrest in Britain sent 1,500 armed soldiers marching on Rome to complain of Perennis, and Commodus let them come. The chamberlain Cleander used the moment to persuade Commodus that Perennis meant to make himself or his son emperor; Perennis and his family were executed, and a second purge swept up Cleander's enemies in the Senate.

ParticipantsTigidius Perennis, Commodus

Rome

The deserter Maternus gathered fellow deserters, veterans and brigands into an army that raided and besieged towns across Gaul and Spain until Pescennius Niger beat it in open battle. In 187 Maternus led a remnant into Italy, planning to reach Commodus in Praetorian uniforms amid the costumed revels of a festival and kill him, but was betrayed by one of his own followers and executed. Saved only by that betrayal, Commodus withdrew into the palace for the rest of his reign.

ParticipantsCommodus

When grain ran short in 190, Cleander's surviving enemies sent children with banners onto the floor of the Circus Maximus to chant against him, and the crowd, some 150,000 strong, marched on his villa. He sent the Praetorians against them, but the urban prefect Pertinax turned his cohorts on the Guard instead. Cleander fled to Commodus, who handed him over to the mob; he was killed and his body dragged through the streets, and a purge of his allies followed.

ParticipantsCleander, Commodus, Pertinax

Rome

Alarmed by Commodus's delusions and fearing they would be purged for urging restraint, his mistress Marcia, his chamberlain Eclectus and the Praetorian prefect Laetus plotted his death and secured the old general Pertinax as a successor. On New Year's Eve 192 Marcia's poison failed when Commodus vomited it up, so they sent his wrestling partner Narcissus into his bath to strangle him. He was 31 and had ruled for twelve years.

ParticipantsCommodus, Pertinax, Quintus Aemilius Laetus

Rome

Woken on New Year's Day to news that Commodus was dead and the Praetorians had already proclaimed Pertinax, the delighted Senate ratified the new emperor and in the same breath damned the old one's memory: his renaming of Rome, the months and the legions was annulled, and his statues were pulled down across the city.

ParticipantsPertinax

Rome

Pertinax had promised the Praetorians a huge donative for their support, but with the treasury empty he paid only half, and he imposed a discipline the indulged Guard resented. On 28 March some 300 of them stormed the palace. The prefect Laetus, sent to talk them down, joined them instead, and as Pertinax tried to reason with them a soldier cut him down. He was 66 and had ruled for 86 days.

ParticipantsPertinax, Quintus Aemilius Laetus

Rome

With Pertinax dead and no successor in place, Laetus had the Praetorians offer the throne to the highest bidder. Pertinax's father-in-law Sulpicianus bid from inside the camp while Didius Julianus shouted his offers over the wall; Sulpicianus reached 20,000 sesterces a head, and Julianus won with 25,000, on condition that his rival be spared. The Guard marched him to the Senate, which ratified him with soldiers standing over it.

ParticipantsDidius Julianus, Quintus Aemilius Laetus

Rome

Hailed by the Danube legions in April 193, Severus raced for Rome, buying off Clodius Albinus in Britain with the title of Caesar. Julianus had him declared a public enemy and sent senators to win over his army and assassins to kill him, but the assassins never got close and the senators changed sides; a token force sent to block him was brushed aside, the first fighting between Romans in 124 years. Stopping short of the city, Severus offered the Praetorians their safety in exchange for Pertinax's killers, executed Laetus and the others they handed over, and watched Julianus's support collapse.

ParticipantsSeptimius Severus, Didius Julianus, Quintus Aemilius Laetus

Abandoned by the Praetorians, Julianus was deposed on 1 June 193, when the Senate declared Severus emperor and Julianus a public enemy. Left alone in the palace, he was seized by soldiers and beheaded, asking "What evil have I done? Whom have I killed?" He had ruled for sixty-six days.

ParticipantsDidius Julianus

Rome

Entering Rome in June 193, Severus had the disgraced Praetorians assemble unarmed outside the walls, surrounded them with his own troops, and disbanded the Guard. In its place he raised new cohorts drawn not from well-to-do Italians but from veterans of his Danube legions, and promotion to the Guard became the reward for distinguished service in the legions.

ParticipantsSeptimius Severus

Rome

Caracalla, married against his will to Plautianus's daughter, threatened to kill them both once he ruled, and Plautianus, in turn, was believed to be plotting to keep him from the throne. After Severus's dying brother Publius Septimius Geta denounced the prefect, Caracalla had centurions burst into an imperial banquet in January 205 claiming Plautianus had ordered them to kill Severus; Cassius Dio, who was there, thought the charge absurd. Confronted in the palace, Plautianus was struck by Caracalla and killed on Severus's order, and his family was exiled.

ParticipantsGaius Fulvius Plautianus, Septimius Severus

Rome

In December 211 Julia Domna brought her sons together, alone and unarmed, in her apartment to reconcile them. Caracalla's men burst in and stabbed Geta to death in his mother's arms, wounding her hand as she tried to shield him. Caracalla then ran to the Praetorian camp, where Geta had been the favourite, and claimed both brothers had been attacked and only he had escaped. A purge of Geta's friends, their families and their associates followed, killing thousands.

ParticipantsGeta, Caracalla, Julia Domna

Rome

When Caracalla arrived in Alexandria in 215, its citizens greeted him with a satirical play about his murder of Geta and his shifting excuses for it. In a rage he ordered a general slaughter, which is said to have killed some 20,000, and justified it to the Senate by declaring the whole city guilty.

ParticipantsCaracalla

An oracle in Africa kept insisting that the Praetorian prefect Macrinus would one day be emperor, and when the report of it reached Caracalla's court in Syria it was Macrinus who opened it, in a bundle the emperor had passed him unread. Knowing the prophecy was a death sentence, Macrinus found a disgruntled soldier, and in April 217, on the road near Carrhae, the man stabbed Caracalla as he stopped by the wayside and was shot down by the emperor's guard. Caracalla was 29 and had ruled for just over six years.

ParticipantsCaracalla, Macrinus

Exploiting Macrinus's lack of any claim to the throne and his stinginess towards the army, Julia Maesa and the eunuch Gannys promised rewards to any legion that backed her grandson. On 16 May 218 the Third Legion in Syria declared for Elagabalus; the Praetorians sent to crush it killed their officers and joined it, and the Second Legion followed. About three weeks later Gannys led Elagabalus's army against Macrinus outside Antioch, where the boy rallied a faltering cavalry charge and Macrinus fled the field. Caught in Cappadocia on his way back to Rome, Macrinus was executed, after fourteen months as emperor.

ParticipantsMacrinus, Elagabalus, Julia Maesa

Despairing of Elagabalus, Julia Maesa persuaded him in 221 to name his serious young cousin Alexander Caesar, and the assassination attempts began. Realising the Praetorians preferred his cousin, Elagabalus revoked Alexander's title in March 222 and spread word that he was dead. The Guard threatened to riot unless Alexander was produced, and when Elagabalus brought him to the camp the Praetorians acclaimed Alexander and, when Elagabalus protested, killed him and his mother and dragged their bodies through the streets. He was eighteen and had ruled for nearly four years.

ParticipantsElagabalus, Severus Alexander

Rome

Rather than pay the Germans as Alexander had planned, Maximinus led the legions across the Rhine on a punitive campaign that also gave his men the plunder they wanted, and won a hard-fought battle in a swamp that broke German resistance. He took the title Germanicus Maximus and made his son Caesar.

ParticipantsMaximinus Thrax

In April 248, a thousand years by Roman reckoning after Romulus founded the city, Philip the Arab celebrated with magnificent Secular Games: the traditional sacrifices, theatrical performances across the city, and gladiatorial combats in which a thousand men and many exotic animals died. They were the last Secular Games ever held, since by the time either cycle next fell due the empire was turning Christian.

ParticipantsPhilip the Arab

Rome

In 248 the legions of the Danube, who had borne the brunt of the Gothic raids, proclaimed Tiberius Claudius Marinus Pacatianus emperor. Philip, alarmed enough to talk of resigning, was reassured by the senator Decius that the rebels would soon kill their own emperor, and within days they did.

Convinced that Rome's troubles came from its lost virtue and the gods' displeasure, Decius ordered at the turn of 250 that everyone in the empire sacrifice to the gods for the emperor's safety. Local officials set deadlines, issued certificates to those who complied and then demanded to see them. The order was general, but Christians who refused faced torture and death, among them Pope Fabian in January 250, and the persecution eased only toward the end of its second year. When the Church of Rome could again elect a bishop, it split over whether, and on what terms, to take back Christians who had sacrificed.

ParticipantsDecius

An epidemic that broke out in Egypt around 249, reached Rome by 251 and ravaged the empire for some twenty years. Its cause is still unidentified: smallpox, measles and a haemorrhagic fever have all been proposed. It takes its name from St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, who wrote about it. At its height 5,000 people were reportedly dying each day in Rome, and the manpower it took from the fields and the army brought famine and weaker frontiers to an empire already under invasion, in political turmoil and economic depression. The young co-emperor Hostilian may have been one of its first victims in 251, and Claudius Gothicus died of plague at Sirmium in 270.

Taking advantage of Rome's Gothic troubles, Shapur used a dispute over the Armenian succession to overrun Armenia and put his own man on its throne, then in 253 invaded Roman Syria, destroying a Roman army at Barbalissos, taking the legionary garrisons and sacking cities including Antioch itself, before withdrawing for the winter. Rome made no effective response.

ParticipantsShapur I

When the Danube legions proclaimed Aemilianus in 253 and he marched on Italy, Gallus and his son Volusianus met him on the Via Flaminia before Valerian's Rhine legions could arrive. By one account Gallus was beaten near Interamna and killed with his son by his own guards as they fled; by another his army went over to Aemilianus before any battle. He was about 47 and had ruled for two years.

ParticipantsTrebonianus Gallus, Aemilianus

Ingenuus, the general Gallienus had left running the Danube provinces under his young son Valerian II, had himself proclaimed emperor around 260. The sources disagree on the order of events: whether Valerian II died naturally or was killed by Ingenuus, and whether the revolt followed news of Valerian's capture or only of his war in the East. Gallienus hurried from the Rhine, his cavalry under Aureolus routed the rebels in Pannonia, and Ingenuus died in the fighting, at his own men's hands or by his own.

ParticipantsGallienus

Left on the Rhine with a thinned and undersupplied army while Gallienus fought Ingenuus, Postumus caught a German raiding party heading home in 260 and shared its plunder out among his men. When the prefect Silvanus, guardian of Gallienus's young son Saloninus at Cologne, ordered the booty returned to its owners, Postumus refused and his troops proclaimed him emperor. He took Cologne and put Saloninus and Silvanus to death, and the governors of Gaul, Spain and Britain declared for him, trusting a man who promised to stay and defend them where Gallienus had twice left for other fronts.

ParticipantsPostumus, Gallienus

After capturing Valerian, Shapur swept through Syria and into Asia Minor, claiming in his own inscription to have taken 36 Roman cities, slowed only by the general Ballista and the treasury official Macrianus. Withdrawing late in 260 laden with captives and treasure, his army was caught unprepared west of the Euphrates by a force raised by Odaenathus of Palmyra, routed, and driven out of Syria.

ParticipantsOdaenathus, Shapur I

Resenting Gallienus's departure for Italy after the defeat of Ingenuus, the Danube legions proclaimed their general Regalianus emperor around 260. Like Postumus he set about defending his frontier rather than marching on Rome, and after some success against the Sarmatians he was killed within months when the Roxolani invaded Pannonia. Gallienus marched up from Italy and the Danube legions fell back into line.

After driving the Sasanians out, the treasury official Macrianus, who held Valerian's war chest, and the general Ballista had the eastern legions proclaim Macrianus's sons Quietus and Macrianus the Younger emperors. Unlike Postumus and Regalianus they meant to take the whole empire, and in 261 Macrianus and the Younger marched west with a large army, leaving Quietus at Antioch. In the Balkans Gallienus's general Aureolus beat them, and both were killed. Odaenathus, who had stayed loyal to Gallienus, then besieged Quietus at Emesa, where he was killed, and Ballista was put to death.

ParticipantsOdaenathus, Gallienus

Unable to tolerate a rival who coined in his own name, Gallienus sent his cavalry commander Aureolus over the Alps against Postumus, sometime between 261 and 265, perhaps in two campaigns. Aureolus beat Postumus but failed to press his victory or capture him, which the Romans put down to a secret pact. Gallienus, besieging Postumus in a Gallic city, was wounded by an arrow and withdrew, and never tried again. He kept firm control of the Gallic side of the Alps, and with it both ends of the passes into Italy, the line from which Aurelian would retake the West in 274.

ParticipantsGallienus, Postumus

In 267, as he prepared to march north against the Goths raiding Asia Minor, Odaenathus and his eldest son Herodianus were murdered, by the most common account by a kinsman, Maeonius, said to be avenging a personal slight. Zenobia, his widow, had the killer put to death. Versions in which Zenobia arranged the murder to clear the way for her own son Vaballathus, or Gallienus did to rid himself of an overmighty subject, are generally dismissed.

ParticipantsOdaenathus, Zenobia

In 267 the Heruli, a Germanic people of the Black Sea coast sailing with Goths, set out in some 500 ships, failed against Byzantium and Cyzicus, and were scattered by the Roman navy, though many ships escaped through the Hellespont into the Aegean. They sacked Athens, Corinth, Argos and Sparta, until the Athenian historian Dexippus rallied a militia and drove them north into the army Gallienus was bringing from the west, which beat them in Thrace. Duncan calls the raiders Goths, and the sources confuse Gallienus's victory with Claudius's at Naissus.

ParticipantsGallienus, Dexippus

Left behind at Milan in 268 while Gallienus marched against the Heruli, and perhaps aggrieved at losing command of the cavalry, Aureolus revolted, striking coins in Postumus's name at the Milan mint to draw the Gallic emperor in. Postumus ignored him. Gallienus turned back, routed Aureolus on the Adda and shut him up in Milan.

In September 268, while Gallienus besieged Aureolus in Milan, a cabal of officers, many of them Illyrian career soldiers and said to include the prefect Heraclianus, Claudius and Aurelian, murdered him. By the most dramatic account a conspirator raised a false alarm of a sortie from the city, and Gallienus, riding out alone and unarmoured, was cut down. He was about 50 and had reigned for fifteen years, eight of them alone. The officers made Claudius emperor, the story that Gallienus named him with his dying breath being later invention, and the Senate executed Gallienus's brother and son.

ParticipantsGallienus, Claudius Gothicus

Early in 269 the troops at Mainz proclaimed Laelianus emperor. Postumus took the city and killed him, but when he forbade his soldiers to sack it they turned on him and killed him. A soldier, Marius, held power for a few days before Victorinus took the Gallic Empire.

ParticipantsPostumus

With the imperial army drawn back to Italy against Quintillus, the Vandals crossed into Pannonia. Aurelian ordered everything men and horses could eat drawn inside the towns and cities, and once hunger had worn the invaders down he crushed them in a quick battle. He let the survivors go home on condition that they gave 2,000 horsemen to the Roman army.

ParticipantsAurelian

Probably on hearing of Claudius Gothicus's death, Zenobia sent her general Zabdas with the Palmyrene army into Egypt, a province no understanding with Rome had ever put in Palmyra's hands. In October 270 they drove the Roman garrison out of Alexandria, beat off a counter-attack under the prefect Tenagino Probus and declared Zenobia queen of Egypt, cutting the grain that fed Rome. In 272, as Aurelian marched east, a fleet he sent under an officer sometimes identified as the future emperor Probus is said to have retaken the province with ease; other accounts suggest no fighting was needed.

ParticipantsZenobia, Zabdas

The workers of the Rome mint, under its head Felicissimus, had been skimming off even the little silver meant for the debased coinage. Fearing what Aurelian would do when he found out, they rose as he entered Rome in 271, in a city already rattled by the defeat at Placentia and short of grain, and their protest became a general riot, egged on by senators and equites who had backed Quintillus. Regular troops reinforced the urban cohorts, and the revolt ended in a battle on the Caelian Hill; the figure of 7,000 dead is probably exaggerated. Aurelian executed the mint's officials and the senators and equites behind them, and shut the mint.

ParticipantsAurelian

Marching east in 271, Aurelian found the Danube provinces raided again by Goths, a smaller band than the hosts of the 260s, and drove them back across the river. The Historia Augusta, the only source to name him, says their leader Cannabaudes fell with 5,000 of his men, and Aurelian took the title Gothicus Maximus. Some historians identify Cannabaudes with Cniva, the victor of Abritus; others make him Cniva's son.

ParticipantsAurelian

Trajan's Dacia, jutting north of the Danube, had survived Hadrian's wish to give it up only because the memory of its conquest was still fresh. By 271 its mines were worked out, it added hundreds of miles to the frontier for no strategic return, and it had long been a back door into the empire. Aurelian withdrew the troops and most of the settlers south of the river, some dating the evacuation as late as 275, and Goths moved into the abandoned province. To soften the loss he carved a new province called Dacia out of Moesia, south of the Danube, with its capital at Serdica.

ParticipantsAurelian

Marching through Asia Minor in 272, Aurelian met little resistance until Tyana, near the Cilician Gates, whose leaders held out for Palmyra. The city was soon betrayed to him, and against his soldiers' hopes of a sack he declared a general pardon, after a dream, it was said, in which the city's famous philosopher Apollonius urged him to be merciful. The cities beyond, which had feared his revenge, opened their gates in turn.

ParticipantsAurelian