The Bluffer’s Guide to Early Roman Emperors

Another one of my little guides to the ancient world, this time focusing on Roman Emperors. Now, my courses only take me to the end of the Flavian dynasty with a few specks of religious history after that, and I wouldn’t be able to do justice to anyone ruling after AD 138, so I just won’t cover them. Maybe after my exams when I have more time, I might amend this. This will be a very short and rather biased guide, but I’ll try to fill in some of the big issues about each reign. All history is biased. There’s no such thing in history as “facts” only “widely held opinions” and “well argued theories”. Well, that’s my excuse anyway. Hope you enjoy this one, guys!

Augustus (ruled 27 BC to AD14)

Contrary to popular belief, Julius Caesar was not the first emperor. He was an imperator (in the word’s original sense: a general) and a dictator (a man employed to sort out Rome’s problems in a time of crisis) but was never emperor, that is to say, supreme ruler, since his status as dictator was, in theory, temporary. Trouble was, it ended up not being temporary. Caesar was a brilliant general an politician, but his vanity and refusal to give up power made him unpopular with his peers, who promptly murdered him in 44BC. What followed after his death was an awkward attempt to continue the Republic, with his heir Octavian (previously Octavius and later to be known as Augustus, but we’ll get to that, the guy had a lot of names) sharing power as triumvir with Caesar’s old friend Marc Antony and the thoroughly useless Lepidus. Lepidus didn’t last long, and with him gone, relations between Octavian in the west and Antony in the east (famously hanging out with Cleopatra and largely ignoring his duties, much to senatorial dismay) and civil war broke out… again. Octavian defeated Antony at the battle of Actium in 27BC, after Cleopatra and her impressive navy decided they didn’t like the looks of things and fled.

Image via Wikipedia