10 Fourteen Emperors 

What went wrong with Gaius? 
Tiberius took over seamlessly from Augustus but grew increasingly reclusive over the last decade of his life, spending most of his time in Capri. Gaius, the great-grandson of Julius Caesar was 24 when he became emperor in 37 BC. He had been taken on military trips as a young child and ended up with the nickname Caligula (little boots).  

Gaius’ infamies are well known and after only four years on the throne, he was assassinated. But this time, his whole family were killed as well. The consul gave a stirring speech that no despot could now get away with ruining the city, and he said “what nurtured the tyranny was nothing more than our own inaction…. weakened by the pleasure of peace, we learned to live like slaves.” 

Gaius’ fifty year old uncle, Claudius, was proclaimed emperor. The transition from Gaius to Claudius proved that the old Republic lived on only in a nostalgic form to be called up when it served a purpose.  

Claudius, while not reviled like Caligula, had a cruel streak as well. 

Good emperors and bad emperors 
Most of the historians, both ancient and modern, of Rome consider the virtues and vices of the emperors. But there is evidence that those reviled were perhaps not as bad as the anecdotes would have us believe, and those we consider good, have had the ‘bad’ incidents downplayed. 

There is good evidence that for most of the empire, the habits of the emperors mattered little to their daily life. There remained a remarkably stable structure of rule across the whole period. There were also a stable set of problems and tensions. The author will try to understand those to make sense of imperial rule, not the individual idiosyncrasies of the rulers. 

Changes at the top 
Some of the problems and tensions bequeathed by Augustus to the subsequent emperors was succession. The role of the Senate and the relationship between emperor and other elites remained contested. 

Succession 
Transmission of imperial power in Rome was usually by murder. Succession almost never happened without a victim and a struggle. Roman inheritance was not based on the oldest son. That made for rival claims in the case of great wealth or power. Primogeniture makes succession more stable, but it has the risk that the eldest may be unsuited for the job. The Roman system, however, meant every relative was a potential rival of the emperor, and it followed that the emperors themselves were particularly wary of especially their family members.  

But men could also become emperors if they had enough backing from the army. The praetorians did influence who held power, and no one could hold it if he didn’t have the support of the army. 

Adoption was another route to power. This method prevailed for most of the second century and became close to a meritocratic system. But despite the sentiment of adoption being meritocratic, it was still considered second-best. When Marcus Aurelius produced a son who became emperor, what the Romans got was Commodus- a generally recognized disaster. Rome never quite figured out succession. 

Senators 
How were senators supposed to operate under autocracy? Augustus attempted to change this body of legislators into something like an extended arm of his administration. But it left the institution under-defined. Interaction with Tiberius showed a servile senate that refused to act independently. This angered Tiberius, who said they were fit for slavery. But he didn’t recognize that the senate he said he wanted was incompatible with his own reign. 

While emperors could be a terror to the senators, there seemed to be a second type of man who simply went along with the emperors in order to keep his own cushy life going. As time went on, there were also more and more senators from outside Rome. Perhaps these men were not so filled with nostalgia for some republican fantasy. They just got on with their job. 

Oh, dear, I think I’m becoming a god… 
One of the big questions was how the power of the emperor was to be defined and understood. The kings who followed Alexander the Great in the eastern Mediterranean, like the Roman generals, had been offered festivals on the model of religious festivals, and used epithets shared with gods (savior). This was a logical way of making sense of men who far transcended ordinary human power and of finding an existing category into which superhuman people might more or less fit.  

Christianity taught us that this fluid boundary between the divine and the human was ridiculous. Of course, it was problematic for the pre-Christian Romans too and there were debates about just how godlike the ruler was. Of course, the ancient Romans weren’t stupid either and they understood that the emperor wasn’t on the same level as Jupiter, for example. They knew the difference between bonafide Olympians and their emperors. 

While emperors were treated like gods at times, they were also seen to be under the protection of the gods, not their equal. When they died, however, they could be voted into divinity. But the process usually required something like catholic sainthood- an eyewitness to some phenomena that would certify deity. This of course could be corrupted and was the butt of jokes at times.