Emperors and Usurpers in The Later Roman Empire Civil War Panegyric and The Construction of Legitimacy Adrastos Omissi Full Chapter

Emperors and Usurpers in the Later
Roman Empire: Civil War, Panegyric,

and the Construction of Legitimacy
Adrastos Omissi
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Emperors and Usurpers

in the Later Roman
Empire
Civil War, Panegyric, and the
Construction of Legitimacy
ADRASTOS OMISSI
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‘Daddy, it’s quite boring for me for you to work.’

To Chloé, to Leo, to Milo, to Rafe
Preface
sine ira et studio
Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, hand-

somer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other
people—in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain,
making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life
was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong,
who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who
deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.
I did not question the prevailing standards, because so far as I could see
there were no others. How could the rich, the strong, the elegant, the
fashionable, the powerful, be in the wrong? It was their world, and the
rules they made for it must be the right ones.
George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’¹
This book was born of a simple observation, that very little had been written
on the history of usurpation in the later Roman Empire. It seemed to me
strange that, in an age so dominated by civil war, historians had not seen fit to
subject usurpation to detailed scrutiny. The obvious thing to do, therefore,
seemed to be to write the absent book myself. In its conception, it was a
monograph upon civil war and usurpation from the end of the crisis of the
third century to the fall of the Empire in the West and the emergence of the
new, Constantinopolitan Empire in the East. The book was to consider why
usurpations occurred, how they were undertaken, and in what ways they
played themselves out. Above all, it was to shine some much-needed light
upon the shadowy regimes of the late Empire’s great usurpers, men like
Carausius, Maxentius, Magnentius, Magnus Maximus, and Constantine III.
As is often the case at the beginning of a new project, perhaps the first lesson
that my research had to teach was that there was a very good reason that this
book had not already been written. Historians, whatever their subject and
period, are at the mercy of their sources. Although we can approach them
creatively or innovatively, reimagine them or augment them with new discov-
eries, we can ultimately only see our periods through the prism of their
sources. And in this instance the sources clung jealously to their secrets.
Usurpers are elusive figures, their biographies usually no more than a few
¹ From It is What I Think by George Orwell. Published by Secker. Reprinted by permission of

The Random House Group Limited. ©1999. In P. Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George
Orwell, vol. XIX: It Is What I Think (Rev. edn. London, 2002), 378–9.
viii Preface
clipped phrases, their policies unknown, their adherents anonymous but for
the occasional name that falls accidentally, like loose change, from this or that
source. What I might build from the sum of these disjointed parts, I began to
see, would be a Frankenstein’s monster which might bear the semblance of a
connected historical account but would in fact be little more than a series of
rumours and invectives strung together in order.
This tight-lipped refusal of the sources to yield the details I desired of them
pushed me to new questions. Why was it (other, perhaps, than naive expect-
ations) that I was unable to find the details that I was searching for? What
processes had served to destroy them? Perhaps most importantly of all, what
might I learn from looking at the sources not with an eye for what they could
tell me, but for what it was their authors were trying not to tell me? Not only is
the book richer because of this shift in attitude, but the process has also been a
personally transformative one, and helped to move me from the comforting
but immature position of one who views the past as an independent reality,
accessed more or less directly through sources more or less thickly populated
with facts, to that of one who understands, at least vaguely, that the past is text.
The hope to find a past independent of the text is as vain as the hope to find a
thought independent of a thinker. Tacitus, at the opening of his Annales, made
a profession of that virtue which all ambitious historians claim and which all
sensible historians know to be an impossibility, to report the past sine ira et
studio, without bitterness and without partiality. Yet to view the world—
through text, through monuments, or even through the windows of the eyes
and the ears—is to view it studio: with partiality, with intention, with agenda.
There is no history without partiality.
The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter I provides the reader with
some context by way of an account of the history of imperial power between
its inception and the outbreak of the third-century crisis. It attempts to
provide some explanation for the deeply chaotic nature of the imperial
succession and the near imponderability of such questions as ‘what is usurp-
ation?’ Chapter II is perhaps the most important chapter in the whole work, a
justification of the value of the project and—I hope—a convincing demon-
stration not only of how we can use panegyric to understand civil war but also
of the fact that panegyric constituted one of the most important primary
sources available to Roman historians and that, therefore, panegyric underpins
all primary material relating to imperial history that we possess from the
period. Chapters III–IX then set about the body of the project, examining how
the panegyrics present individual usurpations and working chronologically
through the span of the period as defined by the textual corpus of the surviving
prose panegyrics. Each chapter attempts to describe how the panegyrics of the
period constructed the narrative of inter-imperial conflict, to use those nar-
ratives to understand the behaviour of the emperors and courts that they
praised, and to demonstrate the way in which the panegyrics have shaped
Preface ix
subsequent historical source material. Chapter X then provides something of a
postscript, examining from a historical rather than a textual point of view why it
is that the book has the upper chronological boundary (the death of Theodos-
ius) that it has and offering some very general remarks on how the office of
emperor changed in both East and West during the fifth century. I conclude, as
one ought, by telling my reader the things they ought to think after having read
the preceding pages, in case I have failed to make them think them.
This book is not, in and of itself, either a history of usurpation or a political
history of the period in question. It assumes a certain familiarity with late
Roman history and as such—lamentably—will constitute a poor introduction
to the topic. Nevertheless, I hope that it will be of use to students as well as to
researchers and I have made an effort to make it as accessible as the material
allows. In particular, I have tried to make sure that quotations from original
sources and from modern scholarship in languages other than English are
provided in translation (at least when quoted in the main text) and that
technical terms in Latin and Greek have been translated or glossed.
The debts of gratitude that I have accrued in the long course of this work,
which began life as a doctoral project undertaken in 2009 at St John’s College,
Oxford, are too many to comprehensively acknowledge, though certain names
cannot go unmentioned. Thanks first is owed to my doctoral supervisor, Neil
McLynn, who helped above all to redirect an obsession with swords, horses,
and armour into an attempt to write history. Neil’s guidance helped to bring
this project to life and without him it would not exist in any recognizable form.
I am also deeply indebted to the patient teachers who took a monoglot
Masters’ student and gave him the tools to work with his sources, in particular
to Mary Whitby, to Juliane Kerkhecker, and to Ida Toth. To Ida I also owe
a great debt for the confidence she has placed in me as a teacher over the years,
and the opportunities that this trust has afforded me. I would also like to
express my gratitude to those kind friends who have read drafts of parts or all
of this work, and whose comments have greatly enriched it, in particular to
Lydia Matthews, Alan Ross, Michael Hanaghan, and to my brother, Cesare
Omissi, who pored over the whole manuscript with a humbling diligence.
Many are the gaffes and blunders from which they all have saved me, and such
as remain are solely my responsibility. My thanks also to Enrico Emanuele
Prodi, who helped to make up for rare failings in the Bodleian Library.
To Oriel College, Oxford, I also owe a great debt of thanks for having provided
me with a Junior Research Fellowship from 2014–17, during which years the
writing of this book was undertaken. Finally, it must be stressed that none of
this work would have been possible without generous funding from the States
of Jersey, from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and from the British
Academy, all of whom have, at various stages, awarded me grants that have
thereby made it possible for me to devote myself to study and research.
x Preface
My thanks goes also to various seminar series and conferences at which
I have been able to air some of the ideas contained within the book and to
receive feedback from peers and senior colleagues; in particular: the Institute
of Classical Studies Graduate WIP seminar in London, the Oxford University
Byzantine Society Graduate Conference 2012 and 2013, the conference ‘Use of
Antiquity’, held in Vienna in 2012, the History Research Seminar at Hull, the
Late Roman and the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies research seminars at
Oxford, the Leeds International Medieval Congress 2013 and 2015, the con-
ference ‘Medial (re)presentations’. held in Göttingen in February 2015, and to
the 9th biennial Celtic Conference in Classics, held in Dublin in 2016.
Similarly, I am deeply indebted to the board of OUP’s ‘Oxford Studies in
Byzantium’ series for taking this work on, in particular to Elizabeth Jeffreys,
who was a champion of this book when it needed one, and to James Howard-
Johnston, as mild-tempered and supportive an editor as one could hope to
work with. I would also like to thank the team at OUP—in particular Charlotte
Loveridge, Georgina Leighton—and my copy editor, Ben Harris, whose dili-
gence and helpfulness made the business of preparing the manuscript an easy
and a pleasant one.
I must also offer my thanks to Mark Humphries and to Mark Whittow, who
examined the DPhil thesis on which this work was based and whose encour-
agement and support gave me the confidence to believe that it might make a
book worth reading. Both have since proven great mentors, and have made the
baffling road of academic life an easier one to tread. It is with a heavy heart,
and still with a sense of disbelief, that I must add to these thanks the tragic
coda that Mark Whittow will never be able to read them. I owed to Mark and
impossible debt of gratitude for his help over the years, for the belief he always
seemed to place in me, and for his infectious energy and positivity. I shall miss
him dearly.
Finally, for their love, support, and, above all, patience, I want to say thank
you to my family, to Chloé, to Leo, to Milo, and to Rafe. Without you all busily
working away at giving me a life filled with love and fun and little daily
adventures, there is no way that I would have ever had the heart to finish
this project. Like it or not, this book is dedicated to you.
Contents
List of Figures xiii

List of Abbreviations xv
Typographical Note xix
PART I
I. Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 3
Why usurpation?: the problem of the imperial succession 3
‘This litany of manifest usurpers and rebellious generals’: why had
the imperial succession become so unstable by the third century? 12
‘The difference between a tyrant and a king is one of deeds,
not of name’: how was usurpation understood in the late
Roman Empire? 21
‘Let these things go unspoken’: usurpation and modern research 34
II. Usurpation, Legitimacy, and Panegyric 41
Known unknowns, and unknown unknowns: how to use
panegyric as a source 47
‘In which I would tell many lies’: who dictated the content
of panegyric? 54
‘And would be viewed with favour by those who knew them
to be such’: panegyric, audience, and influence 59
Propaganda and power 66
PART II
III. A House Divided Against Itself 71
IV. ‘At last Roman, at last restored to the true light of Empire’:
Diarchy, Tetrarchy, and the Fall of the British Empire
of Carausius 75
Birthing the late Roman state: diarchs, tetrarchs, and a new
language of power 76
Emperors and bandits: the British Empire under
Carausius and Allectus 80
V. Tyranny and Betrayal: Constantine, Maximian, Maxentius,
and Licinius 103
Constantine’s usurpation: Constantine, Galerius, and Maximian 103
The tyrannus: Maxentius and the rewards of civil war 116
Notable by his absence: Licinius and the rise of the
Constantinian dynasty 142
xii Contents
VI. Tyranny and Blood: Constantius, Constans, Magnentius,

and Vetranio 153
Smiling for the cameras: the sons of Constantine, 337–50 154
The son of the father: Constantius the tyrant-slayer 163
VII. Usurper, Propaganda, History: The Emperor Julian 193
The voice of a usurper: Julian’s rise to power 193
Bleaching the stains: Julian’s sole rule 208
VIII. Panegyric and Apology: The Accession of Jovian and the
Usurpation of Procopius 223
The need for victory: Jovian and the demands of imperial
rhetoric 223
The enemy inside: Valentinian, Valens, and Procopius 228
‘He who sought rule for himself behind the cloak of a little boy’:
the usurpation of Valentinian II 250
IX. Dismembering the House of Valentinian: The Usurpation
of Theodosius and the War with Magnus Maximus 255
‘And nobly he made the vote his own’: the usurpation of
Theodosius 255
Divided loyalties: the usurpation of Magnus Maximus 263
X. Crisis and Transformation: Imperial Power in the Fifth Century 291
Conclusion: Those Made Tyrants by the Victory of Others 301
Appendix I: The Panegyrics 307
Appendix II: Quantifying Usurpation: Notes to Accompany Figure I.2 313
Bibliography 317
Index 339
List of Figures
I.1. The Roman Empire in AD 271. 11

Image by Michael Athanson.
I.2. Usurpations in the Roman Empire, 27 BC–AD 455. 20
V.1. The battle of the Milvian Bridge as depicted on the south
face of the Arch of Constantine. 136
THE ARCH OF CONSTANTINE (https://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/resources
/images/arch-constantine), © Steve Kershaw, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
VI.1. Consular issue for the year 346, minted at Antioch and
depicting upon its reverse the imperial brothers, nimbate, each
holding a sceptre and globe and dressed in their consular robes. 163
Numismatica Ars Classica NAC AG, Auction 31, lot 157.
VIII.1. Coins of a) Procopius, b) Julian, and c) Valens, showing the
resemblance between the images of Procopius and Julian. 232
a) Photo courtesy of 51 Gallery—iBelgica; b) Photo courtesy of Triskeles
Auctions; c) © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
IX.1. The relief from the Column of Theodosius, showing a group
of supplicant figures whose attire, in particular the Chi Rho
shield, show them to be the members of an imperial bodyguard. 288
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Istanbul negative
no. D-DAI-IST-R1186. Photographer: W. Schile.
List of Abbreviations
PRIMARY MATERIAL
* Unless otherwise stated, abbreviations for primary sources follow guidelines

set out in the Oxford Classical Dictionary
Ambr., de ob. Theod. Ambrose, de obitu Theodosii
Ambr., Ep. Ambrose, Epistulae
Ambr., Ep. extra coll. Ambrose, Epistulae extra collectionem
Amm. Ammianus Marcellinus
Ath., Apol. ad Const. Athanasius, Apologia ad Constantium
Ath., Apol. contra Ar. Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos
Art. Pass. Passio Artemii
Aur. Vict., Epit. pseudo-Aurelius Victor, Epitome de Caesaribus
Claud., de bello Gild. Claudian, de Bello Gildonico
Claud., Man. Theod. cons. Claudian, Panegyricus dictus Manlio Theodoro consuli
Chron. 354 Chronographus anni CCCLIIII
Coll. Av. Collectio Avellana
Cons. Const. Consularia Constantinopolitana
CTh Codex Theodosianus
Cyr. Jer., Ep. ad Const. Cyril of Jerusalem, Epistula ad Constantium
Eph., Hym. cont. Iul. Ephraem, Hymni contra Iulianum
Eunap., V. Soph. Eunapius, Vitae Sophistarum
Euseb., HE Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica
Euseb., VC Eusebius, Vita Constantini
Greg. Tur., Hist. Gregory of Tours, Decem Libri Historiarum
HA Historiae Augustae
Joh. Ant. fr. Joannis Antiocheni Fragmenta (K. O. Müller, Fragmenta
Historicorum Graecorum, vol. IV (Paris, 1851))
Jul., Ep. ad Ath. Julian, Epistula ad Athenienses
Jul., Caes. Julian, Caesares
Jul., Or. Julian, Orationes
Lact., de Mort. Lactantius, de Mortibus Persecutorum
Orat. ad sanct. Oratio ad sanctos
Origo Origo Constantini Imperatoris
Philost., HE Philostorgius, Historia Ecclesiastica
Prisc., de Laud. Priscian, de Laude Anastasii imperatoris
Ps. Psalms
Ruf., HE Rufinus, Historia Ecclesiastica
Soc., HE Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica
Soz., HE Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica
Sulp. Sev., Chron. Sulpicius Severus, Chronica
xvi List of Abbreviations

Sulp. Sev., Dial. Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi
Sulp. Sev., V. Mart. Sulpicius Severus, Vita Sancti Martini
Symm, Or. Symmachus, Orationes
Symm., Rel. Symmachus, Relationes
Syn., de Reg. Synesius, de Regno
Theodor., HE Theodoret, Historia Ecclesiastica
Theoph. Theophanes, Chronographia
Zon. Zonaras, Epitome Historiarum
SECONDARY MATERIAL
AC Acta Classica
AE L’Année Épigraphique
AJP American Journal of Philology
AncSoc Ancient Society
ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt
AW Ancient World
Barnes, Constantine T. D. Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in
the Later Roman Empire (Malden, 2011)
BZ Byzantinische Zeitschrift
CAH Cambridge Ancient History
CISA Contributi dell’Istituto di Storia Antica
CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
CLRE Bagnall, R. S., Cameron, A., Schwartz, S. R., and Worp,
K. A., Consuls of the Later Roman Empire (Atlanta, 1987)
CP Classical Philology
CQ Classical Quarterly
CW The Classical World
DNP Der Neue Pauly
DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers
Galletier Galletier, E. (ed. and tr.), Panégyriques Latins: texte établi
et traduit par Édouard Galletier (3 vols. Paris, 1949–55)
GOTR Greek Orthodox Theological Review
GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
Heather-Moncur P. J. Heather and D. Moncur (trs), Politics, Philosophy,
and Empire in the Fourth Century: Select Orations of
Themistius (Translated Texts for Historians 36.
Liverpool, 2001)
Historia Historia: Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte
HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
ICUR Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae
ICUR n. s. Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae nova series
ILS Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae
IstMitt Istanbuler Mitteilungen
List of Abbreviations xvii

JLA Journal of Late Antiquity
JTS The Journal of Theological Studies
JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology
JRS Journal of Roman Studies
LSA The Last Statues of Antiquity
MAAR Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome
NC The Numismatic Chronicle
Nixon-Rodgers Nixon, C. E. V., and Rodgers, B. S. (eds and trs), In
Praise of Later Roman Emperors: the Panegyrici Latini
(Berkeley, 1994)
PLRE Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire
RE Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen
Altertumswissenschaft
REA Revue des Études Augustiniennes
REAnc Revue des Études Anciennes
RhM Rheinisches Museum
RIC Roman Imperial Coinage
RIDA Revue Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquité
RSdA Revista Storica dell’Antichita
YCS Yale Classical Studies
Typographical Note
Throughout this text, ‘West’ and ‘East’ (capitalized) have been used as
shorthand for ‘the Western Roman Empire’ and ‘the Eastern Roman Empire’.
It ought to be noted that no official and formalized separation existed between
the Empire’s two halves at any point during this period, but the terms
are nevertheless a useful shorthand for an empire in which emperors frequ-
ently operated with a division of responsibility portioned on a west/east
axis. Likewise, I have capitalized the adjectives ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ as if
they were proper adjectives (as ‘English’, ‘French’) when they refer to these
territories. Where ‘west’, ‘western’, ‘east’, and ‘eastern’ appear without capit-
alization, they are being employed in their more usual sense.
Part I
Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the

Roman Empire
Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?

For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
John Harington, Epigrams IV.5
Roman imperial government proved to be one of the most enduring political

institutions ever established in human history. From 27 BC until AD 1453, a
period of very nearly fifteen centuries, a virtually unbroken line of men clai-
ming the title of Emperor of the Romans ruled over a Mediterranean territory
that outlasted the rise and fall of countless would-be rivals, successors, and
conquerors. Across five centuries in the West, and fifteen centuries in the East,
the legitimacy of Roman imperial government was virtually never called into
question. Romans took it for granted that theirs was a divinely appointed
order, even one that mirrored the divine order itself. Yet if imperial govern-
ment itself was never truly challenged, the same cannot be said for individual
emperors, who faced an unending struggle to gain the acceptance of their
subjects, a struggle whose symptoms were treason trials, usurpation, and the
near perpetual civil wars that characterized the Roman polity. What follows is
an attempt to consider the imperial office over its history, to look at how
emperors were created, and to understand why imperial power and usurpation
were so intertwined.
WHY USURPATION?: THE PROBLEM

OF THE I MP E RI AL SU CCES S I ON
Roman imperial power can only properly be understood in the context of

usurpation. From the death of Commodus in AD 192 to the accession of the
child emperor Valentinian III in the West in 423, no decade was without civil
war and conflict over the imperial succession, and virtually no emperor
4 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

reigned who did not have to face military challenge to his rule. In western
Europe and North Africa, only the disappearance of imperial power brought
an end to this perpetual cycle. In the East, the creation of a new imperial court
centred once more upon a single capital city only served to change the nature
of usurpation and civil war, not to halt its progress. To understand imperial
power, one must understand usurpation. To understand usurpation, we must
understand how imperial power came into being.
From the moment of its creation, Roman imperial power was power usur-
ped. The Roman Republic had been governed by an aristocracy whose mem-
bers competed with one another for power and prestige within a political
system the express function of which was to limit the concentration of power
in individual hands. But during the first century BC, as the spoils of conquest
poured into Roman coffers, the regulations that governed the Republic began
to break down and powerful men fought with one another to rule a Roman
state that now spanned the Mediterranean. Twice, in 88 and 49 BC, Rome itself
was invaded by Roman armies. In 44, the man who had declared himself
perpetual dictator of the Roman state, Julius Caesar, was cut down upon the
senate floor.¹ Chaos reigned, and the man who brought order did so at sword
point, presiding over a restored Republic that was a monarchy in all but name.
Born Gaius Octavius, he died Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus. He
brought a final end to the civil wars of the Republic by defeating Antony
and Cleopatra, first at Actium (2 September 31) and then at Alexandria
(1 August 30).²
When Octavian returned to Rome from Egypt, he made a great show of
laying down his powers and restoring authority to the senate. But the actuality
was different. Octavian was the wealthiest man in the Roman world, he
commanded the loyalty of the armies, and, in the course of fourteen years of
fighting had built an enormous patronage network among the Roman elite. In
January 29 he took up his fifth consulship. He was to hold the office every year
until 23, and twice more after that. In 27, in order to pacify provinces still in a
chaotic condition, the senate voted to him control of a provincia that was
composed of Spain, Gaul, Egypt, and Syria, handing over to his direct admin-
istration not only an enormous territory, but the majority of the Roman army
(twenty of twenty-six legions).³ At the same time the senate declared him
¹ Both Caesar and Rome’s other famous would-be sovereign, Sulla, had engineered dictator-
ships for themselves not bounded by time constraints, as the office had traditionally been in the
early Republic (its last occupant before Sulla being Gaius Servilius Geminus in 202 BC):
J. F. Gardner, ‘The Dictator’, in M. Griffin (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar (Oxford, 2009),
57–60.
² R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (Reissue first paperback edn. Oxford, 2002), 294–300;
C. Pelling, ‘The triumviral period’, CAH X (2nd edn. Cambridge, 1996), 54–65.
³ J. A Crook, ‘Political History, 30 B.C. to A.D. 14’, CAH X, 78–9; Syme, Roman Revolution, 326.
Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 5

princeps, ‘first citizen’, and awarded him the cognomen Augustus.⁴ In 23, he
was granted consular imperium which gave him the right not only to govern his
own extensive provincial holdings, but to interfere in other provinces when he
deemed it necessary.⁵ At the same time he acquired tribunicia potestas, the right
to call the senate, to sit on the consuls’ platform, to speak first when the senate
was in session, to veto legislation, and to administer the grain supply that kept the
city alive. These powers were set with fixed terms, but Augustus so controlled the
operation of Roman government that their renewal was a formality, a formality
enacted in 18, in 13, in 8, and in 3 BC, and in AD 13.⁶ Sacral authority was also
devolved to him in 12 BC, when he was made pontifex maximus, high priest of the
Roman state.⁷ Coupled with his military and executive authority, Augustus thus
had concentrated in his hands a diversity of powers which the Republic had
expressly existed to prevent being controlled by a single individual.
Augustus had thus created for himself a packet of powers each of which,
individually, was grounded in Republican principles but which, taken to-
gether, ensured him a dominance over the Roman state that was a monarchy
in all but name. To ensure the continuation of his novel position, Augustus
had ensured that his successor, Tiberius, was invested with many of these
powers while he was still alive. Upon Augustus’ death (19 August 14), the
senate voted to Tiberius the few remaining powers that he lacked and, in
so doing, the principate became an institution.⁸ Tiberius was acclaimed as
Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti Filius Augustus by the senate and by Augustus’
praetorian guard, but it was not they who had given Tiberius his powers;
Augustus had.⁹ These powers were passed on to his grandson, Gaius (known
to us as Caligula). As Augustus had done with him, so Tiberius marked
Caligula out during his own lifetime as his intended successor, heaping hon-
our and responsibility onto him.¹⁰ And as Tiberius had done, Caligula ensured
⁴ This name is difficult to translate, but perhaps can be rendered as ‘the majestic one’ (with its
Greek equivalent Σεβαστός). It was inherited by Augustus’ successors, however, and quickly
became, with Caesar, less a name than an imperial title (cf. D. Kienast, Römische Kaisertabelle:
Grundzüge einer römischen Kaiserchronogie (Darmstadt, 1996), 24–6).
⁵ J.-L. Ferrary, ‘The Powers of Augustus’, in J. Edmondson (ed.), Augustus (tr. J. Edmondson.
Edinburgh Readings in the Ancient World. Edinburgh, 2009), 90–136, esp. 110–17. Ferrary
argues against the general consensus that this power amounted to imperium proconsulare, which
he sees as a later term.
⁶ Crook, ‘Political History’, 70–112. ⁷ Res gestae 10; Kienast, Kaisertabelle, 27.
⁸ J. Rich, ‘Making the Emergency Permanent: Auctoritas, potestas and the evolution of the
principate of Augustus’, in Y. Rivière (ed.), Des reformes augustéennes (Rome, 2012), 80–1.
⁹ The senate’s vote was clearly considered an important formality for this transition, yet the
fact that Augustus’ powers would pass to another individual had been made very clear by
Augustus, and Tiberius had, after the death of Augustus’ grandsons, long been lined up for the
role. Augustus formally bequeathed his powers to Tiberius in his will: Syme, Roman Revolution,
338–9; J. Wiedemann, ‘Tiberius to Nero’, CAH X, 202–7.
¹⁰ A story, however, not without its complications: A. Barrett, Caligula: The corruption of
power (London, 1989), 27–41, 50–9.

his own smooth adoption of his predecessor’s powers through his control of
the praetorians, the only military force in Italy, stationed within the imposing
walls of the Castra Praetoria, overlooking the city and the senators, ensuring
their good behaviour.¹¹ That was on 16 March 37, when Tiberius died. But by
January 41, Caligula had lost the support of the praetorians; they murdered
him in a palace corridor while he made his way to the baths.¹²
Caligula’s assassination revealed the institutional strength of the principate.
While the individual emperor had been found wanting, the idea of imperial
power stood firm and the hope entertained by certain members of the senate
that the Republic could be restored were dashed within a few hours of
Caligula’s death. The question was not whether someone would succeed Caligula,
but who. While the senate debated this question in the curia, however, the
praetorian guard had already chosen a candidate and acclaimed him Augustus.
With the only serious military force in the city backing him unanimously,
Claudius’ assumption of power could not seriously be challenged.¹³ The senate
had no choice but to consent to the decision of the soldiers.
Claudius’ successor, the infamous Nero, took power on 13 October 54, after
Claudius died from poisoning. The stepson of Claudius, through his wife
Agrippina, and the emperor’s adoptive heir, Nero came to the throne shortly
before his eighteenth birthday. His thirteen-year reign was marked by escal-
ating violence against the senatorial class, a deeply unpopular taste for public
performances in the theatre and the circus, and, following the fire of AD 64, a
monumental building programme in Rome, the scale of which drained his
treasury sufficiently to interrupt grain distribution and military pay in the city.
As open rebellions broke out in the provinces and Nero’s support dwindled, he
was finally forced to suicide on 9 June 68.¹⁴
Nero’s sudden death brought imperial power to its first major crisis. For the
first century of its existence, the imperial office had been controlled by a single
family, the so-called Julio-Claudians, who had carefully managed the succes-
sion of the domus Caesaris as a familial possession. But what happened when
the pater familias of the domus Caesaris died intestate? In 41, the swift action
of the praetorians in promoting the dead emperor’s uncle, Claudius, within
hours of Caligula’s death had silenced debate before it could truly begin and
had affirmed the primacy of the Julio-Claudian line. But by 68, one hundred
¹¹ S. Bingham, The Praetorian Guard: A History of Rome’s Elite Special Forces (London, 2013),
15–33.
¹² Joseph., AJ XIX.1–2; Suet., Calig. 58; Dio Cass., LIX.29.5–7. The conspirators also murdered
his wife and infant daughter, dashing the little girl’s head against a wall.
¹³ Dio Cass., LIX.29–LX.1; Joseph., AJ XIX.2–3; B. Levick, Claudius (London, 1990), 29–40;
J. Osgood, Claudius Caesar: Image and power in the early Roman empire (Cambridge, 2010),
29–32.
¹⁴ M. T. Griffin, Nero: The End of a Dynasty (2nd edn. London, 1984), 164–82; J. Malitz, Nero
(Oxford, 2005), 99–108.

years of paranoid treason trials had so effectively extirpated the imperial
family that there existed no obvious successor. The Empire now faced a
question that had been effectively sidestepped for as much as a century: who
could be emperor, and by whose authority were emperors to be created?
The Republican clothing in which the imperial office had been garbed
allowed the senate to flatter itself with the notion that the power to select
and to create an emperor lay with it alone. As a body, they wrote to Servius
Sulpicius Galba, governor of the Spanish province of Hispania Tarraconensis,
to announce that they had declared him the new emperor. But the events of
the following year were to demonstrate yet again that it was not senators but
soldiers that made emperors. On 15 January 69, Marcus Salvius Otho was
declared emperor by the praetorians and Galba was murdered in the Forum.
The armies on the Rhine, however, had already refused to offer Galba their
allegiance and had declared their general, Vitellius, emperor on 1 January 69.
They were marching on Rome. Nor did the defeat of Otho by the Rhine
legions in the spring bring the conflict to an end. On 1 July 69, Vespasian, the
general who had been charged with suppressing the Jewish rebellion that had
begun in 66, was also declared emperor by the armies gathered at Alexandria
in Egypt. Vespasian’s forces likewise marched into Italy, invaded the capital,
and murdered Vitellius. Vespasian was recognized as emperor by the senate in
December 69, and the so called ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ was at an end.¹⁵
It is a simplification, but not necessarily a misleading one, to say that the
accession of Galba in 68 marked the beginning of a steady broadening of the
criteria which qualified an individual for imperial power. Formerly, descent
from the first emperor, Augustus, had been an important precondition. Galba,
through his wife, was distantly connected to the family, but Vespasian was, at
least in relative terms, a new man, he, his brother, and his uncle being the first
men of senatorial rank in his family.¹⁶ More important, however, for the future
of the imperial office was the fact that, in the words of Tacitus, ‘the secret of
the Empire had been uncovered: that an emperor could be made elsewhere
than Rome.’¹⁷ The year 69 proved conclusively that provincial armies pos-
sessed the power, de facto, to create emperors, and from 69 onwards they
possessed it de jure as well. Vespasian dated the beginning of his reign not
from 21 December 69, when the senate had confirmed him as Augustus, but
from 1 July, when his soldiers had hailed him by this title in Alexandria.¹⁸ An
emperor began at his acclamation.
¹⁵ For the events of 68–69, see K. Wellesley, The Year of the Four Emperors (3rd edn. London,
2000); B. Levick, Vespasian (London, 1999), 43–64; E. Flaig, Den Kaiser herausfordern: die
Usurpationen im Römischen Reich (Frankfurt, 1992), 240–416.
¹⁶ Levick, Vespasian, 4–13.
¹⁷ Tac., Hist. I.4: evulgato imperii arcano posse principem alibi quam Romae fieri.
¹⁸ Wellesley, Year of the Four Emperors, 120; A. Pabst, Comitia imperii: Ideelle Grundlagen des
römischen Kaisertums (Darmstadt, 1997), 169.

When Vespasian’s dynasty collapsed, in September 96, with the murder of
his second son Domitian, power eventually passed, after the brief reign of
Nerva, to Trajan. Like Vespasian, Trajan belonged to a powerful Italian family,
but Trajan was Spanish-born, making him the first non-Italian emperor.¹⁹ His
successor, Hadrian, was likewise a Spaniard. Not only did Hadrian bring to a
final halt the process of expansion which, in theory and in practice, had
characterized Roman foreign policy for some five centuries; he also spent
more than half of his twenty-one-year reign outside Italy.²⁰
The period 96–180, that is from the accession of Nerva to the death of
Marcus Aurelius, is often remembered as a golden age of the Empire. Edward
Gibbon declared, in the opening paragraph of his Decline and Fall, that
‘During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administra-
tion was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and
the two Antonines [Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius]’ and modern scho-
lars have frequently been happy to acquiesce in this assessment.²¹ Happy it
may have been, but Gibbon’s count of five emperors simplifies the growing
complexities of imperial power, for it is all too often forgotten that the number
of men who held imperial power was in fact seven. First, at the death of
Antoninus Pius in 161, two emperors, Antoninus’ adoptive sons Marcus
Aurelius and Lucius Verus, were created joint Augusti with equal powers
over the Roman state, an unprecedented move but one that was to become
increasingly common and to have profound effects on the conception of
imperial power.²² Verus died in 169, but this experiment in power-sharing
was to be repeated, and eventually to become a virtually permanent feature of
imperial government. Eight years later, in 177, three years before he was
himself to die, Marcus Aurelius created his son, Commodus, as Augustus,
an innovation that was likewise to become a norm.²³
¹⁹ J. Bennett, Trajan: Optimus Princeps (2nd edn. London, 2005), 1–3.

²⁰ H. Halfmann, Itinera Principum: Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreisen im Römischen
Reich (Stuttgart, 1986), esp. 184–5; A. R. Birley, Hadrian: The restless emperor (London, 1997), 1.
²¹ E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. J. B. Bury. 7 vols.
London, 1896–1900), I 1.
²² HA M. Antoninus 7.5–6; HA Verus 3.8–41; Dio Cass., LXXI.1; Eutr., VIII.9. The equality of
their status is variously affirmed and denied in the sources, and an unofficial seniority of Marcus
appears to have been recognized: cf. A. R. Birley, Marcus Aurelius (Rev. edn. London, 2000),
116–17.
²³ O. Hekster, Commodus: An Emperor at the Crossroads (Dutch monographs on ancient
history and archaeology 23. Leiden, 2002), 38–9. On the custom of emperors promoting their
children, see H. Börm, ‘Born to be Emperor: The Principle of Succession and the Roman
Monarchy’ in J. Wienand (ed.), Contested Monarchy: Integrating the Roman Empire in the
Fourth Century AD (Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. Oxford, 2015), 239–64, esp. 239–43.
Manoeuvring of imperial children had in fact been going on from the earliest days of the Empire.
Augustus, who had no male heirs, had clearly been preparing his grandsons for the succession
(B. Parsi, Désignation et investiture de l’empereur romain: 1er et 2e siècles après J.-C. (Université
de Paris, 1963), 9).

Marcus died in 180, and Commodus ruled alone for twelve years. He had,
so his critics maintained, little interest in the business of government and
engendered the disgust of the senatorial class with his love of appearing in
gladiatorial bouts in the Colosseum. On the final day of 192, he was mur-
dered.²⁴ With no designated heir, the Empire again descended into warfare.²⁵
In many ways, the events of 69 may be said to have replayed themselves. In the
immediate aftermath of Commodus’ murder, Pertinax was proclaimed em-
peror in Rome, but he ruled for only three months before being murdered by
the praetorians, who sold the title to the highest bidder.²⁶ Meanwhile, provin-
cial armies elevated their commanders: Lucius Septimius Severus was declared
on the Danube and Gaius Pescennius Niger in Syria.²⁷
Septimius Severus, the eventual victor in this civil war, was not only the first
non-European to take the purple (he had been born to a family of mixed
Italian-Punic descent in Leptis Magna), but his accession, like Claudius’s and
Vespasian’s, demonstrated just how little power the senate possessed as an
agent in the imperial succession.²⁸ After his acclamation in May 193 by the
troops at Carnuntum, on the Danube, the senate had declared him a public
enemy. By June 193 Severus had invaded the city, and the senate was forced to
declare him Augustus, a title he held until his natural death in February 211.²⁹
Severus made his children, Caracalla and Geta, Augusti while he was still
living, in 197 and 209 respectively. Their joint rule after Severus’ death lasted
only ten months; Caracalla murdered his brother in their mother’s arms and
ruled alone until his own murder in April 217.³⁰
He was succeeded by a man named Macrinus who, as well as probably
having been involved in Caracalla’s death, was the first man to claim imperial
power who did not hail from a senatorial family.³¹ His position as praetorian
prefect, commander of the emperor’s bodyguard, placed him in an important
²⁴ Hekster, Commodus, 77–83.

²⁵ D. S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay AD 180–395 (Routledge History of the Ancient
World. 2nd edn. London, 2014), 85ff.
²⁶ Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, 95–9 (note that Potter has serious doubts about the
accusation of auctioning off imperial power).
²⁷ Herod., II.8–9; A. R. Birley, ‘The Coups d’Etat of the Year 193’, Bonner Jahrbücher 169
(1969), 247–80, and Septimius Severus: the African Emperor (Rev. edn. London, 1999), 97ff.;
J. Osgood, ‘Ending Civil War at Rome: Rhetoric and Reality, 88 B.C.E.–197 C.E.’, The American
Historical Review 120:5 (2015), 1694.
²⁸ Later commentators claimed that Severus never lost his African accent (HA Sept. Sev. 19.9).
²⁹ Dio Cass., LXXIV.14–LXXV.2; Herod., II.10–14. Birley, Septimius Severus, 97ff.
³⁰ Dio Cass., LXXVIII.1–LXXIX.6; Herod., IV.1–12. Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, 122–46.
³¹ It is occasionally stated that he was the first man who took imperial power who was not
himself a senator (e.g. M. Grant, The Severans: The changed Roman Empire (London; 1996), 23);
this is not strictly true, since Claudius, by virtue of his illness, had been excluded from the
senatorial cursus honorum and so, despite being member of an aristocratic family, had not
himself formally entered the senate prior to his accession. On Macrinus’ accession and the rise of
the equestrian class, see M. Kulikowski, ‘Regional Dynasties and Imperial Court’, in Wienand
(ed.), Contested Monarchy, 135–48, esp. 135–9. Also: I. Mennen, Power and Status in the Roman

position at the moment of transition from one emperor to another, despite his
own low status.³² Eighteen years later, in the early spring of 235, the first
commoner in imperial history was created emperor. Julius Maximinus (later
known as Maximinus Thrax, ‘Maximin the Thracian’) was a first-generation
Roman, the son of barbarian parents, and had joined the army as a mere
private soldier, rising through the ranks to a military prefecture under Severus
Alexander (r. 222–35). When Severus’ soldiers mutinied and murdered their
emperor, it was to Thrax that they turned, and they ‘hailed him as emperor’.³³
This date is generally taken to mark the start of the so-called third-century
crisis, a fifty-year period in which more than eighty men may have claimed
imperial power (historical records from this time are so poor that it is difficult
to separate the real emperors from the fictional) in a string of short, invariably
violent reigns that frequently saw numerous rivals simultaneously claiming
supreme power.³⁴ The crisis was a nadir in the imperial order and a regular
succession all but collapsed. In 260, a separatist empire, ‘the Empire of the
Gauls’, was proclaimed under Postumus, with its headquarters at Trier. The
Gallic Empire was, until its collapse in 274, ruled as a state completely
independent from the rest of the Empire and with its own (unruly) imperial
succession.³⁵ In the East, it was mirrored by the Palmyrene Empire under
Zenobia and her children, 270–3 (see Fig. I.1).³⁶ It took a series of ruthless,
reforming emperors who had risen up through the military (Claudius Gothicus,
268–70; Aurelian, 270–5; Probus, 276–82; Diocletian, 284–305), the easing of
Persian aggression in the East, and a total restructuring of the Empire’s army
and administration to bring this crisis to an end. But though the chaos of
the third century was not to be repeated, the imperial succession was now to
be forever dominated by the spectre of usurpation. Under the principate,
Empire, AD. 193–284 (Impact of Empire 12. Leiden, 2011), 193–246; Potter, Roman Empire at
Bay, 225–8.
³² Despite the importance of the guard, Macrinus was the first prefect to personally take
imperial power (barring the ill-fated usurpation attempt of Nymphidius Sabinus in 68: W. Eck,
‘Nymphidius 2,’ DNP VIII, 1072).
³³ HA Maximini Duo 7. Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, 167–71.
³⁴ G. Alföldy, ‘The Crisis of the Third Century as Seen by Contemporaries’, Greek, Roman,
and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974), 89–111; F. Hartmann, Herrscherwechsel un Reichskrise:
Untersuchungen zu den Ursachen und Konsequenzen der Herrscherwechsel im Imperium Roma-
num der Soldatenkaiserzeit (3. Jahrhundert n. Chr.) (Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe III,
Geschichte und ihre Hilfswissenschaften 149. Frankfurt am Main, 1982); S. Williams, Diocletian
and the Roman Recovery (London, 1985), 15–23; C. Ando, Imperial Rome AD 193–284: The
Critical Century (Edinburgh, 2012), 146–223; Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, 215–80.
³⁵ I. König, Die gallischen Usurpatoren von Postumus bis Tetricus (München, 1981);
J. F. Drinkwater, The Gallic Empire: Separatism and Continuity in the North-Western Provinces
of the Roman Empire A.D. 260–274 (Stuttgart, 1987).
³⁶ R. Stoneman, Palmyra and Its Empire: Zenobia’s Revolt Against Rome (Ann Arbor, 2004),
esp. 111–27 (though to be treated with caution!); A. Watson, Aurelian and the Third Century
(London: 2004), 57–88; P. Southern, Empress Zenobia: Palmyra’s Rebel Queen (London, 2008).
Eboracum
Londinium
Augusta Treverorum (Trier)

Durocortorum
Carnuntum
Burdigala
Lugdunum
Ravenna

Narbo
Rome Nicomedia
Tarraco Thessalonica
Emerita Augusta Ancyra Nisibis
Nicopolis Edessa
Corduba Ephesus
Tingi Antioch
Corinth
Carthage Syracuse Palmyra
Caesarea
Cyrene
Alexandria
Separatist Empires
The Gallic Empire
The Palmyrene Empire
Fig. I.1. The Roman Empire in AD 271.

Image by Michael Athanson.

emperors had executed senators and family members on an industrial scale in
order to prevent conspiracies arising in the palace; by the third century,
usurpers could arise at any military outpost and the war for allegiance had
become a perpetual one.
‘ THIS LITANY OF MANIFEST USURPERS

AND REBELLIOUS GENERALS’ : WHY HAD
THE I MPERIAL SUCCESSION BECOME SO
UNSTABLE BY THE THIRD CENTURY?
The apparent collapse of the imperial succession into chaos during the third
century was by no means purely the result of changes in the nature of the
imperial office. Economic and social factors as well as the emergence of
powerful new enemies on the Empire’s European and Near Eastern borders
placed strain upon the Empire that stretched it to breaking point. Changes to
the imperial succession should be seen in coordination with these broader
historical developments. Yet these factors alone are insufficient to explain the
state of near constant civil war that the Empire found itself in between the end
of the second and the middle of the fifth centuries. Why was the imperial
succession so chaotic?
As the preceding survey has attempted to show, one of the greatest barriers
to a stable succession was the superfluity of potential candidates for the role.
Under the Julio-Claudians, the succession had been limited to those who, by
blood or by adoption, could claim membership of the divine family of
Augustus. AD 69 had shown that such concerns no longer mattered. No slave
ever became an emperor, nor did a barbarian, a eunuch, or a woman.³⁷ Beyond
this, however, the field was an open one, insofar as any man capable of
commanding military support could be acclaimed emperor by his soldiers,
with an increasing professionalization of the military through the third cen-
tury hugely increasing the potential for strong men to rise.³⁸ But the supply of
³⁷ Eunuchs were so universally detested that their exercise of power always depended upon
the support of a patron or patrons (K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge, 1978),
172–96). Many emperors were claimed to be the sons of freedmen (e.g. Pertinax, Diocletian), but
the stigma associated to slavery itself was too great to ever allow a slave to take power
(H. Mouristen, The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2011)). Emperors were made
whom it would seem probable were the children of barbarian parents (e.g. Maximinus Thrax,
Magnentius, Silvanus), but no one born upon the far side of Rome’s borders ever took power for
themselves. Women could, on occasion, exercise considerable power through male relatives (e.g.
Julia Maesa through her grandsons Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, Justina through her son
Valentinian II). Perhaps the only woman ever to rule Roman territory in her right was the
Palmyran queen Zenobia, who created the Palmyrene Empire (see above, n. 36).
³⁸ J. B, Campbell, War and Society in Imperial Rome, 31 BC–AD 284 (London, 2002), 113–19.

imperial armies was such that, in moments of crisis, competing claims were
almost inevitable. AD 69 was the Year of the Four Emperors, 193 was the Year
of the Five Emperors, and 238 the Year of the Six Emperors.
In part, this change had occurred because of the waning influence of the
senate in the management of the Empire. Early emperors had sought to
present themselves as members of the senate and to cast themselves merely
as the princeps, the first citizen.³⁹ Yet while this presentation may have helped
to palliate the imposition of autocracy on a polity as proudly Republican as the
Roman, it did little to change the realities of the emperor’s near absolute
power.⁴⁰ The lex de imperio Vespasiani, for instance, a document recording the
senate’s confirmation of Vespasian’s authority in 69, couched his rule very
much in terms of government through the senate. At the same time, however,
it made abundantly clear that any decision Vespasian presented to that body
was to be accepted without challenge.⁴¹ Furthermore, as the second century
wound on, emperors were increasingly required to be away from Rome,
supervising campaigns, and when the emperor moved, the executive and
judicial functions of the state moved with him, and the increasing physical
distance between the emperor and the senate only reinforced that body’s
powerlessness.⁴² The growing power and influence of provincial elites increas-
ingly competed with the senate’s traditional cursus honorum, and membership
of that ancient but restricted body was no longer the defining marker of
power and influence.⁴³ This might have been good news for social and political
mobility within the Empire, but for the imperial succession it had the effect of
bringing more cooks to the broth.
Acclamation by the senate had also formerly given to the imperial office the
illusion that the senate was its elective body. But numerous conflicts between
soldiers and the senate (Claudius, Vespasian, Septimius Severus, Maximi-
nus Thrax) in which, in every instance, the senate was forced to yield to the
soldiers, demonstrated that this was nothing but a polite fiction, generated
by Augustus’ own propagandistic insistence that his position was held in
³⁹ A. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Civilis Princeps: Between Citizen and King’, JRS 72 (1982), 32–48.
⁴⁰ Occasionally, the mask of senatorial accountability might slip. Tiberius made a great show
of reluctance to shoulder all of Augustus’ responsibilities but said that he would take any
individual office the senators assigned him. Asinius Gallus took this show of modesty at face
value and asked Tiberius what he would like to be assigned, which met with a frosty reply from
the emperor in waiting, who merely repeated that he would not reject anything assigned to him.
Asinius Gallus fell instantly to backtracking: cf. Tac., Ann. I.11–12.
⁴¹ CIL VI.930; Brunt, ‘Lex de Imperio Vespasiani’, 95–116.
⁴² This was already true in the time of Augustus. When Augustus was not in Rome foreign
embassies travelled to him rather than to the senate (Crook, ‘Political History’, 82). cf. Herodian’s
‘Rome is where the emperor is’ (I.6.5); C. Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge MA,
2004), 114–37.
⁴³ J. Weisweiler, ‘Domesticating the Senatorial Elite: Universal Monarchy and Transregional
Aristocracy in the Fourth Century AD’, in Wienand (ed.), Contested Monarchy, 17–41.

obedience to the Republican customs and the democratic will of the Roman
people.⁴⁴ The senate confirmed—and so helped to legitimate—emperors, but
it could neither oppose an imperial proclamation, nor could it topple an
emperor without the direct support of the military.⁴⁵ Senators could still
become emperor, of course, as numerous third-century examples demonstrate
(Pupienus and Balbinus, Decius, Valerian), and the power of individual sena-
tors could still be prodigious, but the senate as a body was set into terminal
decline by the creation of the office of emperor and, by the third century, it had
disappeared into total insignificance, its acclamation of a new emperor noth-
ing more than a rubber stamp.
Hand in hand with the waning influence of the senate upon the succession
came the gradual eclipse of Rome as a meaningful political centre for the
Empire. This again had profound effects upon the stability of the imperial
succession. Military changes in the Empire had forced emperors increasingly
to vacate the city for the frontiers, and in so doing the Empire had been
stripped of a centre of power for which all parties competed. As noted above,
Tacitus observed, of 68, that a terrible secret had been uncovered when the
soldiers found they could make emperors outside Rome. But in both 69 and
193, even though emperors had been made outside the city, control of Rome
was still their ultimate goal. By the end of the third century, however,
Rome had lost anything but ideological significance. Numerous cities nearer
to strategic frontiers—Mainz, Trier, Milan, Sirmium, Nicomedia, Emessa,
Antioch, and others—began to acquire importance. These cities were increas-
ingly ornamented with the trapping of rule—palaces, barracks, hippo-
dromes—that permitted the normal exercise of imperial power far from
Rome.⁴⁶ Emperors like Macrinus and Maximinus Thrax might conduct the
entirety of their reign outside the city, being made emperors in the field by
soldiers and dying in the field at the hands of soldiers. This drew criticism, but
it didn’t change the realities of power.⁴⁷
⁴⁴ Perhaps the only counterexample to this trend in imperial history was the election of Nerva
in 96: J. D. Grainger, Nerva and the Roman Succession Crisis of AD 96–99 (London, 2003), 1–3.
⁴⁵ This contradiction (and its violent consequences) is brought out in A. Winterling, Politics
and Society in Imperial Rome (tr. K. Lüddecke. Chichester, 2009), 110–11.
⁴⁶ T. Brown, Emperors and Imperial Cities, AD 284–423 (DPhil. Oxford, 2002); F. Millar, The
Emperor in The Roman World (31 B.C.–A.D. 337) (London, 1977), 40–53; E. Mayer, Rom ist dort,
wo der Kaiser ist: Untersuchungen zu den Staatsdenkmälern des dezentralisierten Reiches von
Diocletian bis zu Theodosius II (Monographien 53. Mainz, 2002); B. Ward-Perkins, ‘A Most
Unusual Empire: Rome in the Fourth Century’, in C. Rapp and H. A. Drake (eds), The City in the
Classical and Post-Classical World: Changing contexts of power and identity (Cambridge, 2014),
109–29.
⁴⁷ Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, 232–7 argues that the intense efforts on the part of Philip the
Arab to commemorate the Roman millennium were an attempt to ‘heed the examples of both
Macrinus and Maximus, which showed what happened to men with local support who failed to
solidify their positions at Rome with sufficient alacrity’ (quote at 233).

So pronounced was this centrifugal tendency that entirely independent
imperial hierarchies could spring up outside of Italy, as did the Gallic Empire,
from 260–74, or the Palmyrene Empire from 270–3. Though ultimately these
territories were recaptured under Aurelian, nevertheless what is striking about
them is that they coexisted with one another for so long, a thing that would
have been unthinkable in the first century AD. As the Empire had grown
increasingly Romanized, the ability of regional factions to control power
without reference to Rome destabilized the political order. In the fourth
century, rival courts might watch each other warily across the open expanse
of the Mediterranean for years, as did Constantine and Licinius between 313
and 324, or Magnus Maximus and Theodosius between 383 and 388.⁴⁸
Controlling the succession was also so difficult because the Empire was so
big. It stretched from Cumbria to Upper Egypt, from Morocco’s Atlantic coast
to the fringes of Georgia and Armenia, surrounding the Mediterranean basin
and encompassing a territory, at its height, of nearly two million square miles,
today occupied by more than fifty independent nations on three continents.⁴⁹
This territory was defended by an army that, by the fourth century, was
composed of half a million men.⁵⁰ As Augustine lamented in his de Civitate
Dei, ‘the very breadth of the Empire has brought forth wars of a worse sort –
social or rather civil wars.’⁵¹ In moments of crisis, a pattern endlessly replayed
was that regional armies were pitted against one another and could be united
only through conflict, a tendency made worse by the loss of Rome as a
recognized centre. This was also a product of the highly centralized nature
of the imperial system. Even the most powerful provincial governor or
regional general lacked the recognized authority to undertake certain activities
reserved to the emperor: to appoint men to high office or to demote them from
it; to raise soldiers at his own discretion; to mint coins; to alter laws; and so on.
When crisis struck a region, the emperor might be 3,000 miles away, he might
be incompetent, or he might simply be too busy to react. During the third
century, the Danube in particular was almost constantly rocked by usurpation
as the legions stationed there attempted to secure an emperor near at hand to
manage their pay and to defend this vulnerable frontier.⁵² In 248, Decius, the
⁴⁸ On regionalization, see Kulikoski, ‘Regional Dynasties’, 135–48.

⁴⁹ R. Taagepera, ‘Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D.,’
Social Science History 3:4 (1979), 118 and 125ff.
⁵⁰ A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A social, economic and administrative
survey (3 vols. Oxford, 1964) II, 679–86 for various estimates of imperial military manpower;
W. Treadgold, Byzantium and Its Army, 284–1081 (Stanford, 1995), 43–59; R. Rees, Diocletian
and the Tetrarchy (Edinburgh, 2004), 17–18.
⁵¹ August., de Civ. D. XIX.7.
⁵² German scholars have called this ‘Bedürfnis nach Kaisernähe’: Hartmann, Herrscherwech-
sel un Reichskrise, 140–8; A. Demandt, Der Fall Roms: Die Auflösung des römischen Reiches im
Urteil der Nachwelt (München, 1984), 48.

general sent to put down one such rebellion under Pacatianus, had no sooner
arrived in the region than he was himself proclaimed emperor.⁵³
Rebellion and usurpation also flourished because there was no institutional
means by which to control or regulate the behaviour of emperors. The
emperor’s will had the force of law and there was no court of appeal from
decisions made by him.⁵⁴ He was unimpeachable and unquestionable and
the only way to oppose an emperor, therefore, was to kill him. It is because of
this that the third century saw so many of its emperors murdered by their
subjects as a corrective on their behaviour, emperors like Caracalla, Elagabalus,
Maximinus Thrax, Gallienus, and more besides. Rebellion, increasingly synon-
ymous with usurpation, was the only way to challenge an emperor.⁵⁵ Further-
more, the emperor’s enmity was essentially a death sentence, and a man with an
army who had fallen from imperial favour would thus often choose usurpation
rather than face the certain death of submission. In April 175, Avidius Cassius
seized imperial power in Egypt, having heard a false report of Marcus Aurelius’
death. He soon learned that this information was incorrect and Marcus was in
fact alive, but having undertaken an act of supreme disloyalty (despite perfectly
loyal intentions) he was thus forced to prosecute a war against the emperor
whose legacy he had usurped power in order to defend.⁵⁶ In 286, the naval
commander Carausius was accused of stealing from the provincials of Gaul and
Britain, and was sentenced to death by the emperor Maximian. Faced with a
choice between submission and certain death or rebellion and the hope of
survival, Carausius chose rebellion.⁵⁷
It was not simply the Empire and the challenges it presented, however, that
helped to ensure a cycle of instability; the office of emperor itself encouraged
challenge and competition in three important ways, all of which, ultimately,
stemmed from the fact that the imperial office had arisen as an improvised de
jure justification of a de facto reality under Augustus. The first of these was the
fiction of the emperor’s meritocratic position. Despite ample evidence to the
contrary, Romans continued to pretend, throughout the history of the Empire,
that theirs was a polity ruled by the best man, a fiction given some weight by
the fact that in the first two centuries of imperial rule, only two emper-
ors, Vespasian and Marcus Aurelius, were succeeded by their natural sons.⁵⁸
⁵³ Zon. XII.19; Zos. I.21–22; cf. Potter, Roman Empire at Bay, 236–7.
⁵⁴ Ulpian, the great third-century legal commentator, had declared both that ‘the princeps is
unbound by the law’ (Dig. I.3.31) and that ‘what pleases the princeps has the force of law’ (Dig.
I.4.1); Millar, Emperor in The Roman World, 507–27.
⁵⁵ This association was complete enough in the mind of late Roman authors that it is often
difficult to distinguish rebellion from usurpation in the sources: cf. J. Szidat, Usurpator tanti
nominis: Kaiser und Usurpator in der Spätantike, 337–476 n. Chr. (Wiesbaden, 2010), 28–9.
⁵⁶ Dio Cass., LXXII.17–31. ⁵⁷ On Carausius, see Chapter IV, p. 81.
⁵⁸ Two out these three natural sons—Domitian and Commodus—were ultimately murdered
by their subjects.

Fictive though it might have been, the concept of rule by the best and the
notion of an elective office meant that the political climate of the Roman world
was favourable to the deposition of monarchs deemed unsuitable.⁵⁹ The
proportion of Roman emperors murdered by their subjects is, accordingly,
enormous. On the final page of his weighty The Emperor in the Roman World,
Fergus Millar provides a list of emperors who ruled between 27 BC and AD 337,
a total of sixty names.⁶⁰ Of these sixty, an astounding forty-one were either
murdered by their soldiers, by a court conspiracy, by a rival emperor, or else
killed themselves in the wake of an unsalvageable political defeat. Between the
death of Septimius Severus in 211 and the accession of Diocletian in 284, only
four emperors did not die at Roman hands: Decius, who died in battle against
the Goths; Valerian, who died in Persian captivity; Claudius, who died of
plague; and Carus, who died of natural causes or of a battle wound while
campaigning against the Persians. For the Romans, regicide was the expected
end for a ruler, not an occasional aberration.
The second feature of the imperial office that ensured its instability was the
absence of objective criteria by which one accession might be marked out from
another. Emperors had no required place of coronation, as Rheims was for
French kings.⁶¹ As we have seen, Rome had begun to lose this title by 68, and
had lost it utterly by the third century. There was no recognized elective body
whose vote, once given, could not legally be challenged, as were the Great
Council of Venice or the Cardinals of the Catholic Church.⁶² As we have seen,
the senate had only ever held this role in name, and by the third century even
that had faded into insignificance. The Empire had no sacred objects, the
possession of which confirmed the right to rule, as the Three Sacred Treasures
were for Japanese emperors.⁶³ Emperors were expected to wear purple and
purple was supposedly reserved only for members of the imperial family, but
as frequent legislation on the subject shows, the colour was regularly used to
adorn the clothes of non-imperial persons, and in a moment of need a purple
garment could usually either be found or be improvised; Ammianus tells
us that the usurper Silvanus (355) made an imperial garment for himself
⁵⁹ A. E. Wardman, ‘Usurpers and Internal Conflicts in the 4th Century A.D.’, Historia 33:2
(1984), 227–8.
⁶⁰ Millar, Emperor in The Roman World, 657. Millar’s list is far from a comprehensive roster
of everyone who claimed the imperial title during that period, omitting (not unreasonably) the
majority of the usurpers and separatist emperors of the third century, but it provides a
convenient list of the most important names.
⁶¹ R. E. Giesey, ‘Inaugural Aspects of French Royal Ceremonials’, in J. M. Bak (ed.), Coron-
ations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual (Berkeley, 1990), 35–45.
⁶² Great Council: J. J. Norwich, A History of Venice (London, 2003), 166–7. Cardinals:
F. J. Baumgartner, Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections (Basingstoke, 2003).
⁶³ D. C. Holtom, The Japanese Enthronement Ceremonies: With an account of the Imperial
regalia (2nd edn. Tokyo, 1972), 1–44.

from the purple decorations on his soldiers’ standards.⁶⁴ Numerous emperors
attempted to look to religion to help underscore their position, but since each
emperor claimed to be the highest religious authority in the state, as pontifex
maximus, appeals to the religious sphere had little independent force as a
vehicle for distinguishing emperors from one another.⁶⁵
Perhaps the sole objective criterion that provided some exclusive benefit to
those who could claim it was dynastic connection, whether real or adoptive, to
a previous emperor. The biological accident that prevented a clear patrilineal
succession in the Empire’s first two centuries should not blind us to the fact
that imperial power was, from the time of Tiberius, treated as a possession of
the emperor and handed on in his will. Clear designation of an intended heir
was a policy that began under Augustus and which provided the best avail-
able guarantee of an orderly succession.⁶⁶ Dynastic considerations could have
powerful results; when Macrinus became emperor after the assassination of
Caracalla, he sent Caracalla’s family into exile in Syria. But when Julia Maesa,
Septimius Severus’ sister-in-law, began to circulate the rumour that her
grandson, Elagabalus, was Caracalla’s illegitimate son, it was sufficient incen-
tive (along with the promise of rich donatives) to encourage soldiers based at
Emesa to declare him emperor.⁶⁷ Indeed, the potential legitimating force of a
familial relationship to a former emperor was powerful enough that emperors
even began to fabricate their dynastic relationships, writing back connections
with respected emperors of the past in order to bolster their claim to power.
Septimius Severus declared himself the adoptive son of Marcus Aurelius and
the brother of Commodus.⁶⁸ Constantine, in an effort to help distinguish
himself from the other tetrarchs, claimed descent from Claudius Gothicus.⁶⁹
Theodosius claimed descent from Trajan.⁷⁰
⁶⁴ Amm., XV.5.16; cf. XXVI.6.15. W. T. Avery, ‘The “Adoratio Purpurae” and the Importance
of the Imperial Purple in the Fourth Century of the Christian Era’, Memoirs of the American
Academy in Rome 17 (1940), 66; M. Reinhold, ‘Usurpation of Status and Status Symbols in the
Late Roman Empire’, Historia 20:2 (1971), 283–4.
⁶⁵ A. Pabst, Comitia imperii: Ideelle Grundlagen des römischen Kaisertums (Darmstadt, 1997),
18–19.
⁶⁶ Augustus worked exceptionally hard to designate a clear heir during his lifetime, though
was repeatedly frustrated by accidents of mortality. Others took great interest in this designation,
as it was widely recognized that this heir would inherit not merely Augustus’ (enormous) private
wealth, but his public status: B. Severy, Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire
(London, 2003), 68–78.
⁶⁷ Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, 149–51.
⁶⁸ O. Hekster, Emperors and Ancestors: Roman rulers and the constraints of tradition (Oxford,
2014), 205–21.
⁶⁹ Pan. Lat. VI.2 and V.2.5, 4.2; Jul., Or. I.6d–7a. On the fictitious nature of this association,
see R. Syme, Historia Augusta Papers (Oxford, 1983), 63–79; Hekster, Emperors and Ancestors,
225–33.
⁷⁰ C. Kelly, ‘Pliny and Pacatus: Past and Present in Imperial Panegyric,’ in Wienand (ed.),
Contested Monarchy, 236–8.

As powerful and natural as dynastic principles might have been, however,
they proved a very poor legitimating tool. Of the three sons of emperors who
ruled between 27 BC and AD 192 (Titus, Domitian, and Commodus) two were
murdered by their subjects. Indeed, other than Titus, no son of an emperor
who ruled after his father died a natural death until Constantine in 337. Under
the late Empire, the same problem continued; dynastic ties were generally
sufficient to ensure a son came to power, but could do little to protect him if
his rule proved unacceptable to his most powerful subjects (in particular, the
high command of his military). Constans and Valentinian II were two such,
sons of emperors brought down by their inability to manage their militaries.⁷¹
Dynastic connection was clearly a strong bargaining chip in the contest to be
acclaimed emperor, and it seems to have held particular appeal for soldiers
who, throughout the Empire’s history, showed themselves willing to proclaim
distinctly unmilitary usurpers by virtue of descent (Claudius, Elagabalus,
Gordian III, Valentinian II). But dynasty proved poor armour in defending
an emperor once on the throne. Excepting the Julio-Claudians, whose succes-
sion was maintained through adoption, no imperial dynasty managed to
establish itself into the third generation until 337, with the sons of Constan-
tine, and no dynasty managed to reach its fourth generation until the accession
of Constantine IV in 654.⁷² Like any other criterion we might point to by
which an accession might be measured as legitimate, dynastic ties might help
bring a man to the throne but they were a poor tool to help him keep it.
The third and final feature of the imperial office that tended towards
endemic usurpation was that it became increasingly acceptable that emperors
would not—again in contrast to medieval kings—rule alone. Joint rule had
theoretical precursors, not least the old Republican principle that the state was
ruled by two equal magistrates, the consuls. From the very earliest days of the
Empire, emperors had associated their prospective heirs with themselves via
imperial titles.⁷³ Though resisted under the earliest emperors, true joint rule
first occurred in March 161, under Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.⁷⁴ After
Aurelius and Verus, joint rule was never truly abandoned, and various regimes
turned to diarchies, triarchies, and even tetrarchies to address their political
problems. But the concept of collegiate government likewise admitted the
potential for usurpation; it created the possibility, albeit an infrequently
⁷¹ See Chapter VI, p. 163, and Chapter IX, pp. 289–90.

⁷² W. E. Kaegi, Byzantine Military Unrest, 471–843: An interpretation (Amsterdam, 1981),
166–9. Constantine IV passed power on to his son, Justinian II, in 685 so the dynasty continued
to break records by entering a fifth generation: J. F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century:
the transformation of a culture (Cambridge, 1990), 41–78.
⁷³ E.g. Kienast, Kaisertabelle, 24–7. The imperial titles Caesar and Augustus began as family
names, but soon became formal titles.
⁷⁴ HA M. Antoninus 7.5–6; HA Verus 3.8–41; Dio Cass., LXXI.1; Eutr., VIII.9.

realized one, that a usurper need not be in conflict with the reigning emperor,
but might be welcomed by him into joint rule.⁷⁵
By the end of the second century, therefore, there existed within the
imperial system a number of factors which, under best conditions, could
prove to be incredible strengths: imperial power was open to a wide variety
of candidates, encouraging excellence; it was not dependent upon the deci-
sions of a distant centre but could be created organically in response to crises;
it allowed the possibility for innovation and flexibility within its own (unwrit-
ten) constitution; it was (theoretically) not dependent on the accidents of
biology which, in hereditary monarchies, allow utterly incapable rulers to
take the throne. But under the difficult conditions of the third century a
trident of regional dissent, military defeat, and financial collapse brought the
imperial system into crisis, and the cracks opened dangerously wide. Usurp-
ation became so common as to be plausibly described as a fundamental feature
of Roman imperial government.
The result of all this was a chaotic and unregulated succession. Displayed
graphically (see Fig. I.2), the scale of this problem is striking.⁷⁶ The graph
represents every year from 27 BC, when Octavian was declared Augustus, until
AD 455, when Valentinian III died and the idea of a united Empire and of
Western imperial power can safely be said to have vanished in all but name.
4
Usurpations
0
25 1 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200 225 250 275 300 325 350 375 400 425 450
Year
Fig. I.2. Usurpations in the Roman Empire, 27 BC–AD 455.
⁷⁵ This was something that actually happened in the case of Constantine, of Theodosius I,
and—briefly—of Magnus Maximus (see Chapter V, p. 105, and Chapter IX, pp. 266–7).
⁷⁶ On the composition of this graph, see Appendix II.

A clear period of calm runs from 27 BC until around the end of the second
century AD, punctuated only by isolated crises. After this, there is an explosion:
there were more usurpations in the three decades from 192–222 than in the
preceding 220 years. All told, this graph shows 103 usurpations, an average of
slightly fewer than one every four and a half years. If we begin our count from
192, that average rises to almost one usurpation every two and a half years.
Usurpation had come to define Roman imperial power.
‘ THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TYRANT AND A KING

IS ONE OF DEEDS, NOT OF NAME’ : HOW W AS
USURPATION UNDERSTOOD IN THE L ATE
RO MAN E MPIRE?
A graph like Figure I.2 invites an important question: how are we to define
usurpation in a system as confused as the Roman?⁷⁷ This question may be
roughly broken into two, namely: how did the Romans define usurpation, and
how is it defined in this volume? That the answers to these two questions will
be different from one another may initially strike readers as undesirable. If our
definition of usurpation is to be historically meaningful, ought it not to marry
with the definition that the Romans themselves used? Despite the obvious
appeal of this logic, to follow a Roman definition proves to be impossible
because the Romans did not define usurpation in any constitutionally mean-
ingful way. Contemporaries did not provide objective definition as to what
marked a ruler legitimate or illegitimate. Rather, they defined just rule in
contrast to tyranny, and did so in explicitly moral, rather than constitutional,
terms. When looking back into history, Roman historians and orators were
happy to denounce individuals as illegal or unjust claimants to power, but
political necessity ensured that the emperor under whom they lived and wrote
was always legitimate, just, and a model of virtue.
Perhaps the defining statement for the establishment of the imperial office is
the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, ‘The Deeds of the Divine Augustus’, a political
autobiography composed (or at least brought into its final form) shortly before
Augustus’ death in AD 14. The text was included, along with Augustus’ will, in
the documents officially delivered to the senate on his death and it was
published widely, being inscribed in both Latin and Greek in many cities
across the Empire, including upon a pair of bronze pillars in front of Augustus’
⁷⁷ ‘Wie die Usurpationen in der Spätantike wahrgenommen und nach welchen Kriterien sie
bewertet wurden, wäre Thema eines eigenen Buches’ (Szidat, Usurpator tanti nominis, 25).
Szidat’s assessment stands and the following is little more than a brief survey, highlighting key
themes.

gargantuan mausoleum in Rome.⁷⁸ In the text, Augustus explicitly drew atten-
tion to the fact that he had refused the dictatorship, and that he had taken up
no power that was contrary to mos maiorum, ‘ancestral custom’. He governed,
he claimed, through legally appointed powers, given ‘by decree of the senate’
(senatus consulto). He was at pains, too, to stress that his position was not one
that had been taken but one that had been given and, furthermore, that
had been laid down when the crisis that occasioned it was ended. Importantly,
Augustus claimed that he ruled the entire Republic ‘by the consent of all’ (per
consensum universorum), a claim given credibility by the fact that before
Actium he had ordered the entire population of the territories he adminis-
tered in the western Mediterranean to swear personal allegiance to him in an
oath that mirrored that sworn by soldiers to their commander.⁷⁹ It is in this
tension between military dictatorship and a Republican ideology in which the
emperor ruled though the sovereign power of the people, exercised with their
full consent, that the distinctive character of Roman imperial power is to
be found.
The right of soldiers to create emperors was so fundamental to the Romans
as to have been an axiom that needed virtually no explanation.⁸⁰ As I showed
in the previous section, if there had ever been any doubt as to the reality of this
situation, the accession of Vespasian firmly laid this to rest. Vespasian dated
his reign from the day when the soldiers stationed in Alexandria swore the
oath of allegiance to him. Tacitus, in his Histories, puts the following statement
in the mouth of Mucianus, the governor of Syria, who declared to Vespasian,
‘Moreover you have proof in the case of Vitellius himself that an army can
make an emperor.’⁸¹ One of the emperor’s formal titles, and the word fre-
quently used in Latin to refer to an emperor, was imperator, which simply
meant ‘commander’. Although, after the first century AD this word was used
exclusively to refer to Roman emperors, it nevertheless reinforces the fact that
the emperor’s position was thus fundamentally grounded in his relationship
with the military.⁸² This was more than a simple manifestation of the idea that
might was right. The soldiers did not only provide the emperor with the
requisite force to ensure that his will was obeyed; they were, for the Romans,
the theoretical underpinning of imperial power. The emperor, through the
⁷⁸ A. E. Cooley (ed. and tr.), Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary
(Cambridge, 2009), 3–22.
⁷⁹ Res Gestae 25.2; Syme, Roman Revolution, 284–5.
⁸⁰ Jer., Ep. 146.1: ‘ . . . the presbyters always elect one of their own number, calling him to a
higher station, and name him bishop, just as an army makes an emperor . . . ’; J. Weisweiler,
‘Domesticating the Senatorial Elite’, 37.
⁸¹ Tac., Hist. II.76.
⁸² Q. Iunius Blaesus, in AD 22, was the last Roman commander not of the imperial family to be
hailed imperator (Tac. Ann. III.74), after which time the titled passed solely into the use of,
initially, the imperial family, and then solely emperors themselves (L. de Libero, ‘Imperator’,
DNP VI, 954–5).

soldiers, drew his authority from the people. Through its acclamation, when
an army thus hailed someone as imperator, it communicated the assent of the
entire Roman population.⁸³
The Historia Augusta—a corpus of imperial biographies spanning from
Hadrian to Carinus, purportedly composed by six different authors during the
reigns of Diocletian and Constantine and of dubious value as faithful witnesses
to the events they describe—nevertheless provides fruitful grounds for enquiry
into fourth-century attitudes towards the imperial proclamation.⁸⁴ Perhaps
the most useful section to examine is the part of the work known as the
Tyranni Triginta (Thirty Tyrants), the biographies of (slightly confusingly)
thirty-two usurpers who arose during the time of the emperor Gallienus.
Many of these men may never have existed, or may never have claimed
imperial power, but here the importance is not the accuracy of what is being
described, but the author’s attitude to it. Thirty-two accessions are described,
all of them for men whom the book expressly declares to be tyranni. Yet the
accessions themselves often receive no more comment than the laconic ‘he was
made emperor’ (factus est), ‘he was declared emperor’ (vocatus est or dictus
est), or ‘he took up imperial power’ (sumpsit).⁸⁵ Some, admittedly, are accused
of ‘usurping’ power (usurpare, a word which had, by the fourth century,
acquired many of its modern, negative connotations), but even these are
often praised as being worthy of rule (on which more below).⁸⁶ A detail thus
apparent in the Historia Augusta is that it was considered sufficient to have
been made emperor ‘by the witness of the soldiers’.⁸⁷ The impression thus
garnered is one of extreme pragmatism; soldiers made emperors and that
was that.
⁸³ Dig. I.4.1: Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem: utpote cum lege regia, quae de imperio
eius lata est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem conferat. On the power of
acclamation, see C. Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire
(Berkeley, 2000), 199–205; U. Wiemer, ‘Akklamationen im spätrömischen Reich: Zur Typologie
und Funktion eines Kommunikationsritual,’ Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 86 (2004), 27–73.
⁸⁴ The classic study is H. Dessau, ‘Über Zeit und Persönkichkeit der Scriptores Historiae
Augustae,’ Hermes 24 (1889), 337–92; see also R. Syme, Emperors and Biography: Studies in the
Historia Augusta (Oxford, 1971); R. Baker, A Study of a Late Antique Corpus of Biographies
[Historia Augusta] (DPhil. Oxford, 2014).
⁸⁵ Factus: (10.1, 12.2, 14.1, 33.2); vocatus/dictus: (2.3, 6.1, 9.1); sumpsit (11.1, 15.1, 18.3, 19.3,
21.1, 22.1, 23.2). Also acceptus/accepit (3.4, 16.1); imperare (18.1, 20.2, 30.2, 32.1); appellari/
appellare (24.2, 25.1, 29.1). The Loeb translation of the Tyranni Tringinta frequently (though not
consistently) translates sumpsit (and, at 20.2 and 32.1, imperare) as ‘he seized’, which carries
connotations of force not found in the Latin.
⁸⁶ Usurpare (12.2, 15.4, 27.1); Postumus, who launched a ‘rebellion’ (rebellio), was, along with
the other Gallic emperors, ‘a protector of the Roman name’ (5.5); Regalianus was always
suspected by Gallienus because he dignus videretur imperio (10.8); Claudius, Macrianus, In-
genuus, Postumus, and Aureolus all died while holding power, cum mererentur imperium
(10.14); were it not for Odaenathus taking imperial power, ‘the entire East would have been
lost’ (15.1); Piso is a vir summae sanctitatis (21.1).
⁸⁷ Militum testimonio (HA tyr. trig. 10.15; cf. 3.4).

The Tyranni Triginta is a convenient text, despite the problems of its
historicity, because it provides us with so many accessions of emperors exp-
licitly denounced as tyranni. But the observations that can be drawn from it
hold true when we examine other sources. Emperors were ‘elected’, were
‘created’, were ‘made’, and were ‘declared’.⁸⁸ The decision of the soldiers was
sovereign and any body of soldiers was deemed sufficient to place someone in
power. Perhaps the starkest illustration of this is the usurpation of Eugenius.
In 303, Eugenius was serving as the commander of a unit of 500 men who had
been tasked with deepening the harbour mouth at Seleucia, the port city of
Antioch. So back-breaking was the work that the soldiers revolted, and they
declared Eugenius emperor, wrapping him in a purple robe taken from a
statue. At the head of his soldiers, Eugenius marched inland to Antioch while
his subjects pillaged the surrounding farms, getting very drunk in the process.
When they entered the city at nightfall they made for the palace. When the
citizens of Antioch realized what was happening, however, they rose up and
murdered Eugenius and his soldiers in the streets. This story is intriguing
not only because it shows us that even so insignificant body of soldiers felt
capable of making an emperor, but because the reaction of the emperor then
reigning, Diocletian, demonstrates that he treated this occurrence with the
utmost seriousness, ordering wide-ranging executions of the leading men
in Antioch.⁸⁹
None of this, of course, aims to suggest that the imperial succession was
condemned to be a perpetually disorderly affair, determined at every change of
power by the shouting of an assembled army. Save in dire crisis, decisions
concerning the succession were made by generals, state officials, and emperors
themselves. These decisions, however, had to be communicated to and ratified
by the soldiers in order to have any force. Ammianus Marcellinus, the great
historian of the later Empire, describes a total of nine imperial accessions in
his Res gestae: that of Silvanus (355), those of Julian as Caesar (355) and
Augustus (360), that of Jovian (363), those of Valentinian and Valens (364),
that of Procopius (365), that of Gratian (367), and that of Valentinian II
(375).⁹⁰ Of these, three are certainly to be considered usurpations (Silvanus,
Julian’s acclamation as Augustus, and Procopius) and two more may plausibly
be argued as such (Jovian and Valentinian II). All nine of these acclamations
took place before assembled armies, from the enormous praesental forces that
hailed Valentinian I and Valens to the small assemblage of soldiers that hailed
Procopius in Constantinople. In moments of interregnum, the soldiers, as a
collective mass, suddenly became an enormously dangerous and unwieldy
⁸⁸ For a summary of the terminology of the sources, see Pabst, Comitia imperii, 37–45.
⁸⁹ Lib., Or. I.3, 125, II.10–11, XI.158–62, XIX.45–6, XX.18–20, and ep. 1154/125.
⁹⁰ Amm., XV.5; XV.8; XX.4; XXV.5; XXVI.2; XXVI.4; XXIV.6; XXVII.6; XXX.10.
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perhaps a people that can dance may dispense with them. They
impart a pensive, wayward pleasure to the mind, and are a kind of
chronology of happy events, often serious in the retrospect—births,
marriages, and so forth. Coleridge calls them ‘the poor man’s only
music.’ A village-spire in England peeping from its cluster of trees is
always associated in imagination with this cheerful accompaniment,
and may be expected to pour its joyous tidings on the gale. In
Catholic countries, you are stunned with the everlasting tolling of
bells to prayers or for the dead. In the Apennines, and other wild and
mountainous districts of Italy, the little chapel-bell with its simple
tinkling sound has a romantic and charming effect. The Monks in
former times appear to have taken a pride in the construction of bells
as well as churches; and some of those of the great cathedrals abroad
(as at Cologne and Rouen) may be fairly said to be hoarse with
counting the flight of ages. The chimes in Holland are a nuisance.
They dance in the hours and the quarters. They leave no respite to
the imagination. Before one set has done ringing in your ears,
another begins. You do not know whether the hours move or stand
still, go backwards or forwards, so fantastical and perplexing are
their accompaniments. Time is a more staid personage, and not so
full of gambols. It puts you in mind of a tune with variations, or of an
embroidered dress. Surely, nothing is more simple than time. His
march is straightforward; but we should have leisure allowed us to
look back upon the distance we have come, and not be counting his
steps every moment. Time in Holland is a foolish old fellow with all
the antics of a youth, who ‘goes to church in a coranto, and lights his
pipe in a cinque-pace.’ The chimes with us, on the contrary, as they
come in every three or four hours, are like stages in the journey of
the day. They give a fillip to the lazy, creeping hours, and relieve the
lassitude of country places. At noon, their desultory, trivial song is
diffused through the hamlet with the odour of rashers of bacon; at
the close of day they send the toil-worn sleepers to their beds. Their
discontinuance would be a great loss to the thinking or unthinking
public. Mr. Wordsworth has painted their effect on the mind when
he makes his friend Matthew, in a fit of inspired dotage,
‘Sing those witty rhymes
About the crazy old church-clock
And the bewilder’d chimes.’
The tolling of the bell for deaths and executions is a fearful
summons, though, as it announces, not the advance of time but the
approach of fate, it happily makes no part of our subject. Otherwise,
the ‘sound of the bell’ for Macheath’s execution in the ‘Beggar’s
Opera,’ or for that of the Conspirators in ‘Venice Preserved,’ with the
roll of the drum at a soldier’s funeral, and a digression to that of my
Uncle Toby, as it is so finely described by Sterne, would furnish
ample topics to descant upon. If I were a moralist, I might
disapprove the ringing in the new and ringing out the old year.
‘Why dance ye, mortals, o’er the grave of Time?’
St Paul’s bell tolls only for the death of our English kings, or a
distinguished personage or two, with long intervals between.[15]
Those who have no artificial means of ascertaining the progress of
time, are in general the most acute in discerning its immediate signs,
and are most retentive of individual dates. The mechanical aids to
knowledge are not sharpeners of the wits. The understanding of a
savage is a kind of natural almanac, and more true in its
prognostication of the future. In his mind’s eye he sees what has
happened or what is likely to happen to him, ‘as in a map the voyager
his course.’ Those who read the times and seasons in the aspect of
the heavens and the configurations of the stars, who count by moons
and know when the sun rises and sets, are by no means ignorant of
their own affairs or of the common concatenation of events. People
in such situations have not their faculties distracted by any
multiplicity of inquiries beyond what befalls themselves, and the
outward appearances that mark the change. There is, therefore, a
simplicity and clearness in the knowledge they possess, which often
puzzles the more learned. I am sometimes surprised at a shepherd-
boy by the road-side, who sees nothing but the earth and sky, asking
me the time of day—he ought to know so much better than any one
how far the sun is above the horizon. I suppose he wants to ask a
question of a passenger, or to see if he has a watch. Robinson Crusoe
lost his reckoning in the monotony of his life and that bewildering
dream of solitude, and was fain to have recourse to the notches in a
piece of wood. What a diary was his! And how time must have spread
its circuit round him, vast and pathless as the ocean!
For myself, I have never had a watch nor any other mode of
keeping time in my possession, nor ever wish to learn how time goes.
It is a sign I have had little to do, few avocations, few engagements.
When I am in a town, I can hear the clock; and when I am in the
country, I can listen to the silence. What I like best is to lie whole
mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain, without any object
before me, neither knowing nor caring how time passes, and thus
‘with light-winged toys of feathered Idleness’ to melt down hours to
moments. Perhaps some such thoughts as I have here set down float
before me like motes before my half-shut eyes, or some vivid image
of the past by forcible contrast rushes by me—‘Diana and her fawn,
and all the glories of the antique world;’ then I start away to prevent
the iron from entering my soul, and let fall some tears into that
stream of time which separates me farther and farther from all I once
loved! At length I rouse myself from my reverie, and home to dinner,
proud of killing time with thought, nay even without thinking.
Somewhat of this idle humour I inherit from my father, though he
had not the same freedom from ennui, for he was not a
metaphysician; and there were stops and vacant intervals in his
being which he did not know how to fill up. He used in these cases,
and as an obvious resource, carefully to wind up his watch at night,
and ‘with lack-lustre eye’ more than once in the course of the day
look to see what o’clock it was. Yet he had nothing else in his
character in common with the elder Mr. Shandy. Were I to attempt a
sketch of him, for my own or the reader’s satisfaction, it would be
after the following manner:——but now I recollect, I have done
something of the kind once before, and were I to resume the subject
here, some bat or owl of a critic, with spectacled gravity, might swear
I had stolen the whole of this Essay from myself—or (what is worse)
from him! So I had better let it go as it is.
WHY THE HEROES OF ROMANCE ARE
INSIPID
The New Monthly Magazine.]

[November, 1827.
Because it is taken for granted that they must be amiable and

interesting, in the first instance, and like other things that are taken
for granted, is but indifferently, or indeed cannot be made out at all
in the sequel. To put it to the proof, to give illustrations of it, would
be to throw a doubt upon the question. They have only to show
themselves to ensure conquest. Indeed, the reputation of their
victories goes before them, and is a pledge of their success before
they even appear. They are, or are supposed to be, so amiable, so
handsome, so accomplished, so captivating, that all hearts bow
before them, and all the women are in love with them without
knowing why or wherefore, except that it is understood that they are
to be so. All obstacles vanish without a finger lifted or a word spoken,
and the effect is produced without a blow being struck. When there is
this imaginary charm at work, every thing they could do or say must
weaken the impression, like arguments brought in favour of a self-
evident truth: they very wisely say or do little or nothing, rely on
their names and the author’s good word, look, smile, and are adored;
but to all but the heroines of romance and their confidantes, are
exceedingly uninteresting and common-place personages, either
great coxcombs or wonderfully insipid. When a lover is able to look
unutterable things which produce the desired effect, what occasion
for him to exert his eloquence or make an impassioned speech in
order to bring about a revolution in his favour, which is already
accomplished by other less doubtful means? When the impression at
first sight is complete and irresistible, why throw away any farther
thoughts or words to make it more so? This were ‘to gild refined gold,
to paint the lily, to smooth the ice, to throw a perfume on the violet,
or add another hue unto the rainbow, or seek with taper-light the
beauteous eye of Heaven to garnish,’ which has been pronounced to
be ‘wasteful and superfluous excess.’ Authors and novel-writers
therefore reserve for their second-rate and less prominent
characters, the artillery of words, the arts of persuasion, and all the
unavailing battery of hopeless attentions and fine sentiment, which
are of no use to the more accomplished gallant, who makes his
triumphant approaches by stolen glances and breathing sighs, and
whose appearance alone supersedes the disclosure of all his other
implied perfections and an importunate display of a long list of titles
to the favour of the fair, which, as they are not insisted on, it would
be vain and unbecoming to produce to the gaze of the world, or for
the edification of the curious reader. It is quite enough if the lady is
satisfied with her choice, and if (as generally happens both as a cause
and consequence in such cases) the gentleman is satisfied with
himself. If he indeed seemed to entertain a doubt upon the subject,
the spell of his fascination would be broken, and the author would be
obliged to derogate from the beau-ideal of his character, and make
him do something to deserve the good opinion that might be
entertained of him, and to which he himself had not led the way by
boundless self-complacency and the conscious assurance of infallible
success.
Another circumstance that keeps our novel-heroes in the back-
ground is, that if there was any doubt of their success, or they were
obliged to employ the ordinary and vulgar means to establish their
superiority over every one else, they would be no longer those
‘faultless monsters’ which it is understood that they must be to fill
their part in the drama. The discarded or despairing, not the
favoured lovers, are unavoidably the most interesting persons in the
story. In fact, the principals are already disposed of in the first page;
they are destined for each other by an unaccountable and
uncontrollable sympathy: the ceremony is in a manner over, and
they are already married people, with all the lawful attributes and
indifference belonging to the character. To produce an interest, there
must be mixed motives, alternate hope and fear, difficulties to
struggle with, sacrifices to make; but the true hero of romance is too
fine a gentleman to be subjected to this rude ordeal, or mortifying
exposure, which devolves upon some much more unworthy and
unpretending personage. The beauty of the outline must not be
disturbed by the painful conflicts of passion or the strong contrast of
light and shade. The taste of the heroic cannot swerve for a moment
from the object of its previous choice, who must never be placed in
disadvantageous circumstances. The top characters occupy a certain
prescriptive rank in the world of romance, by the rules of etiquette
and laws of this sort of fictitious composition, reign like princes, and
have only to do nothing to forfeit their privileges or compromise
their supposed dignity.
The heroes of the old romances, the Grand Cyruses, the
Artamenes, and Oroondates, are in this respect better than the
moderns. They had their steel helmet and plume of feathers, the
glittering spear and shield, the barbed steed, and the spread banner,
and had knightly service to perform in joust and tournament, in the
field of battle or the deep forest, besides the duty which they owed to
their ‘mistress’ eyebrow,’ and the favours they received at her hands.
They were comparatively picturesque and adventurous personages,
and men of action in the tented field, and lost all title to the smile of
beauty if they did not deserve it by feats of prowess, and by the
valour of their arms. However insipid they might be as accepted
lovers, in their set speeches and improgressive languishments by
which they paid their court to their hearts’ idols, the ‘fairest of the
fair,’ yet in their character of warriors and heroes, they were men of
mettle, and had something in them. They did not merely sigh and
smile and kneel in the presence of their mistresses—they had to
unhorse their adversaries in combat, to storm castles, to vanquish
giants, and lead armies. So far, so well. In the good old times of
chivalry and romance, favour was won and maintained by the bold
achievements and fair fame of the chosen knight, which keeps up a
show of suspense and dramatic interest, instead of depending, as in
more effeminate times, on taste, sympathy, and a refinement of
sentiment and manners, of the delicacy of which it is impossible to
convey any idea by words or actions. Even in the pompous and
affected courtship of the romances of the seventeenth century (now,
alas! exploded) the interviews between the lovers are so rare and
guarded, their union, though agreed upon and inevitable, is so
remote, the smile with which the lady regards her sworn champion,
though as steady as that of one of the fixed stars, is like them so cold,
as to give a tone of passion and interest to their enamoured flights, as
though they were affected by the chances and changes of sublunary
affairs. I confess I have read some of these fabulous folios formerly
with no small degree of delight and breathless anxiety, particularly
that of ‘Cassandra’; and would willingly indeed go over it again to
catch even a faint, a momentary glimpse of the pleasure with which I
used at one period to peruse its prolix descriptions and high-flown
sentiments. Not only the Palmerins of England and Amadises of
Gaul, who made their way to their mistresses’ hearts by slaying
giants and taming dragons, but the heroes of the French romances of
intrigue and gallantry which succeeded those of necromancy and
chivalry, and where the adventurers for the prize have to break
through the fences of morality and scruples of conscience instead of
stone-walls and enchantments dire, are to be excepted from the
censure of downright insipidity which attaches to those ordinary
drawing-room heroes, who are installed in the good graces of their
Divinities by a look, and keep their places there by the force of still-
life! It is Gray who cries out, ‘Be mine to read eternal new romances
of Marivaux and Crebillon!’ I could say the same of those of Madame
La Fayette and the Duke de la Rochefoucault. ‘The Princess of Cleves’
is a most charming work of this kind; and the Duke de Nemours is a
great favourite with me. He is perhaps the most brilliant personage
that ever entered upon the tapis of a drawing-room, or trifled at a
lady’s toilette.
I prefer him, I own, vastly to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison,
whom I look upon as the prince of coxcombs; and so much the more
impertinent as he is a moral one. His character appears to me ‘ugly
all over with affectation.’ There is not a single thing that Sir Charles
Grandison does or says all through the book from liking to any
person or object but himself, and with a view to answer to a certain
standard of perfection for which he pragmatically sets up. He is
always thinking of himself, and trying to show that he is the wisest,
happiest, and most virtuous person in the whole world. He is (or
would be thought) a code of Christian ethics; a compilation and
abstract of all gentlemanly accomplishments. There is nothing, I
conceive, that excites so little sympathy as this inordinate egotism; or
so much disgust as this everlasting self-complacency. Yet this self-
admiration, brought forward on every occasion as the incentive to
every action and reflected from all around him, is the burden and
pivot of the story. ‘Is not the man Sir Charles Grandison?’—is what
he and all the other persons concerned are continually repeating to
themselves. His preference of the little, insignificant, selfish,
affected, puritanical Miss Byron, who is remarkable for nothing but
her conceit of herself and her lover, to the noble Clementina, must
for ever stamp him for the poltroon and blockhead that he was. What
a contrast between these two females—the one, the favourite heroine,
settling her idle punctilios and the choice of her ribbons for the
wedding-day with equal interest, the other, self-devoted, broken-
hearted, generous, disinterested, pouring out her whole soul in the
fervent expressions and dying struggles of an unfortunate and
hopeless affection! It was impossible indeed for the genius of the
author (strive all he could) to put the prettinesses and coquettish
scruples of the bride-elect upon a par with the eloquent despair and
impassioned sentiments of her majestic but unsuccessful rival.
Nothing can show more clearly that the height of good fortune and of
that conventional faultlessness which is supposed to secure it, is
incompatible with any great degree of interest. Lady Clementina
should have been married to Sir Charles to surfeit her of a coxcomb—
Miss Byron to Lovelace to plague her with a rake! Have we not
sometimes seen such matches? A slashing critic of my acquaintance
once observed, that ‘Richardson would be surprised in the next world
to find Lovelace in Heaven and Grandison in Hell!’ Without going
this orthodox length, I must say there is something in Lovelace’s
vices more attractive than in the other’s best virtues. Clarissa’s
attachment seems as natural as Clementina’s is romantic. There is a
regality about Lovelace’s manner, and he appears clothed in a
panoply of wit, gaiety, spirit, and enterprise, that is criticism-proof. If
he had not possessed these dazzling qualities, nothing could have
made us forgive for an instant his treatment of the spotless Clarissa;
but indeed they might be said to be mutually attracted to and
extinguished in each other’s dazzling lustre! When we think of
Lovelace and his luckless exploits, we can hardly be persuaded at this
time of day that he wore a wig. Yet that he did so is evident; for Miss
Howe when she gave him that spirited box on the ear, struck the
powder out of it! Mr. B. in ‘Pamela’ has all the insipidity, that arises
from patronising beauty and condescending to virtue. Pamela herself
is delightfully made out; but she labours under considerable
disadvantages, and is far from a regular heroine.
Sterne (thank God!) has neither hero nor heroine, and he does
very well without them.
Many people find fault with Fielding’s Tom Jones as gross and
immoral. For my part, I have doubts of his being so very handsome
from the author’s always talking about his beauty, and I suspect he
was a clown, from being constantly assured he was so very genteel.
Otherwise, I think Jones acquits himself very well both in his actions
and speeches, as a lover and as a trencher-man whenever he is called
upon. Some persons, from their antipathy to that headlong impulse,
of which Jones was the slave, and to that morality of good-nature
which in him is made a foil to principle, have gone so far as to prefer
Blifil as the prettier fellow of the two. I certainly cannot subscribe to
this opinion, which perhaps was never meant to have followers, and
has nothing but its singularity to recommend it. Joseph Andrews is a
hero of the shoulder-knot: it would be hard to canvass his
pretensions too severely, especially considering what a patron he has
in Parson Adams. That one character would cut up into a hundred
fine gentlemen and novel-heroes! Booth is another of the good-
natured tribe, a fine man, a very fine man! But there is a want of
spirit to animate the well-meaning mass. He hardly deserved to have
the hashed mutton kept waiting for him. The author has redeemed
himself in Amelia; but a heroine with a broken nose and who was a
married woman besides, must be rendered truly interesting and
amiable to make up for superficial objections. The character of the
Noble Peer in this novel is not insipid. If Fielding could have made
virtue as admirable as he could make vice detestable, he would have
been a greater master even than he was. I do not understand what
those critics mean who say he got all his characters out of alehouses.
It is true he did some of them.
Smollett’s heroes are neither one thing nor the other: neither very
refined nor very insipid. Wilson in Humphrey Clinker comes the
nearest to the beau-ideal of this character, the favourite of the novel-
reading and boarding-school girl. Narcissa and Emilia Gauntlet are
very charming girls; and Monimia in Count Fathom is a fine
monumental beauty. But perhaps he must be allowed to be most at
home in Winifred Jenkins!
The women have taken this matter up in our own time: let us see
what they have made of it. Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroes and lovers are
perfect in their kind; nobody can find any fault with them, for
nobody knows any thing about them. They are described as very
handsome, and quite unmeaning and inoffensive.
‘Her heroes have no character at all.’
Theodore, Valancourt,—what delightful names! and there is

nothing else to distinguish them by. Perhaps, however, this
indefiniteness is an advantage. We add expression to the inanimate
outline, and fill up the blank with all that is amiable, interesting, and
romantic. A long ride without a word spoken, a meeting that comes
to nothing, a parting look, a moonlight scene, or evening skies that
paint their sentiments for them better than the lovers can do for
themselves, farewells too full of anguish, deliverances too big with
joy to admit of words, suppressed sighs, faint smiles, the freshness of
the morning, pale melancholy, the clash of swords, the clank of
chains that make the fair one’s heart sink within her, these are the
chief means by which the admired authoress of ‘The Romance of the
Forest’ and ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ keeps alive an ambiguous
interest in the bosom of her fastidious readers, and elevates the lover
into the hero of the fable. Unintelligible distinctions, impossible
attempts, a delicacy that shrinks from the most trifling objection, and
an enthusiasm that rushes on its fate, such are the charming and
teazing contradictions that form the flimsy texture of a modern
romance! If the lover in such critical cases was any thing but a lover,
he would cease to be the most amiable of all characters in the
abstract and by way of excellence, and would be a traitor to the
cause; to give reasons or to descend to particulars, is to doubt the
omnipotence of love and shake the empire of credulous fancy; a
sounding name, a graceful form, are all that is necessary to suspend
the whole train of tears, sighs, and the softest emotions upon; the
ethereal nature of the passion requires ethereal food to sustain it;
and our youthful hero, in order to be perfectly interesting, must be
drawn as perfectly insipid!
I cannot, however, apply this charge to Mrs. Inchbald’s heroes or
heroines. However finely drawn, they are an essence of sentiment.
Their words are composed of the warmest breath, their tears scald,
their sighs stifle. Her characters seem moulded of a softer clay, the
work of fairest hands. Miss Milner is enchanting. Doriforth indeed is
severe, and has a very stately opinion of himself, but he has spirit
and passion. Lord Norwynne is the most unpleasant and obdurate.
He seduces by his situation and kills by indifference, as is natural in
such cases. But still through all these the fascination of the writer’s
personal feelings never quits you. On the other hand, Miss Burney’s
(Madame D’Arblay’s) forte is ridicule, or an exquisite tact for minute
absurdities, and when she aims at being fine she only becomes
affected. No one had ever much less of the romantic. Lord Orville is a
condescending suit of clothes; yet certainly the sense which Evelina
has of the honour done her is very prettily managed. Sir Clement
Willoughby is a much gayer and more animated person, though his
wit outruns his discretion. Young Delville is the hero of punctilio—a
perfect diplomatist in the art of love-making—and draws his parallels
and sits down as deliberately before the citadel of his mistress’s
heart, as a cautious general lays siege to an impregnable fortress.
Cecilia is not behind-hand with him in the game of studied cross-
purposes and affected delays, and is almost the veriest and most
provoking trifler on record. Miss Edgeworth, I believe, has no heroes.
Her trenchant pen cuts away all extravagance and idle pretence, and
leaves nothing but common sense, prudence, and propriety behind
it, wherever it comes.
I do not apprehend that the heroes of the Author of Waverley form
any very striking exception to the common rule. They conform to
their designation and follow the general law of their being. They are
for the most part very equivocal and undecided personages, who
receive their governing impulse from accident, or are puppets in the
hands of their mistresses, such as Waverley, Ivanhoe, Frank
Osbaldistone, Henry Morton, &c. I do not say that any of these are
absolutely insipid, but they have in themselves no leading or master-
traits, and they are worked out of very listless and inert materials
into a degree of force and prominence solely by the genius of the
author. Instead of acting, they are acted upon, and keep in the back-
ground and in a neutral posture, till they are absolutely forced to
come forward, and it is then with a very amiable reservation of
modest scruples. Does it not seem almost, or generally speaking, as if
a character to be put in this responsible situation of candidate for the
highest favour of the public at large, or of the fair in particular, who
is to conciliate all suffrages and concentrate all interests, must really
have nothing in him to please or give offence, that he must be left a
negative, feeble character without untractable or uncompromising
points, and with a few slight recommendations and obvious good
qualities which every one may be supposed to improve upon and fill
up according to his or her inclination or fancy and the model of
perfection previously existing in the mind? It is a privilege claimed,
no doubt, by the fair reader to make out the object of her admiration
and interest according to her own choice; and the same privilege, if
not openly claimed, may be covertly exercised by others. We are all
fond of our own creations, and if the author does little to his chief
character and allows us to have a considerable hand in it, it may not
suffer in our opinion from this circumstance. In fact, the hero of the
work is not so properly the chief object in it, as a sort of blank left
open to the imagination, or a lay-figure on which the reader disposes
whatever drapery he pleases! Of all Sir Walter’s characters the most
dashing and spirited is the Sultan Saladin. But he is not meant for a
hero, nor fated to be a lover. He is a collateral and incidental
performer in the scene. His movements therefore remain free, and he
is master of his own resplendent energies, which produce so much
the more daring and felicitous an effect. So far from being intended
to please all tastes or the most squeamish, he is not meant for any
taste. He has no pretensions, and stands upon the sole ground of his
own heroic acts and sayings. The author has none of the timidity or
mawkishness arising from a fear of not coming up to his own
professions, or to the expectations excited in the reader’s mind. Any
striking trait, any interesting exploit is more than was bargained for
—is heaped measure, running over. There is no idle, nervous
apprehension of falling short of perfection, arresting the hand or
diverting the mind from truth and nature. If the Pagan is not
represented as a monster and barbarian, all the rest is a god-send.
Accordingly all is spontaneous, bold, and original in this beautiful
and glowing design, which is as magnificent as it is magnanimous.—
Lest I should forget it, I will mention while I am on the subject of
Scotch novels, that Mackenzie’s ‘Man of Feeling’ is not without
interest, but it is an interest brought out in a very singular and
unprecedented way. He not merely says or does nothing to deserve
the approbation of the goddess of his idolatry, but from extreme
shyness and sensitiveness, instead of presuming on his merits, gets
out of her way, and only declares his passion on his death-bed. Poor
Harley!—Mr. Godwin’s Falkland is a very high and heroic character:
he, however, is not a love-hero; and the only part in which an episode
of this kind is introduced, is of the most trite and mawkish
description. The case is different in St. Leon. The author’s
resuscitated hero there quaffs joy, love, and immortality with a
considerable gusto, and with appropriate manifestations of triumph.
As to the heroes of the philosophical school of romance, such as
Goethe’s Werther, &c., they are evidently out of the pale of this
reasoning. Instead of being common-place and insipid, they are one
violent and startling paradox from beginning to end. Instead of being
cast in stiff unmeaning mould, they ‘all germins spill at once’ that
make mere mortal men. They run a-tilt at all established usages and
prejudices, and overset all the existing order of society. There is
plenty of interest here; and instead of complaining of a calm, we are
borne along by a hurricane of passion and eloquence, certainly
without any thing of ‘temperance that may give it smoothness.’
Schiller’s Moor, Kotzebue’s heroes, and all the other German
prodigies are of this stamp.
Shakspeare’s lovers and Boccaccio’s I like much: they seem to me
full of tenderness and manly spirit, and free from insipidity and cant.
Otway’s Jaffier is, however, the true woman’s man—full of passion
and effeminacy, a mixture of strength and weakness. Perhaps what I
have said above may suggest the true reason and apology for Milton’s
having unwittingly made Satan the hero of ‘Paradise Lost.’ He suffers
infinite losses, and makes the most desperate efforts to recover or
avenge them; and it is the struggle with fate and the privation of
happiness that sharpens our desires, or enhances our sympathy with
good or evil. We have little interest in unalterable felicity, nor can we
join with heart and soul in the endless symphonies and exulting
hallelujahs of the spirits of the blest. The remorse of a fallen spirit or
‘tears such as angels shed’ touch us more nearly.
THE SHYNESS OF SCHOLARS
The New Monthly Magazine.]

[December, 1827.
‘And of his port as meek as is a maid.’
Scholars lead a contemplative and retired life, both which

circumstances must be supposed to contribute to the effect in
question. A life of study is also conversant with high and ideal
models, which gives an ambitious turn to the mind; and pride is
nearly akin to delicacy of feeling.
That a life of privacy and obscurity should render its votaries
bashful and awkward, or unfit them for the routine of society, from
the want both of a habit of going into company and from ignorance
of its usages, is obvious to remark. No one can be expected to do that
well or without a certain degree of hesitation and restraint, which he
is not accustomed to do except on particular occasions, and at rare
intervals. You might as rationally set a scholar or a clown on a tight-
rope and expect them to dance gracefully and with every appearance
of ease, as introduce either into the gay, laughing circle, and suppose
that he will acquit himself handsomely and come off with applause in
the retailing of anecdote or the interchange of repartee. ‘If you have
not seen the Court, your manners must be naught; and if your
manners are naught, you must be damned,’ according to
Touchstone’s reasoning. The other cause lies rather deeper, and is so
far better worth considering, perhaps. A student, then, that is, a man
who condemns himself to toil for a length of time and through a
number of volumes in order to arrive at a conclusion, naturally loses
that smartness and ease which distinguish the gay and thoughtless
rattler. There is a certain elasticity of movement and hey-day of the
animal spirits seldom to be met with but in those who have never
cared for any thing beyond the moment, or looked lower than the
surface. The scholar having to encounter doubts and difficulties on
all hands, and indeed to apply by way of preference to those subjects
which are most beset with mystery, becomes hesitating, sceptical,
irresolute, absent, dull. All the processes of his mind are slow,
cautious, circuitous, instead of being prompt, heedless,
straightforward. Finding the intricacies of the path increase upon
him in every direction, this can hardly be supposed to add to the
lightness of his step, the confidence of his brow as he advances. He
does not skim the surface, but dives under it like the mole to make
his way darkling, by imperceptible degrees, and throwing up heaps of
dirt and rubbish over his head to track his progress. He is therefore
startled at any sudden light, puzzled by any casual question, taken
unawares and at a disadvantage in every critical emergency. He must
have time given him to collect his thoughts, to consider objections, to
make farther inquiries, and come to no conclusion at last. This is
very different from the dashing, off-hand manner of the mere man of
business or fashion; and he who is repeatedly found in situations to
which he is unequal (particularly if he is of a reflecting and candid
temper) will be apt to look foolish, and to lose both his countenance
and his confidence in himself—at least as to the opinion others
entertain of him, and the figure he is likely on any occasion to make
in the eyes of the world. The course of his studies has not made him
wise, but has taught him the uncertainty of wisdom; and has
supplied him with excellent reasons for suspending his judgment,
when another would throw the casting-weight of his own
presumption or interest into the scale.
The inquirer after truth learns to take nothing for granted; least of
all, to make an assumption of his own superior merits. He would
have nothing proceed without proper proofs and an exact scrutiny;
and would neither be imposed upon himself, nor impose upon others
by shallow and hasty appearances. It takes years of patient toil and
devoted enthusiasm to master any art or science; and after all, the
success is doubtful. He infers that other triumphs must be prepared
in like manner at an humble distance: he cannot bring himself to
imagine that any object worth seizing on or deserving of regard, can
be carried by a coup de main. So far from being proud or puffed up
by them, he would be ashamed and degraded in his own opinion by
any advantages that were to be obtained by such cheap and vulgar
means as putting a good face on the matter, as strutting and
vapouring about his own pretensions. He would not place himself on
a level with bullies or coxcombs; nor believe that those whose favour
he covets, can be the dupes of either. Whatever is excellent in his
fanciful creed is hard of attainment; and he would (perhaps absurdly
enough) have the means in all cases answerable to the end. He knows
that there are difficulties in his favourite pursuits to puzzle the will,
to tire the patience, to unbrace the strongest nerves, and make the
stoutest courage quail; and he would fain think that if there is any
object more worthy than another to call forth the earnest solicitude,
the hopes and fears of a wise man, and to make his heart yearn
within him at the most distant prospect of success, this precious
prize in the grand lottery of life is not to be had for the asking for, or
from the mere easy indifference or overbearing effrontery with which
you put in your claim. He is aware that it will be long enough before
any one paints a fine picture by walking up and down and admiring
himself in the glass; or writes a fine poem by being delighted with the
sound of his own voice; or solves a single problem in philosophy by
swaggering and haughty airs. He conceives that it is the same with
the way of the world—woos the fair as he woos the Muse; in
conversation never puts in a word till he has something better to say
than any one else in the room; in business never strikes while the
iron is hot, and flings away all his advantages by endeavouring to
prove to his own and the satisfaction of others, that he is clearly
entitled to them. It never once enters into his head (till it is too late)
that impudence is the current coin in the affairs of life; that he who
doubts his own merit, never has credit given him by others; that
Fortune does not stay to have her overtures canvassed; that he who
neglects opportunity, can seldom command it a second time; that the
world judge by appearances, not by realities; and that they
sympathise more readily with those who are prompt to do
themselves justice, and to show off their various qualifications or
enforce their pretensions to the utmost, than with those who wait for
others to award their claims, and carry their fastidious refinement
into helplessness and imbecility. Thus ‘fools rush in where angels
fear to tread;’ and modest merit finds to its cost, that the bold hand
and dauntless brow succeed where timidity and bashfulness are
pushed aside; that the gay, laughing eye is preferred to dejection and
gloom, health and animal spirits to the shattered, sickly frame and
trembling nerves; and that to succeed in life, a man should carry
about with him the outward and incontrovertible signs of success,
and of his satisfaction with himself and his prospects, instead of
plaguing every body near him with fantastical scruples and his
ridiculous anxiety to realise an unattainable standard of perfection.
From holding back himself, the speculative enthusiast is thrust back
by others: his pretensions are insulted and trampled on; and the
repeated and pointed repulses he meets with, make him still more
unwilling to encounter, and more unable to contend with those that
await him in the prosecution of his career. He therefore retires from
the contest altogether, or remains in the back-ground, a passive but
uneasy spectator of a scene, in which he finds from experience, that
confidence, alertness, and superficial acquirements are of more avail
than all the refinement and delicacy in the world. Action, in truth, is
referable chiefly to quickness and strength of resolution, rather than
to depth of reasoning or scrupulous nicety: again, it is to be
presumed that those who show a proper reliance on themselves, will
not betray the trust we place in them through pusillanimity or want
of spirit: in what relates to the opinion of others, which is often
formed hastily and on slight acquaintance, much must be allowed to
what strikes the senses, to what excites the imagination; and in all
popular worldly schemes, popular and worldly means must be
resorted to, instead of depending wholly on the hidden and intrinsic
merits of the case.
‘In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness, and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tyger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage:
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it,
As fearfully, as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.’
This advice (sensible as it is) is abhorrent to the nature of a man

who is accustomed to place all his hopes of victory in reasoning and
reflection only. The noisy, rude, gratuitous success of those who have
taken so much less pains to deserve it, disgusts and disheartens him
—he loses his self-possession and self-esteem, has no standard left by
which to measure himself or others, and as he cannot be brought to
admire them, persuades himself at last that the blame rests with
himself; and instead of bespeaking a fashionable dress, learning to
bow, or taking a few lessons in boxing or fencing to brace his nerves
and raise his spirits, aggravates all his former faults by way of
repairing them, grows more jealous of the propriety of every word
and look, lowers his voice into a whisper, gives his style the last
polish, reconsiders his arguments, refines his sentiments till they
evaporate in a sigh, and thus satisfies himself that he can hardly fail,
that men judge impartially in the end, that the public will sooner or
later do him justice, Fortune smile, and the Fair no longer be averse!
Oh malore! He is just where he was, or ten times worse off than ever.
There is another circumstance that tends not a little to perplex the
judgment, and add to the difficulties of the retired student, when he
comes out into the world. He is like one dropped from the clouds. He
has hitherto conversed chiefly with historic personages and abstract
propositions, and has no just notion of actual men and things. He
does not well know how to reconcile the sweeping conclusions he has
been taught to indulge in to the cautious and pliant maxims of the
world, nor how to compare himself, an inhabitant of Utopia, with
sublunary mortals. He has been habituated all his life to look up to a
few great names handed down by virtue or science as the ‘Gods of his
idolatry,’ as the fixed stars in the firmament of reputation, and to
have some respect for himself and other learned men as votaries at
the shrine and as appreciating the merits of their idol; but all the rest
of the world, who are neither the objects of this sort of homage, nor
concerned as a sort of priesthood in collecting and paying it, he looks
upon as actually nobody, or as worms crawling upon the face of the
earth without intellectual value or pretensions. He is, therefore, a
little surprised and shocked to find, when he deigns to mingle with
his fellows, those every-day mortals, on ordinary terms, that they are
of a height nearly equal to himself, that they have words, ideas,
feelings in common with the best, and are not the mere cyphers he
had been led to consider them. From having under-rated, he comes
to over-rate them. Having dreamt of no such thing, he is more struck
with what he finds than perhaps it deserves; magnifies the least
glimpse of sense or humour into sterling wit or wisdom; is startled by
any objection from so unexpected a quarter; thinks his own
advantages of no avail, because they are not the only ones, and
shrinks from an encounter with weapons he has not been used to,
and from a struggle by which he feels himself degraded. The Knight
of La Mancha when soundly beaten by the packstaves of the
Yanguesian carriers, laid all the blame on his having condescended
to fight with plebeians. The pride of learning comes in to aid the
awkwardness and bashfulness of the inexperienced novice,
converting his want of success into the shame and mortification of
defeat in what he habitually considers as a contest with inferiors.
Indeed, those will always be found to submit with the worst grace to
any check or reverse of this kind in common conversation or
reasoning, who have been taught to set the most exclusive and
disproportioned value on letters: and the most enlightened and
accomplished scholars will be less likely to be humbled or put to the
blush by the display of common sense or native talent, than the more
ignorant, self-sufficient, and pedantic among the learned; for that
ignorance, self-sufficiency, and pedantry, are sometimes to be
reckoned among the attributes of learning, cannot be disputed.
These qualities are not very reconcilable with modest merit; but they
are quite consistent with a great deal of blundering, confusion, and
want of tact in the commerce of the world. The genuine scholar
retires from an unequal conflict into silence and obscurity: the
pedant swells into self-importance, and renders himself conspicuous
by pompous arrogance and absurdity!
It is hard upon those who have ever taken pains or done any thing
to distinguish themselves, that they are seldom the trumpeters of
their own achievements; and I believe it may be laid down as a rule,
that we receive just as much homage from others as we exact from
them by our own declarations, looks, and manner. But no one who
has performed any thing great looks big upon it: those who have any
thing to boast of are generally silent on that head, and altogether shy
of the subject. With Coriolanus, they ‘will not have their nothings
monster’d.’ From familiarity, his own acquirements do not appear so
extraordinary to the individual as to others; and there is a natural
want of sympathy in this respect. No one who is really capable of
great things is proud or vain of his success; for he thinks more of
what he had hoped or has failed to do, than of what he has done. A
habit of extreme exertion, or of anxious suspense, is not one of
buoyant, overweening self-complacency: those who have all their
lives tasked their faculties to the utmost, may be supposed to have
quite enough to do without having much disposition left to anticipate
their success with confidence, or to glory in it afterwards. The
labours of the mind, like the drudgery of the body, depress and take
away the usual alacrity of the spirits. Nor can such persons be lifted
up with the event; for the impression of the consequences to result
from any arduous undertaking must be light and vain, compared
with the toil and anxiety accompanying it. It is only those who have
done nothing, who fancy they can do every thing; or who have leisure
and inclination to admire themselves. To sit before a glass and smile
delighted at our own image, is merely a tax on our egotism and self-
conceit; and these are resources not easily exhausted in some
persons; or if they are, the deficiency is supplied by flatterers who
surround the vain, like a natural atmosphere. Fools who take all their
opinions at second-hand cannot resist the coxcomb’s delight in
himself; or it might be said that folly is the natural mirror of vanity.
The greatest heroes, it has often been observed, do not show it in
their faces; nor do philosophers affect to be thought wise. Little
minds triumph on small occasions, or over puny competitors: the
loftiest wish for higher opportunities of signalising themselves, or
compare themselves with those models that leave them no room for
flippant exultation. Either great things are accomplished with labour
and pains, which stamp their impression on the general character
and tone of feeling; or if this should not be the case (as sometimes
happens), and they are the effect of genius and a happiness of nature,
then they cost too little to be much thought of, and we rather wonder
at others for admiring them, than at ourselves for having performed
them. ‘Vix ea nostra voco’—is the motto of spontaneous talent; and in
neither case is conceit the exuberant growth of great original power
or of great attainments.
In one particular, the uneducated man carries it hollow against the
man of thought and refinement: the first can shoot in the long bow,
which the last cannot for the life of him. He who has spent the best
part of his time and wasted his best powers in endeavouring to
answer the question—‘What is truth?’—scorns a lie, and every thing
making the smallest approach to one. His mind by habit has become
tenacious of, devoted to the truth. The grossness and vulgarity of

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Emperors and Usurpers in the Later

Roman Empire: Civil War, Panegyric,

OXFORD STUDIES IN BYZANTIUM

OXFORD STUDIES IN BYZANTIUM

Oxford Studies in Byzantium consists of scholarly monographs and editions

Emperors and Usurpers

‘Daddy, it’s quite boring for me for you to work.’

Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, hand-

¹ From It is What I Think by George Orwell. Published by Secker. Reprinted by permission of

List of Figures xiii

VI. Tyranny and Blood: Constantius, Constans, Magnentius,

I.1. The Roman Empire in AD 271. 11

* Unless otherwise stated, abbreviations for primary sources follow guidelines

xvi List of Abbreviations

List of Abbreviations xvii

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the

Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?

Roman imperial government proved to be one of the most enduring political

WHY USURPATION?: THE PROBLEM

Roman imperial power can only properly be understood in the context of

4 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 5

6 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 7

8 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

¹⁹ J. Bennett, Trajan: Optimus Princeps (2nd edn. London, 2005), 1–3.

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 9

²⁴ Hekster, Commodus, 77–83.

10 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Augusta Treverorum (Trier)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 27/3/2018, SPi

The Palmyrene Empire

Fig. I.1. The Roman Empire in AD 271.

12 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

‘ THIS LITANY OF MANIFEST USURPERS

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 13

14 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 15

⁴⁸ On regionalization, see Kulikoski, ‘Regional Dynasties’, 135–48.

16 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 17

18 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 19

⁷¹ See Chapter VI, p. 163, and Chapter IX, pp. 289–90.

20 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Fig. I.2. Usurpations in the Roman Empire, 27 BC–AD 455.

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 21

‘ THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TYRANT AND A KING

22 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire 23

24 Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire

The New Monthly Magazine.]

Because it is taken for granted that they must be amiable and

Theodore, Valancourt,—what delightful names! and there is

The New Monthly Magazine.]

Scholars lead a contemplative and retired life, both which

This advice (sensible as it is) is abhorrent to the nature of a man

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