Let's rank the (Western) Roman emperors!

[Lanassa]

You have Constantinus "III" on your list, but it's not clear that he was ever recognized by the Roman senate. We know that in 409 he sent ambassadors to Honorius' regime demanding recognition as co-Augustus (in Olympiodorus) and we know that he claimed that he was recognized (due to an inscription at Augusta Treverorum) but the consular lists published elsewhere in the empire omit his name (two other consuls are given in Consularia Constantinopolitana for 409, while no consuls are given in Consularia Italica for that year).

Bury believed that Constantinus was telling the truth, but more recent historians disagree. That's why he's usually left off of the lists.

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Not pretending to be objective about any of this.

10 Constantinus I (needs more points tbh)
9 Antoninus Pius (there's a lot to be said for peace)
8 Augustus (duh)
7 Marcus Aurelius (faute de mieux)
6 Vespasianus (zzz military emperors)
5 Diocletianus (some good reforms, some silly reforms)
4 Septimius Severus (zzz more military emperors)
3 Constantius III (tremendously underrated if not ignored)
2 Theodosius I ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
1 Hadrianus (meh)
-1 Anthemius (tried hard but really unlucky)
-2 Traianus (overrated but good at overextension)
-3 Maiorianus (really bad at elite management but was admittedly in a bad situation)
-4 Petronius Maximus (just no)
-5 Elagabalus (embarrassing)
-6 Caligula (also embarrassing)
-7 Valerianus (humiliating)
-8 Gratianus (much much worse at his job than most people recognize, and basically caused the entire fifth century crisis)
-9 Valentinianus III (duh)
-10 Honorius (also duh)

I dunno man. Aetius was a hell of a guy. If you look at what Justinian and Belisarius were able to achieve, against foes that were far more entrenched and secure in their positions than they were in Aetius's day, and with Aetius's talent at using the barbarian tribes settled in Rome as a battering ram against the larger Roman enemies... maybe something could've been achieved there.

That implies that Aetius did his job poorly, then, doesn't it - if he failed against (ostensibly) weaker opposition and with great resources.

Either way, the man had about two decades at the pinnacle of power in the West, and spent them ineffectively. He appears to have created the civil war against Bonifacius through elite mismanagement (although it's entirely possible that the sources have more to do with that impression than reality) and totally failed to keep North Africa safe. He tacitly abandoned northern Gaul and basically wrote off most of the Spains as well. Constantius III left behind an empire that was almost fully recovered from the wars of the first two decades of the fifth century and that only needed a bit of mopping-up action to finish the long, exhausting climb back to security. Aetius's period of predominance saw those advantages evaporate entirely.

 

[Gurkhal]

The only Western Roman Emperor that stands out for me is Constantine who did accomplish something. The rest of them feels as either to obscure, at least for my superficial knowledge of the later Roman empire, to rank correctly, they were incompetent or they did something which I personally can't stand. Like Constantinus II who killed all those relatives or Theodocius I did religious persecutions and so on.

 

[Arilou]

The problem with the powerful generals ala. Aetius, Stilicho, etc. was that there was basically no option for the reigning emperor: Either they let the generals run the show (which meant they'd be overthrown sooner or later, either in favour of the general or another puppet) or they'd remove him. It was a real "damned if you do, damned if you don't" (and notably the dynamic forms the basis of one of the Foundation stories)

 

[brave46]

nero was crazy

 

[sleeperul]

What did Hadrian even did that people rank him so high. He reduced the Roman territory did little to no war which is not good for the empire and basically did nothing else.
Antoninus Pius the same and but at least Hadrian did some war this guy did nothing.

 

[Arilou]

What did Hadrian even did that people rank him so high. He reduced the Roman territory did little to no war which is not good for the empire and basically did nothing else.
Antoninus Pius the same and but at least Hadrian did some war this guy did nothing.

He brought a period of peace for the empire, abondoned territory he felt was too expensive to defend, and generally consolidated the place. He travelled across the empire, founded temples and sponsored public works, and generally made life better for the citizens of the Empire.

 

[DukeDayve]

What did Hadrian even did that people rank him so high. He reduced the Roman territory did little to no war which is not good for the empire and basically did nothing else.
Antoninus Pius the same and but at least Hadrian did some war this guy did nothing.

Hadrian consolidated and defined the territory of the Roman empire. He recognized that even the Romans had limits and couldn't conquer the entire world. The fact that he built so many walls kind of proves that his interests were in keeping the empire and its citizens safe. The fact that he spent so much time travelling around the empire personally seeing to problems himself showed that he was genuinely concerned about the prosperity and stability of the empire and everything within it.

i kinda suspect that Caracalla gets overly badmouthed because he made every free person in the Empire a citizen.

the old school arsehats who wrote the histories were probably pretty teed off about that.

Been quite a while since I read any books about this stage of the empire, but wasn't citizenship basically worthless by the time Caracalla gave it to everybody? I doubt that's what gave him his bad name to be honest. More likely his massacres of tens of thousands of people for the crime of enjoying a play that mocked him a little. Or having his brother murdered in front of their mother.

 

[Taylor]

The practice of the augusti between Nerva and Antoninus Pius of adopting an heir was not any kind of regular or accepted procedure, it was merely an ad hoc solution adopted because not a single one of these augusti had male children able to succeed them. Marcus Aurelius was the first augustus since Vespasian who had a male heir able to succeed him. And succession via the direct male line was the common and most "normal” inheritance procedure in Roman society. Why else if not because of this did Augustus, Nerva or Hadrian play the charade of adopting adult males as their sons (some of them, like Trajan or Tiberius, well into middle age) if not because they knew that dynastic continuity was a strong (and in some cases indispensable) guarantee for a stable and accepted succession? As a matter of facts, the great weakness of the Augustan system was precisely that as the post of augustus was not in itself a magistrature, but just a bunch of titles, magistratures and extraordinary powers piled upon an individual, it was by definition impossible to establish a proper succession system.

You make a very good point. It's not so much that Marcus Aurelius went out of his way to put his crazy son on the throne - he was just following Roman tradition. However, I don't agree that succession-by-adoption wasn't in any way accepted procedure: IIRC the Romans themselves produces rhetoric praising it and saying how successful and meritocratic it was and so on. So the philosopher emperor might have taken the hint and adopted someone more competent than Commodus, thus in effect reforming the succession system.

Actually this makes me wonder: how much of Commodus' later madness was visible when Marcus Aurelius was still alive? And surely he must have noticed his son had no interest in actual government?

 

[Taylor]

I updated the table with @Lanassa's changes.

So far Augustus ranks as the best by some distance, followed by Diocletian (28), Antoninus Pius (25), and Vespasian (23). Then Constantine I and Hadrian tie for 6th place, and Trajan and Aurelian for 8th. Marcus Aurelius is 10th, followed at some distance by Domitian, Septimius Severus, Constantius III, Theodosius I, Anthemius, and Maximian (all with single-digit points).

By far the worst emperor is Honorius. Then Commodus and Elagabalus are tied for who is the second worst emperor of Rome. After that the usual suspects Caligula and Caracalla, and Valentinian III. Nero is deemed a considerably less bad than Valentinan III. After him follows a long list of slightly bad emperors which I'm to lazy to write down here.

It is still unclear who the 17th best emperor of Rome was - the position is tied between the 47 emperors who have received no points so far.

 

[Geriander]

Alot of the stories about the unpopular Emperors should be taken with a grain of salt. Sources are few and mostly come from the Senatorial class. If an Emperor didn’t pay the Senate the respect they expected, they could end up with some incest, orgies, etc. in their record. This is of course even more likely if the history is written during the reign of whoever usurped the throne.

 

[Semper Victor]

You make a very good point. It's not so much that Marcus Aurelius went out of his way to put his crazy son on the throne - he was just following Roman tradition. However, I don't agree that succession-by-adoption wasn't in any way accepted procedure: IIRC the Romans themselves produces rhetoric praising it and saying how successful and meritocratic it was and so on. So the philosopher emperor might have taken the hint and adopted someone more competent than Commodus, thus in effect reforming the succession system.

Actually this makes me wonder: how much of Commodus' later madness was visible when Marcus Aurelius was still alive? And surely he must have noticed his son had no interest in actual government?

Succession by a natural heir was the most widely accepted form of succession, both in the private and public spheres of Roman life. In the case of Roman society, there was the additional fact that adoption, as intended by Roman law, gave the adopted heir full inheritance rights. But still in the Roman mind a biological son was a more "real" heir than an adopted one.

In the case of Commodus, that meant that if Marcus Aurelius had adopted another man as his heir, he would've needed to kill Commodus first (his own son) in order to ensure an orderly succession. If he did not, three scenarios would've been possible:

• An uprising by Commodus while his father was still alive.
• A civil war after Marcus Aurelius' death.
• The murder or execution of Commodus by Marcus Aurelius' adopted heir (now the ruling augustus).

The two first scenarios assume that Commodus would've been able to gather around him a party of followers amongst the senators and equites, enough to launch an armed coup. Given the nature of Roman politics, that's a very probable outcome. And it would've been probably a matter of live and death for Commodus, because the probabilities of the new heir allowing him to live after his father's death woudl've been close to zero. That means that the third scenario would've been highly unlikely, unless Commodus really had a death wish.

 

[Lanassa]

Alot of the stories about the unpopular Emperors should be taken with a grain of salt. Sources are few and mostly come from the Senatorial class. If an Emperor didn’t pay the Senate the respect they expected, they could end up with some incest, orgies, etc. in their record. This is of course even more likely if the history is written during the reign of whoever usurped the throne.

Yes. However, some of the stories appear to be at least partially genuine. For example, the Senate loathed Caracalla, and the historical tradition is (universally) hostile in amusing ways, but there is epigraphical proof of him taking on preposterous (if not unhinged) titles, like Amazonius and Exsuperatorius, and we have a fragment of his citizenship declaration (Constitutio Antoniniana) preserved from Egyptian papyrus, along with the indirect evidence of the golden age of Roman legal theory in the early third century that emerged primarily to fix the massive legal problems that accumulated from applying Roman law to every free man in the empire. Many of the problems his reign caused, therefore, are attested independently of the senatorial tradition.

 

[DukeDayve]

With regards to the dubious nature of what we know about some of the emperors... at a certain point you just have to accept what is agreed upon as "the truth" is... the truth. Otherwise you can never reach any opinions. I mean, it's generally considered that Vespasian was a very good emperor, the right man for the job at the right time, and so forth. Or was he terrible, but very very generous to writers and historians so that they always wrote nice things about him?

Maybe Tiberius lived on Capri because he was just shy, and he actually spent his days administering the empire very well and totally not engaging in sordid pool orgies with children and torturing people to death. Maybe all that stuff was fabricated at the time by a hostile senate, or later by an emperor whose relative was executed on Tiberius's orders?

You have to just kind of accept that what is written down is true...ish. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to play this game!

Now with that said, I regret not giving Otho a single point. Him committing suicide to preserve the life of the younger men in the two armies, rather than continuing to fight when he could actually have won (his reinforcements had shown up after the initial skirmish which his forces lost), ought to be worth something. Not many Roman emperors would commit suicide and let some other guy be emperor so they don't have to have a civil war on their conscience. Apparently some of his soldiers were so impressed they committed suicide themselves at his funeral so they could follow their emperor into the afterlife. He must've been a pretty good dude.

 

[Yakman]

Hadrian consolidated and defined the territory of the Roman empire. He recognized that even the Romans had limits and couldn't conquer the entire world. The fact that he built so many walls kind of proves that his interests were in keeping the empire and its citizens safe. The fact that he spent so much time travelling around the empire personally seeing to problems himself showed that he was genuinely concerned about the prosperity and stability of the empire and everything within it.



Been quite a while since I read any books about this stage of the empire, but wasn't citizenship basically worthless by the time Caracalla gave it to everybody? I doubt that's what gave him his bad name to be honest. More likely his massacres of tens of thousands of people for the crime of enjoying a play that mocked him a little. Or having his brother murdered in front of their mother.

It provided a degree of protection under the law. You couldn't vote for anything, but not being entirely at the mercy of capricious aediles is better than nothing.

Also, citizens had to pay a particular tax, so it raised a lot of money.

 

[Arilou]

Yes. However, some of the stories appear to be at least partially genuine. For example, the Senate loathed Caracalla, and the historical tradition is (universally) hostile in amusing ways, but there is epigraphical proof of him taking on preposterous (if not unhinged) titles, like Amazonius and Exsuperatorius, and we have a fragment of his citizenship declaration (Constitutio Antoniniana) preserved from Egyptian papyrus, along with the indirect evidence of the golden age of Roman legal theory in the early third century that emerged primarily to fix the massive legal problems that accumulated from applying Roman law to every free man in the empire. Many of the problems his reign caused, therefore, are attested independently of the senatorial tradition.

I think the issues his reign caused can usually be relatively well established, to some degree his policies, etc. It's the more lurid details that tends to be unreliable. It can also often be hard to separate (in retrospect) "reasonable" (even if failed) policies that were mocked by his contemporaries from genuine lunacies. (IE: trying to call on the legacy of Alexander when preparing to fight the persians might be misguided, but isn't neccessarily all that crazy)

A lot of the later emperors (who may or may not be specifically incompetent) run into the problems that they had to deal with serious structural weaknesses of the roman state: Caracalla had to pay the army more (precedent had shown what happened if you didn't) and that means he had to squeeze the money from *somewhere*, and the people squeezed in turn became angry about it, and so forth.

Thee problems weren't unique to Caracalla, and while he didn't solve them, neither did any of the other emperors.

 

[Lanassa]

It provided a degree of protection under the law. You couldn't vote for anything, but not being entirely at the mercy of capricious aediles is better than nothing.

Also, citizens had to pay a particular tax, so it raised a lot of money.

Well, it applied Roman law to every free male adult in the Empire (minus the dediticii - but who cared about them?), when they had originally been protected by the laws of their polis, or whatever other relevant jurisdiction applied. This made a lot of practices that had been customary in various parts of the Empire illegal, like marrying your brother or sister in Egypt. Roman citizens did enjoy certain privileges that nobody else had enjoyed before (e.g. exemption from certain forms of punishment), but it's worth not overstating how much of a benefit this was to most people.

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The issue with the tax thing is that Dio is the primary source for that explanation and he uses it to paint the whole thing as a cynical money grab by Caracalla. There is no other literary source for the Constitutio. (We do have some text from Ulpian on it from his Digest.) Dio, however, claims that the former class of peregrini (non-Roman citizens) had been exempt from some forms of taxation (taxes paid on inheritance and manumission) and were now subject to tax as a result of the decree. The problem with that is that peregrini were, in fact, also taxed in a way that Roman citizens were not. If anything, the opposite situation would have applied: making all these men Roman citizens would have reduced the government's tax revenues, unless combined with a simultaneous tax increase on Roman citizens, of which we have no attestation.

In our extant fragment of the Constitutio, the Emperor's language implies that his primary appeal is to piety: bringing the gods of Rome new worshipers in exchange for saving him from the evil plot of his brother Geta. Nowhere does he mention taxation (although, of course, if that were his sneaky plan, then he wouldn't). It's possible to read a sort of sense of obligation into it: claiming some sort of implicit ideological favor from all the men he just made citizens, while placing his megalomaniacal stamp on the Empire by giving every peregrinus his last name. Honestly, both of those are justification enough. Dio's explanation, while certainly believable and difficult to dismiss out of hand, is hard to substantiate outside of his own literary work.

 

[sleeperul]

He brought a period of peace for the empire, abondoned territory he felt was too expensive to defend, and generally consolidated the place. He travelled across the empire, founded temples and sponsored public works, and generally made life better for the citizens of the Empire.

First of all temples and public works where just temporary crap that gave people an job they brought nothing in the long run. Also peace its not an good thing for the Roman Empire peace means no loot more soldiers to pay for an longer time and because of the lack of loot you have an hard time paying those soldiers that live longer which creates friction which will lead to rebellion which will get you deposed and the imperial throne given to the highest bidder. But if you warred you will get loot and less soldiers to pay.
Trajan knew how things worked.

 

[Yakman]

First of all temples and public works where just temporary crap that gave people an job they brought nothing in the long run. Also peace its not an good thing for the Roman Empire peace means no loot more soldiers to pay for an longer time and because of the lack of loot you have an hard time paying those soldiers that live longer which creates friction which will lead to rebellion which will get you deposed and the imperial throne given to the highest bidder. But if you warred you will get loot and less soldiers to pay.
Trajan knew how things worked.

Public works are crap? Wha?

 

[sleeperul]

Public works are crap? Wha?

Crap in spite of the fact that it helped make an infrastructure that lasted for thousands of years and helped millions of people its still crap because in the end you made you freaking empire so much more attractive.

 

[Yakman]

Crap in spite of the fact that it helped make an infrastructure that lasted for thousands of years and helped millions of people its still crap because in the end you made you freaking empire so much more attractive.

yeah... who would want to have a nicer place to live in?

???