Curated category
Ancient Roman adoptees
- Tiberius GemellusTiberius Gemellus was born on the 10th of October AD 19, the same day his uncle Germanicus died far away in Syria. He was a grandson of the emperor Tiberius…
- TiberiusTiberius Julius Caesar Augustus was born on the 16th of November 42 BC, and by the time he died on the 16th of March AD 37, he had ruled the Roman Empire for…
- Constantius ChlorusFlavius Valerius Constantius entered the world on the 31st of March, though historians cannot name his birth year. His career and the age of his eldest son…
- AugustusOn the 8th of May 44 BC, a teenager named Gaius Octavius accepted a dead man's will and, with it, the most dangerous inheritance in the Roman world.
- Marcus AureliusMarcus Aurelius was born in Rome on the 26th of April 121, in the grand villa on the Caelian Hill that his mother had inherited along with a fortune that…
- NeroNero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus died on the 9th of June AD 68 with a private secretary's hand helping him drive a blade home.
- Marcus Junius BrutusMarcus Junius Brutus died on the 23rd of October 42 BC, on a hillside near Philippi, by falling on his own sword. He had just lost two battles in quick…
- Lucius VerusLucius Verus became Roman emperor on the 7th of March 161, the day his adoptive father Antoninus Pius died. What makes that moment extraordinary is not just…
- HadrianHadrian was born Publius Aelius Hadrianus on the 24th of January 76, in the town of Italica in southern Spain, far from the city he would one day rule.
- GalbaGalba put on a linen corset on the morning of the 15th of January AD 69, knowing it would offer little protection against so many swords.
- Pliny the YoungerPliny the Younger watched a cloud rise from a mountain across the Bay of Naples and described it as resembling a pine tree, its trunk shooting upward before…
- TrajanTrajan was born Marcus Ulpius Traianus on the 18th of September in AD 53, in a modest Roman colony called Italica, in what is now the Andalusian province of…
- Antoninus PiusAntoninus Pius ruled Rome for twenty-three years, and by the account of the historian J. J. Wilkes, he was likely never within five hundred miles of a legion…
- GermanicusGermanicus Julius Caesar died on the 10th of October AD 19 in Antioch, at the age of thirty-three. He left behind a Roman world in mourning so genuine that…
- Scipio AemilianusScipio Aemilianus stood weeping over the burning city of Carthage in 146 BC. He had just ordered it evacuated, torched, and razed to the ground.
- SejanusSejanus died on the 18th of October, AD 31, strangled by order of the same emperor he had served for seventeen years. His body was thrown down the Gemonian…
- Severus AlexanderSeverus Alexander was born on the 1st of October 208 in Arca Caesarea, Phoenicia, and by the age of thirteen he was ruling the Roman Empire alone.