Curated playlist
Illyrian emperors
- HostilianHostilian ruled Rome for one of the shortest reigns in the empire's long history, a boy emperor caught between a catastrophic military defeat and a disputed death. His full name, recorded on coins and inscriptions, was Gaius Valens…
- LiciniusIn September of 324, at a place called Chrysopolis near Chalcedon, Licinius surrendered to Constantine I. It was the end of a sixteen-year reign as Roman emperor. He had spent those years as both colleague and rival to Constantine.…
- Constantius Chlorus"Constantinian propaganda bedevils assessment of Constantius, yet he appears to have been an able general and a generous ruler." That verdict comes from the Oxford Classical Dictionary. It frames the central difficulty with Constantius…
- Constantine the GreatConstantine the Great was born on the 27th of February 272 in Naissus, a provincial city in what is now Serbia, to a Roman army officer and a Greek woman of low birth. He died on the 22nd of May 337 as the sole ruler of the Roman Empire,…
- Claudius GothicusMarcus Aurelius Claudius, remembered today as Claudius Gothicus, once knocked out a horse's teeth with a single punch, or so an ancient legend claims. That brute strength carried him from the ranks of the Roman army to the imperial throne…
- DiocletianDiocletian retired from the most powerful office in the world and went home to grow cabbages. When rivals begged him to return to the throne in 308, he wrote back: "If you could see the cabbages I have planted here with my own hands, you…
- Justinian IJustinian I was born in 482 in Tauresium, in Dardania, near the city of Naissus, into a peasant family of either Thraco-Roman or Illyro-Roman origin. He may have been the last Roman emperor to speak Latin as his native tongue. From those…
- GaleriusIn the streets of Antioch, Galerius walked a mile ahead of Emperor Diocletian's imperial cart. He wore the full purple robes of a Roman emperor. This was not ceremony. It was punishment, delivered before watching crowds after his forces…
- MaximianMaximian died by hanging in July 310, on the orders of his own son-in-law, the emperor Constantine. Within seven years, that same man had declared him a god. Born around 250 near Sirmium, in what is now Serbia, Maximian grew up in a family…
- AurelianAurelian earned a title that no Roman emperor had ever held before: Restitutor Orbis, Restorer of the World. He was born around 214, the son of a tenant farmer in the borderlands of Moesia Superior, and he died in 275 with an empire…
- ValensValens, Roman emperor from 364 to 378, died on the 9th of August 378 in a way that astonished the ancient world: not from assassination, not from illness, but from a military catastrophe so complete that two-thirds of his eastern army lay…