Curated category
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…
- LiciniusValerius Licinianus Licinius emerged from a Dacian peasant family in Moesia Superior around the year 265. His early life remained obscure until he joined his…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- GaleriusGalerius Valerius Maximianus arrived in the world between 258 and 260 within the Danube provinces. Ancient texts place his birth either near Serdica or at a…
- MaximianMaximian was born around the year 250 near Sirmium in the province of Pannonia. His family owned a shop, and he grew up along the war-torn Danube frontier.
- 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…
- 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…