Curated playlist
Sons of Roman emperors
- Constantine II (emperor)In June 337, Constantine II had not yet been named emperor, but he was already acting like one. He issued an order returning the exiled bishop Athanasius to Alexandria, a city under the jurisdiction of his brother Constantius II. To…
- 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…
- 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,…
- CaracallaCaracalla was born Lucius Septimius Bassianus on the 4th of April 188 in Lugdunum, Gaul, the city now called Lyon, France. He would die on the 8th of April 217, stabbed by a soldier while stopping to urinate on a road in the eastern…
- GallienusGallienus ruled Rome for fifteen years, the longest reign in half a century, and spent nearly every one of those years fighting. He fought Germanic tribes on the Rhine, Persian-backed usurpers in the East, breakaway generals in Gaul, and a…
- DomitianDomitian was assassinated on the 18th of September 96, stabbed seven times in a carefully staged attack by members of his own household. His chamberlain had recruited a steward named Stephanus, who spent several days feigning an arm injury…
- Gordian IIGordian II held the Roman imperial throne for about 22 days in the spring of 238 AD. That figure alone sets him apart from every other emperor in Roman history: no recorded reign was shorter. Yet within those three weeks, he fought a…
- ArcadiusArcadius was born around 377 in Hispania, and by the time he was five years old, his father had named him co-ruler of the eastern Roman Empire. On the 19th of January 383, the emperor Theodosius I declared his eldest son an Augustus. It…
- TitusTitus Flavius Vespasianus was born on the 30th of December 39 AD, in the same world that would later watch him tear down one of its most sacred buildings. He ruled Rome for just over two years. In that time, a volcano buried two cities, a…
- CommodusCommodus was born on the 31st of August 161 into perhaps the most gilded circumstance a Roman child could occupy: his father was the reigning emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the empire at that moment was still basking in what later…
- BritannicusBritannicus was born on the 12th of February AD 41, and his father, Emperor Claudius, marked the occasion by minting coins. The obverse bore the legend Spes Augusta, the hope of the imperial house. Claudius had been emperor for less than a…
- 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 ordinary citizens began the formal mourning rituals before the Senate had even…
- HonoriusHonorius was emperor of the Western Roman Empire for thirty years, from 393 to 423, and he presided over one of the most catastrophic stretches in Roman history. He came to the throne at ten years old, inheriting a crumbling western half…
- MaxentiusRome itself recognized Maxentius as emperor. Every other emperor in the empire refused to. He ruled from 306 to 312, holding the ancient capital while the rest of the empire called him a usurper. The man who finally defeated him spent…