Special Episode - Ancient Rome's Worst Emperors with LJ Trafford

Podcast Archives - The Partial Historians

In our latest special episode, we welcomed the talented LJ Trafford to the show to discuss her latest book, Ancient Rome’s Worst Emperors (2023).

Special Episode – Ancient Rome’s Worst Emperors

You may very well have encountered some of LJ’s wonderful earlier works, including her historical novel series: The Four Emperors. These books cover a turbulent time in the early imperial period with Nero’s fall from power (and life) in 68 CE and the subsequent chaos that followed in the year 69.

She has also published nonfiction works on ancient Rome including How to Survive in Ancient Rome (2020) and Sex and Sexuality in Ancient Rome (2021). And just in case that didn’t keep her busy, LJ is a contributor to The History Girls blog, writing about all sorts of fascinating subjects involving the ancient world from Pliny the Elder’s concerns about the dangers of sponges to handy tips to avoid assassination as a Roman emperor.

Our conversation allowed us to talk about the qualities that define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors. And yes, Augustus and Tiberius were mentioned, but we kept it civil! LJ then took us through some of the characters who qualified as one of the WORST emperors, including Caligula, Didius Julianus, Silbannacus, and Petronius Maximus.

Image of Caligula, courtesy of Carole Raddato on Flickr.

Things to Look Out For:

• Cat armies
• Shadow emperors
• Tips on shaking up your next meeting
• Drunken late-night shopping (Roman style)

You will definitely want to grab a copy of LJ’s book to hear about all the other terrible emperors of Rome after this episode. You should be able to pick up a copy at your local independent bookstore, as well as the usual corporate giants.

Sound Credits

Our music was composed by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Dr Rad 0:15
Music. Welcome to the partial historians.

Dr G 0:18
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr Rad and

Dr G 0:33
I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:55
Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the partial historians I am Dr G

Dr Rad 1:03
and I am Dr Rad,

Dr G 1:05
and we are thrilled today to be sitting down and chatting with LJ Trafford. Now you may have heard of this author before. LJ Trafford studied ancient history at the University of Reading and is famous for her historical novel series the four emperors. These books cover a turbulent time in the early imperial period with Nero’s fall from power and from life in 68 CE and the subsequent chaos that followed in the year 69 LJ is also a contributor to the history girls blog, writing about all sorts of fascinating subjects involving the ancient world, from Pliny the elders’ concerns about the dangers of sponges to handy tips to avoid assassination as a Roman emperor, a goal to which maybe none of us aspire these days, but you never know, those of you out There, there are hints and tips for how to do it. In addition to this, LJ has published three accessible and immensely readable non fiction works on ancient Rome. How to survive in ancient Rome from 2020 sex and sexuality in ancient Rome, 2021, and most recently, ancient Rome’s worst emperors in 2023 and it is this latest work on those troublesome emperors that we’ll be discussing today. Thank you so much for joining us. LJ,

LJ Trafford 2:32
thank you so I’m delighted to be here. Huzzah. Huzzah,

Dr G 2:35
we’re very excited. This is a great topic, and I think there’s going to be some nice surprises in here for people as well. Oh, that’s good. So before we delve into some of the gruesome details, we’d like to start with your perspective on what makes people in power so fascinating. So some of these stories are told, and they’re retold many times, and yet we continue to return to them. And I’m interested in what makes them compelling. From your perspective,

LJ Trafford 3:05
I think from our perspective, I think our kind of politicians look slightly kind of impotent in comparison to kind of Roman emperors. You know, if you’ve got a parliamentary system, our kind of politicians are kind of curtailed, aren’t they, by kind of law, international laws and regulations, and used to be in Britain, certainly UK, European laws and regulations. And they’re also constrained by, you know, having an opposition party who might block everything they want to do. So you kind of vote for some your party, and they don’t fulfil their potential because they’re forever blocked and they and, you know, I think in most societies, there’s these kind of big, looming issues that nobody seems to want to deal with that just get kicked down the road as a can down the road for somebody else to pick up later. So I think kind of in comparison looking at Roman emperors, where somebody can just walk in and go, Hey, let’s just call September Germanicus, and then it’s done. And everybody does. I think there’s something quite compelling about somebody who can come in and just make a change and just say, I’ve decided today we’re going to do this, and it happens. And I think it kind of plays into that kind of childhood game of, what would I do if I ruled the world, kind of thing, that kind of imagining how you generally imagine that you’d be the benevolent dictator. You know, you never think you’re going to go the full Caligula, do you? But so I think in comparison, it kind of appeals for that. And I think also the stories that Roman historians have collected for us on the Emperors is what makes them so compelling, because they can collect all the worst bits and all the most kind of gruesome bits and all the most kind of sexy bits. So they they’ve created really the compelling story for us. It’s, you know, it’s not, it’s not a tale of kind of laws being passed and kind of dreary business. It’s all you know, who’s sleeping of who, who’s done the most outrageous thing, who’s decided, you know, to call every month after themselves, who’s built a, you know, 60 foot gold statue of themselves. So I think it’s that, I think that’s what compels us, just the the power, the ability of one man to decide so much and for people to to act on that. I think, I think we’d all like a kind of a horn to people around us. Just act on every whim, wherever that may be. I think that. I think that’s what makes them so attractive and makes us, yeah, I think it makes this question, what would we do if we had that power? Would we have a 60 foot gold statue of ourselves created?

Dr G 5:11
Definitely, the

LJ Trafford 5:13
answer is yes, of course. Why wouldn’t you? I know, why wouldn’t you name every month after yourself? Because you know you can, I

Dr Rad 5:22
must admit, I’m really enjoying the idea of you saying to someone like Donald Trump that he is impotent.

LJ Trafford 5:30
Oh, yes, I’d like to see his reaction to

Dr Rad 5:33
that. You feel impotent. Yes, exactly.

Dr G 5:38
I think he has aspirations in the Imperial sense, though, if he could be a Roman Emperor, I think he definitely would try. I think he

LJ Trafford 5:45
talks like one a lot, doesn’t he? He comes in as I’m a lot of his rhetoric on the previous election was, I’m the guy who can change this. It’s the eye. It’s not the we, the Republican Party, can come in and change Americans. I Donald Trump, I alone can clean out the swamp. I alone can do this. So he talks a bit like a Roman emperor, because it’s a it’s about him. It’s not about, you know, the kind of administration and their aims. It’s all about him. So, yeah, I can, I can see there’s a comparison there.

Dr Rad 6:11
Well, I think, I kind of think that’s why we are so intrigued by these sorts of figures, because we, in some ways, they seem so alien and different to us for exactly the reasons that you’ve outlined. But then when you look at some of the political figures of the 20th and 21st century that still loom very large, you can kind of see how they would enjoy that level of absolute power. And I think

LJ Trafford 6:34
there’s a kind of fascination, isn’t there, a bit recently, with kind of Putin and his kind of power, and lots of people in, kind of in America, which, you know, given that American Russians history, kind of admiring Putin, because he kind of does stuff as such. So whereas, opposed to their political system has maybe got a bit kind of paralysed in recent years, so there’s still this fascination of one man with with absolute power, I think. And I think, yeah, I think we look at our own times, and we forever looking back and comparing, aren’t we generally wrongly? It’s

Dr G 7:03
one of those dangers of the attraction of the strong man, isn’t it? It’s sense that it’s aligned with a kind of efficiency of purpose and outcomes which you just can’t get in the bureaucratic grind of day to day government.

LJ Trafford 7:17
Yeah, the danger of the strong man is when they stay too long, isn’t it, and then people forget what it was like before there was the strong man, and then they start to not appreciate the strong man. And then it all goes horribly wrong, the kind of thing. But

Dr Rad 7:28
yes, we’re not advocating dictatorship on those podcasts.

LJ Trafford 7:31
She just doesn’t like that. Not advocating dictation, not advocating, not advocating anything like that. We

Dr Rad 7:37
always have to make that very clear, you know, as Roman historians, because sometimes it sounds like we actually are getting swept up in Roman values.

LJ Trafford 7:46
I do not share any values of ancient Roman I can’t think of it

Dr Rad 7:50
exactly yes. So let’s talk about your book a little bit. You take the reader through the imperial period in the Roman West, and you provide examples from the first century all the way down to the fifth century, which means there’s a huge amount of ground to cover in your book, and it means that you have to be a bit selective about which emperors you focused on, but it is also an opportunity to draw attention to some emperors that are less well known, perhaps to general readership. So what kinds of qualities or defects were you keen to include that maybe helped you decide who you were going to focus on?

LJ Trafford 8:24
Yeah, kind of first of all, I probably naively didn’t realise what a huge task this was when I agreed to write this book. Because generally I get given a book title and a book brief, like, kind of sex and sexuality, and I get like the chapters, and they say, write a chapter on contraception, write a chapter on marriage, write a chapter on this. And I did the brief for this, and I kind of randomly said, Oh, I’m going to write about, you know, worst emperors, you know, over 500 years. And and then when I went to research it, I realised what a huge task is, how much reading there is. And then I thought, well, maybe I could do it by dynasty, and I’ll just pick, like, the worst one from each dynasty. And then I looked at, and there’s loads of dynasties, just like, far too much, you know. And I got a kind of, I got a work count of, like, 85,000 words. And there was no way I could pick an emperor from each dynasty and write about them in depth. And I wanted to go in depth on some and kind of pull them apart. So I had to kind of go back to drawing board and go, Okay, how am I going to choose these worst emperors? And I kind of took a few things into consider. I took Augustus’ Res Gestae, the kind of story of his life, because it’s quite a good blueprint for what a good emperor should be, because it’s all about I’m brilliant. This is what I did. This is what makes me brilliant. So I kind of took that, because he would talk about, I built this temple, I built this. I defeated this enemy. I did this. I brought in these laws. I gave this money to these soldiers. I gave so much to the people. So it gave me kind of blueprint of what a good emperor should be. And I took kind of Suetonius 12 Caesars as well to help a bit, because he he does a biography of the first 12 emperors. Well, the first 11 and Julius Caesar, we don’t count but, but he splits his biographies into they. Deeds and their bad deeds, which again, gave me a bit of a basis to have a look at what a good emperor should be doing and what a bad Emperor did. So I kind of used them vaguely as my kind of back blueprint for picking them. And then really, I chose ones that I thought were quite interesting as well, kind of randomly, but I wanted to show right across those 500 years show kind of how the role of Emperor changes and the kind of people holding it change as well. And I wanted to do, I wanted to look at some more unfamiliar ones, because it’s very easy to go, okay, worst emperors, and we just go, okay, Nero, Commodus, Elagabalus, and the kind of the usual people. And I wanted to, kind of, I wanted to find out some more about some different ways in which you could be a worst emperor that didn’t necessarily involve kind of sexual depravity and kind of spending lots of money and excess. Because, you know, that I thought as a book, it would get a bit samey, if that’s like every chapter, oh yeah, and they bankrupted the Treasury. Next chapter, oh yes, and he bankrupted the Treasury. Next Oh yes. Incest with who, you know, Mother, incest, sister, you know, I thought it’d be a bit samey, so I wanted to pull out some kind of alternative ways where people could be worst. And I found, you know, numerous ones where they, you know, they didn’t have these kind of big personalities, like the kind of colleagues and the Neros of the world, but actually, they got the top job, and they just, they just weren’t very good at it, and they just weren’t up to it, you know. And there’s a series of people who kind of become emperor, and at the first sign, the first kind of, kind of barrier, they first the first problem they face, they just completely fold, which I thought was quite interesting. So it was a whole series of people who kind of got the job and then realised they weren’t good enough, which is that, you know, I think must be a terrible realisation that you’re like, I’m emperor, wow, and everybody’s praising you, and you suddenly realise I’m not good enough. I can’t cope with this. And there’s no kind of like, no resign, and there’s no like, handing in your month’s notice again, sorry, chaps, not the job I thought it was going to be, you know, I’ll let somebody else do it. You know, that’s not how you stop being an emperor. You stop being an emperor because somebody kills you, basically, or you die naturally. So there’s no resigning. So yeah, I was looking for kind of people like that, people other reasons why you might be worse. And I think, yeah, not having the qualities you need to be an emperor is certainly one. Being weak is certainly one, not being the kind of strong one. And, yeah, just being kind of ineffectual, being promoted above your kind of ability level and and I thought that was a more interesting way to pull people out. And it pulled out some emperors that I hadn’t, didn’t really know much about, apart from just their names, people like kind of Valentinian the second and kind of Gordian. It pulled out some more interesting people I wanted to have a look at and explore a bit further in detail. But yes, I mean, it’s a bit it’s a book to for people to debate. And I was thinking that I was going to get a lot of a lot of them shouting at me for including various emperors or not including various emperors. And various ones didn’t get in because I, you know, had 85,000 word counts. So some got cut out. And, yeah, some got included because I wanted to write about them, because I thought they were quite interesting. So people like Domitian, I don’t necessarily think he was terrible emperor, but I think he’s a good illustration of what being Emperor does to you, in a sense, the paranoia and that what you have to do as emperor in the sense of holding on to power, and how the actual kind of things that came with being Emperor for Domitian are the things that kind of undid him. So he, you know, his paranoia gets worse and worse and worse, and he kind of undoes himself. So I thought he was an interesting one to look at as to what kind of being, what being Emperor does to you, does to your mindset, and can lead you down a worse path that you wouldn’t necessarily have followed had you been, I don’t know, a bit of a stronger character or less paranoid, but it deservedly paranoid. You know, he got assassinated. So you could say he was deservedly paranoid. So

Dr Rad 13:48
I was going to say that, you know, the saying is, it’s not really paranoia if they’re actually out to get you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 13:54
I think Domitian even said Himself to me that nobody believed in conspiracies unless they were successful. So he was, you know, he was well aware of it.

Dr Rad 14:03
Listening to you talk about that, it again, gives me some sort of modern vibes with people like Louis XVI and Nicholas II, who kind of knew from the get go that they weren’t up to the job and didn’t turn out too well for either of them, either,

Dr G 14:19
certainly. But yeah, there’s a lot to be said for character. Isn’t there? Because for somebody liked mission, perhaps, like, if he had never gotten into that job, chances are he would have lived a perfectly regular kind of elite Roman life. And yet, being thrust into power sort of brought out all of those characteristics in him that maybe he didn’t have a good chance to manage on his own, and then all of a sudden, here we are, and he’s assassinated. Yeah? I mean, he’s

LJ Trafford 14:45
very, you know, he would have, yeah, lived a good Roman elite life. He was a tremendous administrator, a tremendous guy for the details guy. So you can imagine he’d be the guy you’d want on every committee, because he’d, you know, you’d pull out all the details you hadn’t thought of, like, oh, cool, cool. Thanks to mission. Thanks. Yeah, forgotten about that. Gotten about that. That’s really important. But yeah, I mean, he’s paranoia probably built before then, because, you know, he was involved in the year 69 CE, and can thrust to the forefront there. So he’s paranoid probably started in his teenage years, when his father was declared emperor, and his father is in, you know, Syria so safely out the way of Rome. And Domitian, who’s only about 18 at the time, is in Rome, and he’s the kind of the front of the kind of Flavian dynasty. So everything’s kind of centred on him. So I think he’s kind of paranoia probably started from that moment there watching kind of emperors fall and rise right in front of his eyes. But, but, yeah. But I think being emperor, yeah, didn’t improve upon his kind of personality. Probably brought out the kind of worst in him, and that he’s a good example of, you know what you do to try and hold on to power, and his attempts to hold on to power completely undoing. Because the more extreme he becomes, the more plots there are. And then there’s a successful one, and you only need one to be successful. Yes, the

Dr G 16:02
dangers, yeah. And I think this sets up nicely, thinking about the first emperor that you discuss in the book, which is Caligula, which, I mean, it would be hard to pass him over, I think, because he’s almost like the what would be the word

Dr Rad 16:21
the OG terrible,

Dr G 16:24
the OG terrible, yes, the OG terrible emperor, because we’ve kind of got this blueprint that’s kind of offered by Augustus through the Reyes guest. Then we’ve got the struggle street that is Tiberius, who’s really trying to sort of make it happen. Is maybe not quite sure whether he really wants it, but he still seems pretty competent overall. I think that’s a compliment for you. Dr, rad. And then we get Caligula, and he seems to have some pretty devastating qualities that do make him unfit for rule. And I’m interested in what stands out for you when you’re thinking about caligula’s life and his reign. Yeah, he’s

LJ Trafford 17:04
a, yeah, he’s a kind of poster boy of what you would think of as a worst emperor. He’s a kind of shorthand, you know, even today, for what worst Emperor is. You know, anyone who goes slightly extreme is going, Oh, it’s all going a bit Caligula. He’s become that kind of shorthand. He’s like, you say, he’s the first kind of Emperor who’s really kind of unqualified for the job, in the sense of Augustus. Had, you know, this way, created the role of Emperor, though it’s not really a role, it’s kind of nebulous, a nebulous thing, but he created that, and he’d, you know, he’d fought civil wars, he’d held, you know, government posts, he’d got a big and long kind of background in in kind of administration. So he, you can say he was kind of qualified to do that. And Tiberius coming in his emperor in his 50s, he’s got a long history of, you know, being in the military and and holding public position. So again, he’s a very qualified person. And we have colleague who comes in at 25 and he hasn’t got that kind of background, he hasn’t got that kind of training, and he’s the kind of the last minute heir to who suddenly decided upon so I think he goes in with the kind of disadvantage of not knowing how things work. Probably he goes in with the advantage of a lot of public support, because he’s the son of Germanicus and Agrippina, who were very, very popular with the people, and who his father, Germanicus, had died when he was very young, and Agrippina had been exiled by Tiberius and later, kind of killed. So he goes in with a lot of good feeling. But yeah, I think, I think it stands out with kind of Caligula, is there’s a kind of a pushing of how far he can take things. And maybe that’s because, you know, as we said, he hasn’t. He’s got that kind of unqualified feel about it. He’s pushing what the word Emperor means and what he can do with it. And underlying it always is this kind of sense of hum, a kind of a very dark sense of humour that comes out in some of the things he does, you know, kind of famous joke about, oh, I’m going to make my horse a senator, you know, kind of disparaging the whole senatorial class and and, you know, on the crawler stage, you know, there was equestrian he was thrown to the beasts and was protesting his innocence, so Caligula had him taken out of the arena. Guy probably thinks he’s going to be saved instead, he has his tongue cut out and thrown back in with the beasts. So this is kind of sick, kind of humour and kind of delight in kind of pushing what it means to be emperor and what he can do, you know, to the extent of wanting to put his, um, his statue in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, which does not go down well. And in the extent of, you know, he doesn’t dress like an ordinary mortal. We’re told he dresses in very fine clothing. Um, he’s kind of, kind of crossing the boundaries of what’s acceptable in Roman society, kind of sex wise. And like we’re saying, kind of clothing wise. So you know, sex wise, he’s breaking all the taboos, all the things you shouldn’t do. He allegedly held dinner parties where he would with senators and their wives, where he would take their wives away, have sex with them, and then take them back to their husbands and give. Long kind of die trait on how great or bad they were in bed, and that kind of thing, that kind of pushing the envelope of, you know, sleeping obviously, with freeborn women is not, not acceptable if they’re married. He’s he’s kind of pushing and pushing what he how, how much he can get away with almost, and when somebody’s going to say no. And that kind of spreading of kind of terror and humiliation. You know, famously invited a group of people at the dead of night to the palace Who all think they’re going to be executed, and then he just does a little dance for them and sends them home. So there’s this kind of, there’s a kind of thing about pushing the envelope and kind of torment and humiliation and enjoying that, that kind of runs through kind of Caligula reign that he enjoys exercising this power, and he enjoys the effect it has on people, and he enjoys watching, you know, people being tortured, etc, which we can kind of say all kind of stems from a very, very troubled childhood, to put it mildly, where he’d watched his family being picked off one by one around him by the Praetorian prefecture, Janus. So his mother had been exiled and died horribly, and his brother, two brothers, had been exiled and died horribly. And he was kind of next on the list and was saved and then becomes the kind of heir to the to the guy, Tiberius, who’s bumped off his family and is sent to kind of live with him on Capri, the island of Capri where Tiberius has kind of retired to and is forced to kind of keep up this front of being nice to Tiberius whilst knowing what he’s done to his family. So you can kind of see, with that kind of troubled background that it might make you slightly slightly unhinged, and when given the opportunity to kind of take revenge on those senators who signed those kind of those papers that damned his family, you could kind of see that he would kind of push it as far as he could go. Well,

Dr Rad 21:47
that’s definitely the thing, I think that always is intriguing about Caligula, because when you as you say, look at the actions that are recorded, it seems like no question this is a bad guy, but there is that possibility that he is specifically targeting a group of people who have legitimately caused him a lot of pain and grief in his life, and that that’s where this comes from, and this is him sort of unleashing all of that pent up aggression that may have been building up for years and years because The drama of his family is unfolding throughout his entire childhood.

LJ Trafford 22:23
Yeah, I think it’s true. I think there seems to be a point at which he realises and he comes in as a kind of the darling of the Roman people, and they call him chicken and Sweetie, and, you know, the senses he preys upon him. And there seems to be a point when he realises that they don’t mean it, that this is just words and words being thrown at him. And from that kind of point on, yeah, he starts to kind of target them deliberately, deliberately to humiliate them. And, yeah, I think you’re right. I think it is that kind of pent up rage that you know, when the kind of wool is lifted from these eyes, when there’s a plot and he realises these people don’t love him, they don’t adore him. He Yeah, it’s revenge, and it’s revenge against them and and you can kind of see that kind of unfolding, and he’s and obviously the people writing the history are the kind of senatorial class, so any kind of humiliation or kind of undermining of them is going to rank very personally with their kind of personal pride. I mean, Augustus was the one who walked that kind of tightrope between keeping the Senate on side and happy and feeling like they’re in power whilst not actually having much power anymore. And Caligula kind of can’t do that, and won’t do that. He won’t pretend. He won’t work with them. He won’t pretend that they have the power. He is the one with the power, and he unleashes it on them. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s revenge, isn’t it? Really, it

Dr G 23:41
does seem like that, yeah. I think it creates a sense of empathy as well for him, this idea that he’s operating primarily from a position of pain, yeah, and thinking about that trauma of his childhood, and then how that sort of manifests when he has the opportunity. And I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I think some of the obviously, he did terrible things, but all of a sudden you’re kind of like, okay, this is somebody who’s gone through incredible amounts of hurt and frustration, and now they’re in a situation where they have the opportunity to make a choice about how they navigate that, and no one can stop them.

LJ Trafford 24:19
Yeah, that’s, that’s the kind of frightening thing about illegally. Yeah, no one can stop him. And you know, the person who does stop him is not one of these senators who’s been targeting. It’s not a Brutus character who makes a grandstand, you know, for liberty and all this. It’s um, one of his guards because he made fun of his voice. It’s, you know, it’s a very personal assassination. And this guard had got a very high pitched, slightly girly voice, so Caligula had been giving him ever more kind of embarrassing kind of watch words, you know, something like Venus or something like that, evermore kind of just taking the mickey out of him, and he’s the one that kind of snaps and sets up a plot against him. It’s not actually the kind of Senators with grand noble. Lofty ambitions to rid themselves of a tyrant. They don’t kind of turn against him, because, I guess it’s the fear factor. And, you know, going back to Domitian, you can kind of see that, because we have the writings of Pliny and Tacitus, who served a mission, you know, and both of both of whom did very well under Domitian and got promoted, and, you know, moved up the ranks. But they give us an insight into what it’s like to kind of serve an emperor who’s, you know, who is that kind of, not great, you know, it’s terrifying. It’s terrifying to stand in a room and face them when they lose their temper. And I think for Caligula, it must be even more terrifying, because there’s no limits to what he might do. It seems he could do anything. And he does, you know, his whole kind of military campaigns, where they go, think it’s to Germany, and there’s nobody to fight. So they just get some people to hide in the forest for him to capture so he can have his own triumph, you know, the kind of thing. So the it feels like there’s no, kind of no limits to what he will do. But they still don’t turn because they’re just too, too frightened, I guess. But, but, yeah, I mean, it’s coming It’s coming, it’s coming from his child, it’s coming from pain, and it’s full out revenge and, you know, and it works, yeah?

Dr Rad 26:06
Well, I mean, I suppose comparing him to Augustus and Tiberius, again, they’ve both obviously experienced their own pains and setbacks in their lives, but you don’t get the sense that they were ever shielded from that. They kind of grew up in a very sort of realpolitik kind of world, whereas Caligula, because he was so young when things started going wrong for his family, and then you have that allusion to the papers that he had access to when he became emperor, it’s almost as though he maybe did not know the full extent of complicity potentially, in this senatorial class, and you know, people who were involved in powerful circles against his family, and maybe he was sort of kept a bit in the dark, and it wasn’t until he became emperor that he sort of had the wall lifted from his eyes. And maybe that’s partly where this, this pain and sense of revenge comes from, the fact that he maybe didn’t have the full picture, and then all of a sudden, you know, it was kind of like this light, light bulb going off, and he’s like, oh, okay, so this is how it all went down. And this is who really testified against my mother, and this is what really happened. Yeah, I

LJ Trafford 27:16
think you’re absolutely right, because I think, you know, when you read the sources, you know, the person who gets responsibility for the death of all colleague of his family, oh, it’s also Janus fault. You know, there’s this kind of thing. Sejanus is executed, and then, you know, everybody’s kind of like, oh, yeah, nothing to do with us. It was, yeah, it was Sejanus. He did everything. He did everything. Everything is blamed on him, and he’s dead, conveniently dead, so he can be that kind of scapegoat. But, yeah, the papers show that it you know, Sejanus didn’t act alone. He needed people to sign things. He needed things to get passed. And they, they did, and they, they aided the death of his family. And I think you possibly right that he maybe didn’t know. Maybe he he was shielded from it being so young and be and was probably told, Oh, it was sejana. Sejanus bumped off your family with Tiberius. They’re the villains in this piece, and the wool is lifted from his eyes with these kind of papers, and kind of finally realising that these, these are the people who are involved in it as well. Well, that’s

Dr Rad 28:11
why it’s so interesting, because listeners of this podcast will be aware that I have a slight fondest for Tiberius, and one of the things that I have been struck by is that Caligula actually doesn’t seem to have that much of a grudge against Tiberius, which you think he would if Tiberius was really the man he held to be responsible for the downfall of his of his entire family, ultimately, as the Emperor during that time. You know, there are serious some digs. There are some comments, but he also seems to admire Tiberius. Yeah, there are also some positive things that come out of that. So it’s, it’s kind of a weird relationship that those two must have have, but I certainly never get the sense that he truly hated Tiberius. No,

LJ Trafford 28:55
it doesn’t, yeah, like you say, it doesn’t come out much. There’s not, kind of like a complete damning of Tiberius memory and, you know, kind of ripping up statues as what happens of Emperor’s kind of deaths, you know, he kind of keeps it, keeps it going, yeah, yeah, I would grieve you. It doesn’t seem to be the hatred. It doesn’t, yeah. I’m trying to think, no, what he says about Tiberius is not much that comes out of you,

Dr Rad 29:17
like, as you say, dark jokes that. But he says that kind of stuff about everybody,

Dr G 29:21
and they did spend some time together, so they would have had a personal relationship. So I imagine that would play into it for him as well.

LJ Trafford 29:33
Maybe he was won round by Tiberius’ winning personality though, Tiberius was not well known for his kind of winning kind of charm. And I

Dr G 29:41
was gonna say charisma is not really strong suit

Dr Rad 29:45
in the charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. I think he only has the last two. So let’s move along now to one of my other favourites, because I love movies, love gladiator so we of course. Us have to go all the way down to Commodus, who ruled between 180 to 192 he’s been made very famous by Joaquin Phoenix, okay, and I think we can get sort of Caligula vibes from that portrayal in Gladiator. But not many people would be aware that actually, right after him, there was some pretty dud emperors as well. So let’s get into one that I bet nobody’s heard of before, Didius Julianus. What made him so terrible, Didius

LJ Trafford 30:30
Julianus is a joy. We have to say that gladiator kind of underplays, Commodus, somewhat Commodus is way more extreme than anything they ever showed on screen Gladiator, yeah, but I suppose that’s down to you know, the whole thing Commodus is very big on the beast hunts, and he’s doing decapitate ostriches with kind of curved arrows, which the Romans loved. But today, in our kind of animal loving society, possibly wouldn’t go down so well as a film. So they glossed over a lot of that. But yes, after Commodus is assassinated, there’s a guy who steps in, who’s a guy called Pertinax, who is an older, older guy. As what seems to happen after a lot of assassinations and dodgy times in ancient Rome, you tend to get a kind of older person who kind of steps in as a kind of safe pair of hands. Afternoon goes. You have, you have Galba, who’s in his 70s, who’s held a lot of positions. He’s very well esteemed. He kind of steps in, you know, after Domitian is assassinated, we have Nerva, who’s similarly elder statesman, who steps in. And after Commodus, we have Pertinax, who’s that kind of older statesman who kind of steps in and to everybody’s and he starts to mop up what come with us is left, which is a big old mess. And everybody says he’s doing a really great job, and everybody’s very happy with personax, and the Praetorian Guard assassinate him pretty quickly into his reign.

Dr G 31:51
So he was, he was going all right with everybody else, but not with the people with the swords. Yeah.

LJ Trafford 31:57
And the reasons given are kind of one that they couldn’t because Pertinax was a very good emperor, they couldn’t profiteer in various ways, unspecified ways, that they had been under Commodus. And secondly, that their Praetorian Prefect, Clarus wasn’t a very good keeper of secrets, and this was their kind of justification for murder.They burst into the palace, and you know, Pertinax gave a series of arguments of why they shouldn’t assassinate him. And some of them were, you know, pretty good well. They were all pretty good arguments. And some of the guard were a bit, well, yeah, he’s right, you know, but they killed him anyway,

Dr G 32:31
because maybe we should let him live. I’m quite persuaded

LJ Trafford 32:34
by that argument. But we’ve come all this way. We’ve burst in, we’ve got our swords out. We may as well well, you know, as well. Now we’re here do what we set out to do. It’s the kind of least well thought out assassination in history, probably because they have no idea who’s going to take over. They haven’t planned it beyond we’ll just kill pertinax and then something will happen. I don’t know if they’re hoping the Senate will step in and appoint an emperor, but what happens is that most of Senators suddenly disappear to their country estates, I presume, to get out the way because they don’t want to be picked as emperor. The people who like pertinax, are rioting so much so the Praetorian Guard have to then go hide in their barracks up on the rumen or Hill, with kind of riots going on outside. So it’s a big old mess. And obviously the patron Guard are the Emperor’s private bodyguard and no emperor, no Emperor’s private bodyguard. So they need to find a new emperor. So they hit upon this scheme of, um, selling it. They’ll sell the post of Emperor to the highest bidder. People can come bid, and then they can become emperor. Which is, um, to

Dr G 33:37
our shiny auction guys, is going to be great. Which is the kind

LJ Trafford 33:42
of lowest? I mean, the Pretorian God have been the kind of Kim makers for a long time. They’ve helped people into the role of Emperor, and they’ve helped people out of it, shall we say, with swords. But this is the kind of lowest they sink. They’re kind of like we’re going to sell it to the highest bidder. And this kind of word reaches various people, and it reaches a dinner party, which a certain Didius Julianus is attending. And I’m assuming it’s towards the end of this dinner party when everybody is a bit tipsy, because it’s really the only, only explanation for what follows. And everybody’s Dinner Party says, Hey, DidiusJulianus, why don’t you go for it? Why don’t you go bid to be emperor? Come on, you’d be great in it. And he, you know, he’s got a pretty good background. He’s done all the relevant positions, and looked after Belgium for a while, and he was favoured by Marcus Aurelius. So he comes across on paper as not too bad, but yeah, listening to these kind of people at the dinner party, he thinks, yeah, why not? I’m going to be emperor. So they all chopped off, working their way through these riots that are going on somehow, up to the kind of touring barracks and stands outside, and he says, I want to be emperor. I’ll offer you all this money. And I think, I think the killer line is he offers the Pretorian Guard more gold than they had asked for and more gold than they expected.

Dr Rad 34:52
That sounds like a lot, an awful lot, which

LJ Trafford 34:55
should have sounded fishy, because the Praetorian Guard are notorious for demanding payment. Huge. Kind of bounties that don’t actually exist after Nero kind of died, and the Praetorian guard Nymphidius Sabinus demanded 30,000 sesterces for each one of his guards off Galba. They didn’t have the money for that. You know, there was no money to pay them. So they were renowned for asking for more than, you know, the most physically possible. But the fact that Julianus is promised to them more than they even expected, you know, should ring alarm bells that this is a bit fishy, but they they were just delighted, and they hauled him up into the Praetorian barracks and declared him emperor. You know, job done. Brilliant. Got new emperor. It’s all sorted. Only problem is, didis Juliana’s didn’t have that money. He didn’t have the money to pay them. He didn’t have the money to buy the emperorship. He was pretty much broke. It was all it was all bravado and wine. One has to assume,

Dr G 35:47
I was gonna say, maybe he’s been put up to it like, as the dinner party has progressed, people have been like, you know, pushing each other forward, and in the end, like he’s the one they all get behind. And he feels he has to go with it. I don’t know, but it seems like madness. It

LJ Trafford 36:01
seems like madness. And you have to wonder what he thought when he woke up the next day with a kind of killer hangover. I was like, What did I do? What did I say? And it comes back, it kind of flashbacks. Maybe, you know, kind of, oh yeah, I was at that party. Then what, what, you know, wakes up, maybe in the palace, where am I? And then suddenly realises that, you know, he’s emperor, the

Dr Rad 36:20
equivalent of the 90s, late night shopping via credit card, over the telephone, ordering, ordering sets of Ginsu knives and that sort of thing.

LJ Trafford 36:30
Yeah. What did I do last night? Oh, I brought the role of Emperor. Um, so he’s now emperor, which doesn’t go down well with anybody, because, um, everybody liked person act. So the people are still, when he goes down to, you know, be officially ratified, the people are kind of throwing stones at his head, you know. So from day one, I usually have to work to be unpopular, to be a Roman emperor, you know, Caligula, it took five years for it to completely unravel. You know, Commodus, it took many years to unravel. But from day one, you know, Julius did the honest is being kind of booed by the people, and there’s still riots going on and and then he finds out that in the provinces, several other people have declared themselves emperor as well. So he’s also, it’s another kind of oops moment, equivalent to kind of Otho after Galba, after he assassinated Galba you know, jogging up to the palace, the slaves hand him the correspondence. And, you know, he finds out there’s another emperor in Germany marching his direction, and you know, so Julianus is facing not one, but several. He’s got Septimius, Severus, and he’s got Niger, and I’m going to forget the other guy’s name. There’s no one. There’s three of them, and they’re all declared themselves emperor, and they’re all going to be heading his direction, all right,

Dr G 37:38
so he’s got some competition on his hands, on a number of fronts, it’s going to be a problem, good,

LJ Trafford 37:43
promise. So this is a point at which, you know, this is the point at which you find out what emperors are made of, what a man is made of. You’re facing adversity. Everybody hates you. You could turn this round. You could, you know, he’s got he’s got the background, he’s got the experience. He could turn this round. But he doesn’t. I think Herodian describes him as dumb and witless. He did not know how to resolve the situation. So he sends off um several envoys to me, Severus who, um, promptly changed sides, um. And this keeps happening. He keeps sending people to, you know, kind of negotiate with these other would be emperors. And they decide, Oh, this guy’s going to be a better one than Didius Julianus. And they stay so he keeps losing more of his army each time he tries to make situation better, he decides to have an army of elephants in Rome, and he puts except the elephants aren’t very well trained, and they don’t like their drivers, and they just keep tossing off the drivers that are riding them. So that doesn’t work. Cassius, Dio, who’s in he’s a senator at the time, is and he’s there in Rome, says the Senate were frequently overcome with laughter at kind of Didius Julianus’ attempts to kind of secure the city. So, yeah, everything he tries, just fails miserably. And Septimius Severus comes into Rome, bursts into, you know, the palace, and you know, he’s, he’s off, basically, he doesn’t last very long, but I think he definitely is up there with the worst emperor, just just for being, just for the way he became emperor shows moral fibre,

Dr G 39:15
that whole process of being like, well, if It’s for sale, yeah, I’ll buy.

LJ Trafford 39:22
I can do this.

Dr Rad 39:23
I think Duddius Julianus sounds like a better way of remembering him.

LJ Trafford 39:29
Just, and just yeah, just everything he tries is ridiculous and doesn’t work, and he can’t inspire loyalty in his own troops, in his own envoys, who are going off to negotiate. They’re kind of like, Oh yeah, you know, they’re very easily swayed by the other side. Yeah, you’re right. Probably we’ll stay here. I will stay here. So, yeah, it’s, it’s unintentionally hilarious, although Cassius Dio says it was hilarious, but he’s just not up to the job he failed. You know, he’s facing a difficult situation. Yeah, that would test any man, but he does not at all rise to the occasion. And. And produce anything of any work. It

Dr G 40:01
is a real challenge in this situation as well, because we’re dealing with the late second century, and by this stage, if you do not have, like, pretty strong military support, it’s very hard to sustain a power position. And Didius Julianus goes in and doesn’t have anybody at best, he’s got the Praetorian Guard, and then he has to build from there. And so that’s a bit of an issue, I’d say, because everybody else who’s coming at him from all of those different angles, have supported the troops. They’ve been elevated as Imperator from that sort of idea of the general ship being the basis of imperial power. And he doesn’t, and I, I wonder what he thinks, you say at best,

LJ Trafford 40:46
he’s got the Praetorian girl. This is the same Pretorian gone. He’s, he’s promised money to that he doesn’t have. So they don’t, yeah, exactly. He doesn’t even have them, you know, whereas, you know, someone like Otho was able, you know, against vastly superior odds, was able to inspire he had a ramshackle army of praetorian guards, new recruits and Gladiators, but they loved him, and he had the charisma, and he rose to the occasion, and he kept fighting for as long as he could against vastly overwhelming odds. Whereas Didius Julianus, he doesn’t have that same charisma. Clearly, he can’t get an army together. He hasn’t got any great ideas, and he’s got, even the elephants

are against him. But, I mean, it’s, I mean, that just sounds ridiculous. I didn’t argue with elephants as if that’s gonna stop, you know,

Dr G 41:33
I do like it, though it’s got that very, sort of, like, you know, what would work a real hark back to the days of Carthage and, like, you know, the Punic triumphs and things like this. So I can see where, like, the attraction might be in that idea. But obviously, you need to train those elephants quite well for them to be effective,

LJ Trafford 41:51
yeah, just, you know, they may as well have just said, Oh, it’s just cities, cats on them. Get cat on. It’ll work.

Dr G 42:02
That is an underrated, yeah.

LJ Trafford 42:07
Probably be more fate of elephants, I

Dr G 42:09
think, yeah. So we’ve got this sort of, like chaotic and short rule of Didius Julianus. And in a way, you would think that maybe nothing could top that. But then we get to one of the most intriguing emperors. And there is so little to be known about this guy that it’s it is worth mentioning. And I think you pronounce his name, Silbannacus. Silbannacus rules for a really, really short time. And this is in the third the mid third century CE so and this is a pretty unstable time for the Roman emperorship in general. There’s a whole lot of turnover when it comes to this top job. And I’m interested in what we know about Silbannacus, and how does he earn his place as a worst emperor? Well,

LJ Trafford 43:01
what do we know about Silbannacus? Almost nothing about Silbannacus. What we know about him comes from two coins that have been found, one in the 1930s and one in the 1980s and that is all the evidence we have for him ever being emperor. It doesn’t appear anywhere else now. You I mean, this could debate whether you usurp or was he an emperor, but looking at the coins, they look as if they’ve got similarities to coins that were minted in Rome. So they think he must have had some kind of ratification with Rome to be an emperor. But this is all we know about him. And it’s kind of like, how little do you have to do that nobody remembers you.

Dr G 43:40
Nobody remembers you. You don’t get mentioned in a written source that we know at all

Dr Rad 43:45
bitch about you. Yeah,

LJ Trafford 43:49
this is the kind of the crisis of the third century where we get Emperor after Emperor after emperor, and the kind of average rule of reign is something like 1.3 years or whatever. But they do all get a mention, at least for the way they died, or, you know, at least that they how they became emperor and how they died. Most of them get a mention, but he doesn’t appear anywhere. So I have to think, you know how insignificant a ruler you were, that nobody even cares how you died, even, you know. I mean, did he, yeah, was it a pleasure, you know, did was it a natural death, maybe, and that’s why it’s not worth recording. Or was it, was he assassinated by his own troops? Was he, you know, people care so little that it’s not recorded anywhere. And that’s kind of, I call him the book. I call him the Phantom Emperor because we were, you know, we’ve only known about him since the 20th century. But he makes his place as kind of worst Emperor because he’s so insignificant, so so nothing. He can’t have done anything of any note, not even died in any way of any note. Not even become emperor in any way of any note, because nobody notes it down, not even in passing, or, you know, in any other kind of document. When we may yet dig up a big chest somewhere in France and find, you know, all of all of this entire. Life story for all we know, but at this point in time, we know nothing about him. And I think if you leave that little imprint as emperor, then yeah, what was the point of you being emperor? You know, if a tree falls in wood and nobody hears it, did it ever fall? If you exactly nobody heard of it, were you ever emperor? And yeah, I wanted to include him, just because it just shows how reliant we are in certain periods on archaeological evidence, because there isn’t written evidence, because everything’s very chaotic. And yeah, I just think if nobody even records how you died or how you became emperor, you just you can’t have been any good. You must have been getting

Dr Rad 45:37
older. Yeah, it is kind of hard to believe that you could have someone who was emperor of the Roman world. And no details, nothing,

LJ Trafford 45:47
yeah, nothing, yeah. I find it. I find that staggering. And so I wanted to include him, just to show that, you know, it’s so chaos in the fifth century, you could become emperor. Nobody can

Dr G 45:58
notice. It’s also that sort of thing that makes me sort of start to speculate as well, where I think Did he sort of preemptively get some coins done up, but then died before he actually became emperor, like he was getting prepared for it. He knew it was coming, and then he died in the interim? Did he rule for like, two days or something like this? And something happened all of a sudden there was sort of outside of anybody’s control. But you would think even then, that might generate some sort of story that historians at the time would be interested in. And yet, nothing,

LJ Trafford 46:31
nothing. Yeah, it’s just yeah, it’s just Tumbleweed. Yeah, just just Tumbleweed. And like I said, that is intriguing itself. Why? Why do they not mention him? You know, maybe there is a an interesting mystery at the heart of that, but we will never know what it is unless there is a sudden discovery of a new coin that all kind of document explains everything,

Dr G 46:50
all right, archaeologists, the task has been set.

LJ Trafford 46:54
We need to know.

Dr Rad 46:56
So let’s now turn to the final emperor that makes the cut in your book, and that is Petronius Maximus, who, I think sounds like a delicious cocktail, but he holds power in 455, CE, he rates a description in your book as an evil genius. So we have to know what makes him both of those things, evil and a genius.

LJ Trafford 47:22
He’s a fascinating fellow, Petronius Maximus, because he he was one of those guys who seems to be very, very successful everything he turned his hand at he was brilliant. He’d held every single post possible. He’d had been in consul twice because he was so good at it. He was renowned for his dinner parties and for his literary pursuits. He was a man right at the top of his career, a man who’d done everything except being emperor and this. And the problem is, there already is an emperor at this time, a guy called Valentinian in the third who, um, he’s only in his 30s, I think, at this point. So he’s not likely to drop dead anytime soon. And there, and there are other people who are maybe a little bit more well respected than Petronius Maximus, but only just. There’s a general called Flavius Aetius, who’s very famous general who’s defeated Attila the Hun, no less, and so is held in very high esteem by Valentin the third. And is kind of intermarriage between those families. But for some reason, Petronius Maximus decides he wants to become emperor. And there’s kind of two, there’s kind of two stories behind this. One is that it’s revenge, because Valentine the third slept with his wife, or something like that. It’s all very vague and confusing. And the other is that he, he was just, he just wanted the crown. It was the one thing he hadn’t done. And I kind of, I kind of get it there. I get this because, yeah, I think, you know, as a writer, when you start writing, you kind of think, Oh, if I can just get published, that’s all I want. I just want to get my book published. And then that, you know, I’ll feel fulfilled then. And then it’s like, I just want one person to like my book, and then I’ll feel fulfilled. And then, you know, and then it goes on to, well, I want merchandise and a theme park based on my books, you know, an HBO 20 part TV series. And I want you kind of your ambitions grow with every small step you take, your ambitions grow. So I do kind of get why he thought he wanted to be emperor. But he goes about this in a very clever way. So the first thing he does is he gets um Flavius Aetius, a very famous general out of the way so he can step further closer to the throne. And he does this, and he’s not involved, and he doesn’t do the actual getting rid of Flavius Aetius. He somehow gets Valentinian, the third the Emperor, to kill Flavius Aetius. And it happens very suddenly. Aetiust is in a meeting, and it’s just an ordinary meeting about budgets and budgetary concerns and the finances and probably troop deployment, and just a general normal meeting, when suddenly the Emperor gets out his sword and goes running full pelte at Aetius and just murders him there and then in the middle of a meeting.

Dr Rad 49:54
That’s so Roman. That’s so Roman

LJ Trafford 49:57
with the help of his kind of standby eunuch as well, and they just hack him to death, you know, in the middle of a meeting. Oh,

Dr G 50:03
which is guys,

LJ Trafford 50:05
I mean, you know, I mean, we all know these meetings are boring about budgets and that, but made it a bit more exciting, it does

Dr Rad 50:12
give a whole meaning to the idea of cutting the budget.

LJ Trafford 50:18
So the prelude to this is Petronius Maximus, has spent a long time talking to Valentinian the third and kind of building up Aetius as a traitor, of somebody who was looking to overthrow him, who was a danger to him. And because Aetius was very popular, because he’s a very successful general. And so Valentinian the third, you know, is maybe quite right to be a bit worried about this. And it’s built up, and it’s built up, and his paranoia built up to this bit where he murders atheists, and so that gets him a bit closer to the throne. And then the next stage is getting rid of the Emperor himself. And this is made easier by Valentinian the third having killed Aetius because Aetius was very popular. So there was people there that he could hire or persuade to kill the Emperor because they wanted revenge. So it was a couple of guys who’d serve Aetius, who persuades to murder Valentinian the third, which they do, take him out, I think it’s a hunting trip, and they stab him to death, and that’s the end of him. So again, Petronius Maximus is not involved in this. He hasn’t got his hands dirty at all. So Valentinian the third is now dead, but it doesn’t naturally go to Petronius Maximus. He still has to bribe his way into power. So he still has to bribe a load of people, and then he’s made emperor. So he’s basically been made Emperor by offering two people and not getting his hands dirty at all. He’s got other people to do it for him, which is where, you know, like, kind of super, like a kind of Bond villain, you know, kind of sitting there with his minions doing the work for him. He’s managed to do, he’s managed to assassinate someone without getting his hands dirty and without being involved, and now he’s emperor. And you think that’s a very clever way of doing it, because he’s nobody’s blaming him for the death of both of those people. He’s got away with it, and he’s emperor, and then this rule just completely falls apart, like just overnight, so quickly and so disappointingly. Because you think, if he’s that clever, that he’s managed to get himself to this position by getting other people to his dirty work for him, you think, Oh, he’s going to be great emperor. He’s going to have lots of ideas. But he’s in a moment when he gets there, he’s not actually up to the job, and, oh no, he makes a fundamental error. And what he does is he marries um Valentinian the third’s wife, widow, widow, which now is widow, which she’s not happy about and also, also not happy about. This is the king of the vandals, um, whose name I’m probably going to butcher, Geiseric, because they’ve been, they’ve been, um, all kinds of battles between the vandals and the Romans. And they negotiated, Aetius negotiated peace. And Geiseric’s son was going to marry Valentinian the third’s daughter. So the murder of Valentinian the third is a kind of family matter to him now, so and an excuse, presumably, as well. Valentinian the third’s widow writes to Geiseric to ask for help, because she doesn’t want to be married to Petronius Maximus. And Geiseric sees an opportunity, and he launches the vandals. And the Vandals come and they sack Rome. This is one of the famous sackings of Rome. And Petronius Maximus are hearing this news the Vandals are heading towards responds even worse, and did his duty, honest. He doesn’t even try to muster a defence. He just legs it. He just hits on his horse and he legs it. But he’s spotted by people and some Imperial freedmen who are so disgusted at him doing a runner that they stone him to death there and then. So it’s, it’s an intriguing story, because it starts off so well, and you think he’s going to be a brilliant emperor, because, I mean, he’s very well qualified to be emperor. He’s got wonderful background. Everyone agrees he’s very clever, he’s very talented, he’s brilliant. And where he gets there, he’s brilliant. But first sign of trouble, he just folds. He just completely folds, and in the kind of sources, one of the things to say that he just didn’t realise what a step it was from being a senator to being emperor, and it’s compared to a story of a guy sitting at a beautiful banquet of all the best food you can imagine in your life, the best movie ever going to eat, but above your head is swinging an axe that could fall on your head at any minute. And that’s what being Emperor is like. And he didn’t know that. He didn’t realise, I think, that he would be the target that the minute he set took that step up from being an ordinary politician to being the head everything is your fault. You’re the full guy. You’re the guy that everybody’s heading for. And I think that that completely undid him. I mean, you think he would realise that if he’s been around kind of Imperial politics that long, but

Dr G 54:33
you would assume so, but, and he’s obviously got a lot of talent behind the scenes, so very much, one of those sort of people that is able to pull the strings of other people, so a great sort of, like, second in command, if you like, but maybe that step out into the sort of top gig itself. You can’t be in the shadows anymore. It’s much more difficult to be somebody who’s pulling the strings you are now the one whose strings are being pulled. Yeah,

LJ Trafford 54:58
you it was a. He was exposed. Essentially, he was exposed, and all eyes are on him. And, yeah, like you say, he works best in the shadow. He’s a manipulator. He’s, you know, he’s somebody who can pull the strings of other people, and work very has done very well there. But yeah, being exposed and then realising that everything is heading for him, personally, just him, not anybody else. It’s that hatchet, yeah, and that’s what being Emperor’s like that, you know, again, going back to paranoia of Caligula and Domitian, that hatchet are constantly above your head all the time. It can fall. And, yeah, he just met, I guess you got to say kind of mentally. He didn’t have the mental strength to cope with that.

Dr Rad 55:36
I can understand me, just because I think Game of Thrones has shown us this very well. There are some people that are suited to be the front man, and there are other people that are very good at being the helpers of the front man.

LJ Trafford 55:50
Yeah. And I think, yeah, I don’t think he realised, till he took that step, that fatal step, that he was an emperor material. And he didn’t realise what it meant to be emperor, it, yeah, until he took that step. And then, I guess he just panicked, panicked and, yeah, didn’t even try to try to rule in any sense. He just legged it

Dr G 56:12
was panicked, yeah, panicked and ran away. He panicked and

LJ Trafford 56:16
ran away. Yeah, which is, you know, which is even worse than Didius Julianus. At least, did his Julianus tried. He tried badly with elephants, etc, but at least he made an effort. He didn’t run away from the messy, mess he’d made, possibly, because he’s surrounded by Praetorian Guard at all times, he weren’t going to let him go without that gold. I was

Dr G 56:34
going to say, yeah, you always buddy. You got to stick around.

LJ Trafford 56:37
But yeah, he just, he just likes it. Just likes it. And it’s, yeah, I think it’s such, I think it’s such a surprising story of the kind of build up, the two assassinations that he engineers, and then yeah,

Dr G 56:49
for what they’re definitely expecting him to flourish, you know, yeah,

LJ Trafford 56:53
yeah, to have some really top ideas. But yeah, he just, he just folds. And I think that’s, I think that’s really interesting. And I think yeah, and that’s why I wanted to include him as a kind of worst emperor, because it’s that kind of like realisation of what being an emperor is, and realising that you don’t want a part, that you don’t want, that you thought you did, but it’s Be careful what you wish for. Is the message of Petronius Maximus. He got what he wished for and then immediately regretted it. Yeah,

Dr G 57:20
fair enough. I mean, I feel like I would be the same, to be honest, I would probably also run away. I’d be out of there. I’d be like, this was I’ve made a mistake, guys. So thinking about how all of these different characters that have come through the Roman emperorship lead us to gain some insight into the nature of being human. There’s certain strengths, there’s certain frailties that can be read and understood through those who hold power. And I’m interested in the lessons that you’ve taken away from studying these people, lessons,

LJ Trafford 57:59
I think in my conclusion, I think, in my book, I say I don’t have much of a conclusion. I think, I think what changes is what kind of person becomes Emperor over time. So you need a different skill set depending on what period of history you’re in. You know, we talk about Caligula, having them having to make up battles for him to fight, because there aren’t any, because it’s relatively, relatively kind of calm during that period. You know, you get onto the era of Petronius, Maximus and Valentinian the second it’s constant fighting third century crisis. Yeah. And like the kind of third century crisis, the people who come become emperor, people who have armies and who can inspire armies. And so that is a very different kind of skill set to what your Augustus and your Tiberius needed, which were kind of good administration, and kind of keeping the Senate, keeping the Senate on side, that becomes less and less important as kind of the the armies and the soldiers become more and more important. But yeah, I think what I learned from it, I think, yeah, I think there’s a lot of ways in which you can be worst. I think there is a kind of the unqualified way of you know people who, you know, Valentinian the second becomes Emperor when he’s about four, or something, you know, he’s clearly not qualified for the post. So there’s people who come in with no qualifications and no kind of background in what, what the job is, I would think, feature. Then there’s a people like Petronius Maximus, and then people like Gordian, the first to get the top job, and then at the first sign of trouble, just fold, who aren’t, kind of mentally prepared for it, I think, as well. Then you get the people that kind of the flaws in their personality, like kind of Caligula, that kind of fatal flaw of his awful childhood, that’s kind of influences how he behaves as emperor, and kind of do mission simile, having that, that kind of teenage years in Rome in a very tumultuous period, very frightening period, and his increasing paranoia influences how he behaves emperor. And then there’s the ones you know that on paper look like they’re going to be great emperors, but then just just aren’t. So people like Galba, who looks he’s got all the right qualifications to be emperor, but. All falls apart quickly. So there’s, there’s all manner of ways in which you can be a worst emperor. I’m not sure there’s one way, but, yeah, I think it, it’s about personality, I think, at the end, and that is set up by kind of Augustus, who has the charisma and the strength of personality to build this thing called emperor and to hold it together. And then down to Tiberius. He’s got the skill set, you know, even if he’s not got the charisma, he’s got the administrative ability to kind of, and the fear factor of keeping people in line. But then when later on, you get people who just are not the right personality for the times. So I think, yeah, you need a different personality for a different each of the eras, kind of, in ancient Rome, you need to be the strong man, the hard man, the general in the kind of third century you need to be the acute, charismatic politician in the first century, it kind of changes as Rome changes, which is a bit a very waffling answer to, I don’t really know.

Dr G 1:00:55
I think, I think it’s good, because it gives us a sense that it is about the context, like everything is affected by that first and foremost, and then it is what you’re bringing to the table as an individual. And it’s like, if there is a good marriage between what that context requires and the strengths of your character and your background, you might be able to make it work, but it’s a risky thing every single time, every Emperor is always in that delicate balancing act across the whole course of their rule to make it work, because there’s so many things that they’re trying to hold together, and so many people have to fall in line. So it’s,

Dr Rad 1:01:36
it’s a yes, yeah.

LJ Trafford 1:01:39
I think I also I kind of learned, is that you can, I think the line between being a worst Emperor best Emperor is really quite thin. You can spin a lot of people either way, and the historians certainly do. And I think you could probably make a case for any emperor as the worst emperor. If you look at it, you could take Augustus and say, Well, you know, he dismantles the kind of Republic. Let’s enter the report. Republic, you know, if his morality, legislation, you know, kind of bites him in the bum with his own daughter, and he’s ruthless, he’s, you know, he’s not very nice. Morally, he’s deflowering virgins in his 70s. That’s not very, you know, Roman morality, is it? Um, you could take anyone like you take Trajan, you know, oh, he drank too much. You’re like boy boys, you know, you can take anybody and you can spin it and make them a worse temper. And I think that’s what’s interesting as well. I mean, the way in which you become a Western Emperor is basically but having nobody to write up your story well. So you need that successor, that person who’s going to write your story up well and kind of gloss over the lesser aspects of your personality and beef up the bigger ones. But I think, yeah, I think it’s a fine line between the good and the bad. I like

Dr Rad 1:02:46
the idea that the historians are the ones with the real power here. Yeah,

LJ Trafford 1:02:53
they can spin the story. Yeah, they’re spinning the stories and deciding who’s best and worst. So we shouldn’t really believe them over

Dr Rad 1:03:01
We’re all liars, as our name suggests, the partial historians. So on that note, where can people find your book?

LJ Trafford 1:03:14
Usual book outlets, Amazon, etc, online. Just Yes, ancient Rome’s worst emperors, available. And

Dr Rad 1:03:20
tell us. Do you have any exciting secret, upcoming projects? Maybe the eldre Trafford theme park coming up.

LJ Trafford 1:03:30
If only I want, yeah, I want merchandise is what I want. I think I’m coming actually. I’m stepping out of Hmong for the next book. Briefly, I’m doing sex and sexuality in ancient Greece. Oh, that would be exciting, which you’ll pair nicely with the one I did in ancient Rome, which is interesting, very interesting. And it’s very different. And there’s some good differences there. So good differences. And, yeah, I kind of think the Greeks get away with too much. I think

Dr G 1:03:59
because you’ll rein them in, I’m sure, with your whole democracy

LJ Trafford 1:04:02
and politics and art being the cradle of civilization, I think we give them, I think we rose tint them, and then we look at Romans, and we go, oh, geez, emperors, soldiers, gladiators. And yeah, I think it’s time to it’s time for the ancient Greeks to be to be exposed. I was gonna

Dr G 1:04:19
say, pull away the veil and reveal Ancient Greece. Well, that sounds exciting. I’m looking forward to that one coming out so we can delve in. Well, thank you so much, LJ, for joining us and taking us on a potted tour of the worst emperors. This is by no means all the Emperors that mentioned in your book, and so we definitely encourage people to seek out your excellent work and to enjoy some of these fascinating tales.

LJ Trafford 1:04:50
Thank you for having me. It’s been a ball.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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