Ancient Rome’s Worst Emperors

Ancient Rome’s Worst Emperors examines rulers conventionally remembered as cruel, incompetent, weak or catastrophically unlucky from the creation of the principate to the collapse of western imperial rule. Rather than compiling scandal alone, L. J. Trafford asks what the emperor’s job required, how success can be measured and whether a ruler’s decisions left the state more secure or more vulnerable. Augustus provides the benchmark against which later performances are assessed.

The selected cases include notorious figures such as Caligula, Commodus and Elagabalus alongside less predictable choices including Galba, Vitellius, Nerva, Gordian I and Valentinian II. Ancient histories, senatorial hostility and posthumous propaganda are tested rather than accepted at face value. The result distinguishes sexual or personal reputation from political competence and shows how circumstance, succession, military authority and hostile sources combined to create the enduring category of the “bad emperor.”