Best Historical Novels About Didius Julianus

Didius Julianus

133–193

Didius Julianus was a wealthy Roman senator and provincial administrator who became emperor during the political crisis of AD 193. He had held a conventional sequence of elite offices and military commands, including provincial governorships, before retiring from active public life. After the Praetorian Guard murdered Emperor Pertinax, the soldiers effectively offered imperial power to competing bidders. Julianus secured their support with promises of a large donative and was then compelled to seek senatorial recognition.

His accession was immediately discredited in Rome and challenged by powerful provincial armies. Septimius Severus marched from the Danube, while Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus also emerged as rival claimants. As Severus approached the capital, Julianus lost the support of the Guard and Senate and was condemned to death. He was killed in the imperial palace on 1 June 193 after a reign of only about nine weeks, becoming a striking example of the instability of the Year of the Five Emperors.

Anthony Riches’ Storm of War uses Didius Julianus’s purchase of the imperial throne as one of the defining signs that Roman government has collapsed into military competition. His accession follows the murder of Pertinax, but instead of securing authority it prompts provincial commanders such as Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger to advance their own claims. Julianus therefore functions less as a stable emperor than as the brief, discredited ruler whose reign helps ignite the civil war at the centre of the novel.

Historical novels and book series featuring Didius Julianus (1 series)

Empire in Order

by Anthony Riches 16 books 4.5(20,598)

The Empire series follows Marcus Valerius Aquila, a Roman aristocrat forced into hiding after his family is destroyed under Commodus. Serving under an assumed name with the Tungrian auxiliaries, he moves from Hadrian’s Wall and the Rhine to Rome, Egypt and the eastern civil wars that follow the…