How Many Roman Emperors Were Assassinated?

Roman history can often be seen as one long rollercoaster of murder, sex, murder, eating, sex, murder and then more murder. And with good reason, too. Some of the most famous parts of Roman history, like most of the first century AD, seem to consist of little more than a violent rampage across Europe. Almost everything about Roman history in this period, from Jesus to Nero to Vesuivius, seems to consist almost entirely of the violent and spectacular deaths of huge amounts of people.

There's a reason for this that goes beyond the obvious seam of violence that ran through the Roman psyche, but we shouldn't ignore that very obvious central part of Roman life. The arena played a key role in society, as did the violence portrayed there. The games seem to have begun as part of ancient funeral rites, and whilst it's easy to simply dismiss them as glorying in death, the idea of death and death by violence was held with semi-sacred reverence. To most people, modern-day bullfights are nothing but exhibitions of bloodlust and gore - with some justification - but to people who take part in them and enjoy them, they are displays that sit closer to acts of reverence for death - funerals or wakes, say - than sporting events in which animals are needlessly slaughtered. Speaking as someone who, some 30 years ago now, accidentally found themselves taking part in a bullfight, I get both sides of the argument, although I maintain they could still do this without sticking things in animals. If you can begin to get your head around this idea, you can begin to get a better understanding of how Romans saw the games.

The other reason that Roman history seems chock full of gore is that the history itself is really just a snapshot of the lives of the elite. You could just rename the whole of Roman history as 'What the Emperors Did' as most of it was written by people like Tacitus, who was, of course, a senator.

Senators didn't write about the lives of slaves, bakers and cobblers; they wrote about the world in which they moved, and they also had a lot of time on their hands to do so, and because the history is mostly about the emperors, then it follows that this history is also full of an excessive amount of violent death. Because there was no constitutional need for an emperor in the first place, and they only ever held power by mutual agreement, even if that mutual agreement came with the threat of violence, it followed that, in effect, anyone could be emperor.

There were no criteria for who could be emperor or, for that matter, who could be their heir. The man most capable of stepping into the emperor's shoes at a given point in time was always the 'best' candidate, and because there were no rules, there were also no rules about how you got rid of an emperor you didn't like. Vitellius tried to abdicate, but his men wouldn't let him. Nero pondered running off to live in retirement in Egypt. But otherwise, you had to wait until they died, or you had to accelerate that death.

Which brings us to the point of today's question - How many emperors were assassinated?

The first thing to consider is how many emperors there were in the first place. The 4th century is rammed full of emperors, some of whom barely qualify, for example. A while ago, I compiled a list of emperors to illustrate their average ages, so I'll use the same criteria for this exercise, too.

We'll use the cut-off date of AD 235, following the death of Severus Alexander, which plummets the Empire into one of those periods of absolute chaos that it seemed to be very good at, so we'll take Augustus as our starting point and Alexander as the end. This has the advantage of giving us a list of emperors whose legitimacy is normally unquestioned so we can dismiss rag-tag bunches of 'tyrants' who sometimes appear in the record.

There's also the question of who we consider to have been 'murdered'. Question marks surround the death of several emperors. Traditionally, Augustus died in AD 14 of old age, but Cassius Dio alleges that his death was brought on by his wife Livia via some poisoned figs (Roman History 56.30). It's possible that Augustus knew about this and ate them readily. He certainly seemed to be ready to accept death at that stage of his life, so we'll go with the traditional view of him dying of old age. We'll go with the standard view of him dying of natural causes. Tacitus tells us that Tiberius died, and when everyone started congratulating Caligula on his new job, he suddenly came back to life again, demanding something to eat, at which point everyone flew into a panic, and the commander of the praetorian guard had him smothered (Annals, 6.50). Nero tried to kill himself several times but couldn't go through with it, and so his 'suicide' was aided by one of his freedmen. One could argue that he was murdered, but traditionally, he is seen as having taken his own life.

The list looks something like this:

Augustus - Natural causes

Tiberius - Smothered

Caligula - Stabbed

Claudius - Poisoned

Nero - Suicide

Galba - Murdered

Otho - Suicide

Vitellius - Ended up in the Tiber

Vespasian - Natural causes

Titus - Natural causes

Domitian - Murdered

Nerva - Natural causes

Trajan - Natural causes

Hadrian - Natural causes

Antoninus Pius - Natural causes

Marcus Aurelius - Natural causes

Lucius Verus - Natural causes

Commodus - Strangled in the bath

Pertinax - Murdered

Didius Julianus - Executed

Septimius Severus - Natural causes

Caracalla - Stabbed whilst taking a piss

Geta - Murdered in his mother's arms

Macrinus - Executed

Diadumeniuan - Executed

Elagabalus - Also murdered in their mother's arms, along with their mother

Severus Alexander - Assassinated.

So that's twenty-seven emperors (and we're counting poor little Diadumenian, who was only nine, the little shit). Of those, 12 either died of natural causes or by their own hand, leaving 15 who were helped on their way. That means, of our list, 55.56% of them were 'assassinated'. By comparison, only 8.7% of US presidents have, so far, met the same fate.

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