I would definitely put Aurelian at the top. As far as I remember, he is the only emperor who actually made the coin worth MORE than less by adding more silver into it (he had to take it back because the wars brought the Empire to the brink of collapse, but still - the gesture is appreciated). He hold courts in the military camp and brought the a Empire through war and plague without a huge civil war or major territory losses. I think for his achievements, he deserves to be higher.
Aurelian did some currency reforms, but he wasn't the only one who did so. "Right guy, wrong time" was meant more of a "He was great, but he was born in the wrong era"
Imagine an Aurelian after Severus Alexander, and not Maximinus Thrax! Alas, he came in to an Empire on the brink of collapse, expended his energy in reuniting the Empire, and then had the chaos and paranoia of the Crisis of the Third Century lead to his assassination.
But yes, we stan Aurelian in this house, Restitutor Orbis!
Where’s my boy Gallienus? I’d place him in the competent tier at the very least. Poor fucker couldn’t catch a single break and yet never gave up until his death!
I excluded a few (or rather, quite a few) Emperors for lack of strong opinions. I have mixed feelings on Gallienus, but I also recognize that he was in the hardest of fucking hard places, and I can't really fault him for being thrust into the literal middle of the Crisis of the Third Century.
Is Julian the Apostate on here? I have a soft spot for him, though he definitely wouldn't go in the top tiers. Also, did Philip the Arab make it on your list? My memory would place him as above average, though it's been awhile and I could be misremembering what all he did
Ah, I love Julian! Him and Phillip the Arab were both put in the "Right Emperor, Wrong Time" category. Julian for being an absolute throwback to the Principate of the Early Empire, who was out of place in the Christian Dominate of the Late Empire; and Phillip for being a man of humility and moderation in a time of chaos and upheaval.
Ah, perfect. I would agree with those rankings. I always wonder what the world would look like if Julian had ruled longer. Would he have been able to return Rome to a pre-Christian era? Or would all of his changes be undone anyway after his death regardless of how long he could stay in power.
And apologies for missing them, the image was hard to read on my phone.
No worries! As someone else pointed out, the names are a bit blurry on a lot of them.
I think that he wouldn't have been able to permanently reverse the Christianization of the Empire, but if he ruled longer, we'd probably have more surviving pagan texts and artifacts, and that would be pretty cool.
Yeah, sorry. Unfortunately, the only others on TierMaker were pictures of busts and coins without ANY names, which I thought would be harder for most people to parse.
Top to bottom:
Best Emperor: Claudius, Trajan, Antoninus Pius
Competent Emperor: Augustus, Tiberius, Vespasian, Nerva, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius
Right Emperor, Wrong Time: TItus, Pertinax, Phillip the Arab, Decius, Aurelian, Julian the Apostate, Majorian
Mediocre Or Mixed: Galba, Otho, Lucius Verus, Septimius Severus, Alexander Severus
Claudius, a dweeb disrespected by his peers, and unironically one of the men most responsible for the Roman Empire as we know it today. It was his influence which opened the positions of power to provincials and formalized the auxiliaries as a means of assimilating new Roman citizens. He genuinely regarded himself as part of the Senate, and not a god or pseudo-king. He had a famously strong sense of justice, sparing enemies and punishing friends even when it would have been more beneficial to pursue injustice. He greatly expanded infrastructure in Italy and implemented many economic measures to stabilize the Empire-wide economy and encourage the free flow of trade which bound the Empire together by common interest. He considered the bedroom habits of other citizens to be none of his business (though he himself was noted to like only women - not usual for the Roman elite!). He was a scholar of history, an obsessive nerd, a stutterer, and a cripple, so he just like me fr fr. He's my spirit animal and I love him.
Trajan was a wise and fair Emperor who conquered Dacia and temporarily conquered Persia (he died of natural causes before he could finish). He implemented welfare policies for the poor and orphans, embarked on massive building projects, opened the Senate to a wider array of citizens, and implemented reforms of local government to improve its efficiency and responsiveness to local needs. He greatly respected the Senate and was quick to bow to their wishes, despite the fact that his overwhelming popularity and power amongst the army and people would have allowed him to run roughshod over the Senate if he were a different man (and as many less restrained Emperors did).
Antoninus Pius, an Emperor who ruled over a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity, reforming laws to favor mercy and the presumption of innocence, safeguarding the rights of the weak and investing in infrastructure, all while maintaining a massive budget surplus. He put Christians (until then sporadically persecuted by local authorities, who found their customs strange and incomprehensible) under the personal protection of the Emperor, as he saw the cult as harmless (or at least no more harmful than any other). He was attentive to affairs of state up until the very day of his death, and treated himself as the Emperor was supposed to be - simply a magistrate, an official serving at the pleasure of the Senate and People. He loved his wife deeply, and raised his adoptive sons well (Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus), with both of them turning out reasonably well-adjusted human beings who remembered him fondly as a man who took them fishing, and to see plays and boxing matches. "Did nothing, but did it excellently" is a somewhat memetic descriptor of his reign, but it has some accuracy to it - Pius made sure his extraordinarily long reign as Emperor was quiet and peaceful.
For some of my SPICIER takes:
Augustus gets remembered mostly for being the first Emperor and a top-notch politician/propagandist. He was competent, but many of the precedents he set were mixed or set aside, and his major policy successes were only in shoring up his own power - neutering the Senate, and eliminating all other centers of power to create the pseudo-dictatorship of the early Empire. He is not the titan amongst Emperors he is often portrayed as. Propaganda works, boys and girls, even 2000 years later!
Tiberius, sad boi extraordinaire, gets largely tarred by the trials of his later reign. He quite literally did not want to be Emperor, but Augustus was very insistent, and one does not easily refuse an autocrat. But Tiberius was a very competent administrator who paid close attention to the economy and repeatedly tried to make the Senate (by then filled with Augustus's bootlicks who were more interested in sycophancy than government work) more involved in the rule of the Empire. After a while, big shock, the man who didn't want to be Emperor simply... stopped being Emperor. Went off to a private island, one supposes thinking that the Senate would just rule in his absence. Instead, they basically were couped by a handful of soldiers in togas, and let the coup leader plot to murder Tiberius until he caught wind of it and reluctantly dragged himself back to Rome to see the conspirators executed.
Marcus Aurelius was simply a competent workaholic. He was a bitchin' philosopher though, and for that reason, is often regarded much more positively, I think, than his rule deserves.
Diocletian was a proto-feudalist monarch who disregarded the republican traditions of the Empire in exchange for Grek and Prsian traditions of divine kingship, quite literally demanding to be worshipped as a living god over all other men. He wrecked the already-severely-damaged economy, split the Empire into four pieces, enslaved the soldiers as conscripts serving life-sentences in the army, instituted a form of serfdom for poor farmers, bound children to the profession of their parents, embarked on a massive campaign of persecution of Christians because they hurt his precious godlike fee-fees, and was generally a twat. He is remembered fondly by some because he came in at the end of the 'Crisis of the Third Century', and was not wracked by constant civil wars until near the end of his reign.
Constantine I killed his eldest son and boiled his wife alive like a lobster, and then split the Empire like personal property between his much less competent younger sons, who all started fighting each other (thus killing innumerable Roman soldiers) as soon as Constantine died. He's remembered as 'the Great' because the Church slobbered all over his boots for making Christianity the de facto unofficial religion of the Roman Empire, and persecuting pagans.
Theodosius is only remembered as 'the Great' because the Church slobbered all over his boots for making Christianity the officially enforced religion of the Empire, instead of just the unofficially enforced one, and persecuting pagans (see a pattern?). Fuck him.
For some revisionist fucks:
NO, Domitian was NOT just 'slandered by those mean ol' Senators', gtfo. He was a paranoid, vain, autocratic tyrant who probably murdered his much nicer and more competent brother, Titus. The Senate and Praetorian Guard preferred Nerva, a 63 year-old man with no major achievements to his name, to the young and active Domitian, because his activity was overwhelmingly tyrannical.
NO, Gaius Caligula was NOT just 'slandered by those mean ol' Senators', gtfo. He was literally brain-damaged by a fever early in his reign and descended into arbitrary excesses because of it. He was so unpopular that the Praetorian Guard, Senate, and people of Rome ALL preferred his uncle, Claudius, who was thought (at the time) to be a chinless, crippled, stuttering, drooling, browbeaten, abused-by-his-wives moron with no real political or military experience. THAT'S how bad Caligula was.
Uncle Claudius WAS chinless, crippled, stuttering, drooling, browbeaten, and abused by his wives (all seen as very negative qualities by the Romans, who preferred physically flawless men with great gravity in their bearing and control over their household), with no real political or military experience, but he was also a positively brilliant man with a strong sense of justice and foresight in everything except his taste in women, and only PRETENDING to be a moron to avoid getting iced by Caligula.
Julius Caesar isn't on here. Caesar is in kind of an odd place, because he's usually not counted as one of the Emperors - most count his adoptive son/grand-nephew, Augustus, as the first Emperor; as Julius Caesar adopted the (traditional) republican title of dictator.
But he'd be top-tier if he was here. A merciful man of the people, one of the most brilliant military minds of all time, who conquered one of the largest provinces of the Empire? Man had an ambition problem, no doubt about that though.
You say Constantine bringing in Christianity biased the church towards him, but I’d take it a step further and that he is partially responsible for all the evil that came along with wanting a unified religion for all of “his” people, regardless of what they already had going on. His little “strengthen the identity of the Empire” idea is still causing problems to this day.
I appreciate seeing Claudius pretty high up. It's been awhile since I dived into Roman history, but I remember Claudius leaving a strong impression on me. Definitely felt like he was expected to fail but then defied expectations.
Yeah, the man's own mother thought he was pathetic, tried to badmouth him to his grandfather (Augustus), and hired a mule driver to beat the neurodivergence out of him; had his writing suppressed for being too 'political', an insane and all-powerful nephew who constantly mocked him and made him fear for his life (though having such an early example of the 'put the slippers on his hands while he sleeps' bit IS a little funny, ngl) a string of failed marriages, and the only family member who was consistently kind to him, his brother, Germanicus, was assassinated at a relatively young age.
Yet he ended up with a long and successful reign after some 50 years of suffering and relative obscurity. Many of the legal precedents he established would last the entire Principate period, the conquest of Britannia was done under his reign (and honestly pretty bloodlessly), had time to write several books (all which are lost, goddammit), and ended up well-liked by the common people and deified into the Imperial Cult after death.
Shame about his last wife assassinating him. Man had no luck, or taste, with women.
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