Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Alice Johnson asks, You talk a lot about good emperors and bad emperors. You allude to what you consider a good leader. Could you expound? Keeps his people safe? Prosperous? Oversees justice to a broad segment of his people? Unity? The goodwill of the people. Something else?

Alice, this is an excellent question.

The bad emperors are, I think, very easy to identify. They were often crazy, cruel, and hedonistic. They spent an incredible amount of money on themselves on palaces and parties; they delusionally referred to themselves as gods or gladiators, and they often meted out barbaric punishments for the most trivial things.

Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, and Egalabus checked most of these boxes.

The good emperors were the opposite. They were rational, reasonable, and fair. For the most part, they kept the empire at peace, or at least, defended it from invasion along the frontiers. For the most part, they didn’t expand the empire very much, as most of that had been done by the time they came to power.

The good emperors tended to have longer reigns, and many of the more forgettable emperors had rather short reigns.

While good and bad are obviously subjective, most historians largely agree on who the good and bad emperors were.