Hannah
asked
Kate Quinn:
In your opinion, who is the worst Emperor of Ancient Rome?? And why?..P.s: If you have a few candidates, could you also list them and the reasons why they weren't suited to the role of Emperor?...and I really love your books btw.. :)
Kate Quinn
Hmm, good question. I'll confine my answers to pre-Christian Rome, since my knowledge of the Imperial line post-Diocletian is somewhat hazy.
When I was 18 and was first outlining Mistress of Rome, I was brooding "I need a bad emperor. You can get a lot of plot grist with a bad emperor. Mom, what are the worst emperors in your opinion?" My mother and her classics degree at once reeled off in chronological order "Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla." It's probably as good a place to start as any.
Caligula was fairly nuts, so that answer's obvious. Nero I know Margaret George will fight me on, because she's writing about him for her next book and she paints him as more of an artistic type with the world's worst mom-issues who wasn't suited for the throne . . . but whether crazy, cruel, or temperamentally unsuited, he was a pretty terrible emperor. Domitian I picked for MoR's bad emperor; he actually had a lot going for him (smart, good soldier; ran an efficient bureaucracy) but he got paranoid and execution-happy. Commodus because he started out with nothing but advantages in the golden age of Marcus Aurelius and slid downhill so badly that the Roman Empire never really had a sustained golden age again, for which I will never forgive him. Caracalla - massacres, persecutions, murdered his brother.
Elagabalus might get a place on there too, and a few others, but then this answer would turn into an essay!
When I was 18 and was first outlining Mistress of Rome, I was brooding "I need a bad emperor. You can get a lot of plot grist with a bad emperor. Mom, what are the worst emperors in your opinion?" My mother and her classics degree at once reeled off in chronological order "Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla." It's probably as good a place to start as any.
Caligula was fairly nuts, so that answer's obvious. Nero I know Margaret George will fight me on, because she's writing about him for her next book and she paints him as more of an artistic type with the world's worst mom-issues who wasn't suited for the throne . . . but whether crazy, cruel, or temperamentally unsuited, he was a pretty terrible emperor. Domitian I picked for MoR's bad emperor; he actually had a lot going for him (smart, good soldier; ran an efficient bureaucracy) but he got paranoid and execution-happy. Commodus because he started out with nothing but advantages in the golden age of Marcus Aurelius and slid downhill so badly that the Roman Empire never really had a sustained golden age again, for which I will never forgive him. Caracalla - massacres, persecutions, murdered his brother.
Elagabalus might get a place on there too, and a few others, but then this answer would turn into an essay!
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