The Empresses of Rome

Tacitus has given us a spirited picture of life in the Imperial palace during the months which followed the execution of Messalina. Claudius himself had sunk into a state of dro...

In tracing the further career of Livia we enter upon the opening acts of the tragedy of the Cæsars, and we have to consider carefully if there be any truth in the charge that Li...

The course of our inquiry has led us through five centuries of change. We have passed from the sober and virile integrity of the first Imperial pair, the golden age of Roman lif...

The fourfold power which Diocletian had prudently set up ensured for the Empire twenty years of uneventful prosperity. The two Emperors and their Cæsars guarded and repaired the...

When the announcement of Constantine’s death had been borne by swift couriers to the distant provinces, and the body, in its golden coffin, had been transferred to Constantinopl...

The fall of Cæsonia was hardly less romantic than the succession to her position of the woman who is known to every reader of Roman history, and to many others, as Messalina. Wh...

Nero was no longer “the young Apollo” of his boyhood. Unbridled dissipation and precocious crime had made their impress on body no less than on mind. He was a little above the a...

With the Imperial ladies of the courts of Arcadius and Honorius we enter upon the final act in the tragedy of the fall of Rome. The sun is sinking rapidly to the Western horizon...

The Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother were murdered in the year 235. We may convey a just impression of the period that followed this odious crime by the brief observatio...

With the accession of Septimius Severus to the throne, we find ourselves confronting one of the most dominant personalities in the long line of Roman Empresses--a woman of the s...

On an August morning of the year 29 B.C. the million citizens of Rome lined the route which was taken by triumphal processions, to greet the man who brought them the unfamiliar...

The splendour of Julian’s reign was soon overcast. In the summer of 363, as he was skilfully extricating his troops from a dangerous position in Persia, he was pierced with a ja...

On the twenty-fifth of February, in the year 138, Hadrian had summoned the Senators to the palace. Verus was dead, and the whole world wondered on whom the erratic fancy of the...

As Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been equal in Imperial power, and both were married, we have one more Empress to regard before we pass on to the wives of Commodus; and t...

Although we have already indicated the fate of Aurelian, we have not yet referred to the woman who shared his Imperial title and his great renown. Her personality is, in fact, e...

The house of Cæsar had perished with Nero, and few sober folk can have regretted that it had no living representative to win the fancy of the frivolous people or the blind cupid...

The remainder of the reign of Tiberius does not properly concern us, but a very brief account of it will serve at once to confirm our estimate of the influence of Livia, and to...

We are already familiar with the extraction and the training of the next Empress of Rome. Sabina was the elder daughter of Trajan’s niece Matidia, and came of the sound and sobe...

“If,” says Gibbon, “a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, withou...

The fates were now preparing as strange a revolution, and bringing upon the Imperial stage as grotesque a figure, as any that have yet come under our notice. Three women--the si...

To the thoughtful Roman the name of Syria must have suggested an abyss of corruption, and the extension of the Empire over that swarm of Asiatic peoples to whom the name was vag...