Best Roman emperors

01

Aurelian

Murdered by his own secretaries after single-handedly stitching Rome's three fractured pieces back together in five years. The man who saved the empire couldn't survive his own staff.

02

Hadrian

When his teenage lover Antinous drowned in the Nile in 130 AD, Hadrian declared him a god, built a city in his name, and flooded the empire with his portrait. The grief never stopped.

03

Trajan's Column

Inside the base of Trajan's Column — a 30-metre marble drum carved with 2,500 figures — sits a golden urn holding the emperor's actual ashes. The dead man is inside the monument.

04

Column of Marcus Aurelius

Erected after 193 AD, the Column of Marcus Aurelius depicts Romans burning German villages and beheading captives in a 190-metre spiral. It was so ignored that a hermit lived inside it for years.

05

Vespasian

Born to a mule-driver's family, Vespasian taxed public urinal collections and, when his son Titus complained, held a coin to his nose and asked if it smelled. On his deathbed he quipped, 'I think I'm becoming a god.'

06

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek, on military campaign, with no intention of publishing. The book — private, furious, self-lacerating — survived because someone ignored his wishes.

07

Diocletian

In 305 AD, Diocletian became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate — then rejected offers to return and spent his final years at his Split palace growing cabbages, apparently content.

08

Trajan's Dacian Wars

Trajan's two Dacian campaigns dragged 165 tonnes of gold and 330 tonnes of silver back to Rome — enough to fund gladiatorial games lasting 123 days straight. The kingdom of Dacia ceased to exist.

09

Septimius Severus

Rome's first African-born emperor marched his army to Scotland's edge, declared the campaign unfinished, and died in York in 211 AD — 3,000 miles from Leptis Magna, where he was born.

10

Titus

Titus, who destroyed Jerusalem's Temple in 70 AD, wept on any evening he'd performed no act of generosity, reportedly saying, 'Friends, I have lost a day.' He reigned only two years before dying at 41.