Tuesday 18 August 2020

ai claudius

Via Kottke—we are directed to the Roman Emperor Project of Daniel Voshart—Star Trek set designer—who has taken a dataset of over eight hundred sculptures and busts to seed a neural-network to create photo-realistic images of the fifty-four caesars of the Principate, the first period of the Roman Empire that began with the reign of Augustus and ended with the Crisis of the Third Century, which nearly led to its collapse buffeted by civil wars, invasions, economic depression, plague and political instability.
These early days of the Empire were no salad days to be sure but this period prior to the crisis is in contrast to the following one referred to as the Dominate or the despotic phase, beginning with the reign of Diocletian and the downfall of the West. The algorithm was guided and informed by written descriptions in the histories to take into account other physical characteristics in efforts not to flatter or romanticise but show diversity as well as the ravages of rule, age and indulgence. Here is our old friend Claudius, who was rather unexpectedly elevated to the role after his nephew Caligula was assassinated by a conspiracy between senators and the Praetorian Guard. Much more to explore at the links above.

Wednesday 15 July 2020

tempio dei dioscuri

On this day—the ides of July, fulling a tribute pledged for a decisive military victory for the young Republic in rebuffing the forces of the exiled king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, and his allied forces in the native Latin tribes during the Battle of Lake Regillius made by then dictator Aulus Postumius Albus Regillensis (his surname a consequence of the conquest), one of the consul’s sons was appointed magistrate (duumvirs) to dedicate the temple to Castor and Pollux, the twin half-brothers—Castor’s dad the mortal, Tyndareus, king of Sparta but Pollux was the son of Zeus who had seduced their mother Leda in the form of a swan (some accounts have him or both born from an egg and is a classic example of what’s called heteropaternal superfecundation, albeit in divine form like the Capitoline Wolf that reared Romulus and Remus) in central Rome in 484 BC.
Reportedly the brothers appeared on horseback in the midst of battle and fought ably for the Republic. They reappeared after the fighting was over to herald victory, watering their horses at a fountain in the forum called the Spring of Juturna (Lacus Juturnรฆ)—well before the news could be borne by mortal feet, and the temple was built on that spot. Only the distinctive three columns remain though the cult was spread through the empire and other sites are extant. The Dioscuri were transformed into the constellation Gemini so the twins would not be separated in death and were the siblings of twin sisters, Helen of Troy (possibly also ab ovo since the paternity of Helen was also the mighty Zeus) and Clytemnestra.

Wednesday 6 May 2020

chronogram

As much as these days can seem rather untethered, time still marches forward and Messy Nessy Chic brings us a thought-provoking survey of some of the myriad ways that civilisation has tried to regulate and legislate the cycles of the Sun and Moon.
One will encounter some of the earliest attempts to figure human reckoning, superstition and experience with cosmology and the progression of the seasons—and whether indeed time’s arrow isn’t a flat circle that brings everything around again, to efforts to install decimal time (or at least one that followed more regular rules) and the French Revolutionary Calendar plus other ways of resetting the clock. A chronogram, incidentally, is a headstone, plaque or commemoration that one sometimes encounters with those seemingly random capitalised or illuminated letters, like in the more straightforward epitaph for Elizabeth I of England: My Day Closed Is In Immortality—or, MDCIII corresponding to 1603, the year of her death or in lengthier passages called chronosticha on buildings that relate a parable and record when construction was completed.

Sunday 15 March 2020

satire x

First airing on this day in 1968, the penultimate episode of the second season of Star Trek: The Original Series “Bread and Circuses” takes its title from an eponymous satirical poem written by Juvenal that addresses how constituencies are easy led astray from weightier issues if their base needs are satisfied takes place on an alternate Earth (Magna Roma, 892-IV) where the Roman Empire never fell and in a twentieth century setting.

The landing party visit the planet after finding wreckage of a survey vessel without a trace of its crew and compliment, eventually realising that the former captain, now elevated to Princeps Civitatis (emperor and first citizen), went native and sacrificed his company to the gladiatorial games from a conviction that the civilization be shielded from cultural contamination (the Prime Directive), having not yet arrived at the technological threshold of interstellar travel, and tries to convince Kirk and Spock and the rest of the away team to do the same and abandon their Star Fleet careers. Resistant, Kirk and Spock are thrown into the melee and disappointing the audience by dispatching their opponent swiftly and non-bloodily with a Vulcan nerve pinch and then scheduled for execution—to be televised. Deus ex machina, Scotty causes a power disruption and beams them aboard just in time, the blackout preserving the Romans from potential future shock.

Monday 24 February 2020

circus maximus

Two podcasters of note, John Hodgman and Elliot Kalan, are hosting an absolutely delightful mini-series revisiting the 1976 prestige television adaptation of the Robert Graves work of historical fiction I, Claudius.
Though harshly panned by critics on its first airing, it enjoyed cult-status and a dedicated viewership both in the UK and in America where it was syndicated by the Public Broadcasting System in 1978 and features an extraordinary cast of actors including Sir Derek Jacobi, Dame Siรขn Phillips (the Bene Gesserit reverend mother of Dune and voice actor for all the Disney princesses for their UK releases) as Livia, John Hurt, Sir Patrick Stewart, John Rhys-Davies, Brian Blessed, Patsy Byrne (Nursie in Blackadder) and Patricia Quinn, the Lady Stephens (Magenta from The Rocky Horror Picture Show)—just to name a few. Watch along as they recap each chapter with special guests, beginning with the pilot A Touch of Murder/Family Affairs—an extended episode counted as one.

Friday 10 January 2020

ฤlea iacta est

According to Roman historian Suetonius, General Gaius Julius Caesar led one legion to ford the Rubicon (perhaps) on this day in 49 BC and cross into the home province of Italia (previously) in contravention to the conventions of imperium and would launch the civil war (Bello Civili) that transformed the Roman Republic into an empire governed by an absolute monarchy.
In modern parlance a metaphor for committing an irrevocable act and breaching the point of no return, it is said that Caesar, having contemplated his advance and its repercussions before going forward, proclaimed the above—that the die had been cast as he led his army. As the boundaries of Caesar’s bailiwick, his military command were subsequently redrawn when his predecessor Octavian merged the province of Cisalpine Gaul (see also) with Italia and the river presently bearing the name is in Ravenna, historians are not sure exactly what watercourse was the original Rubicon but given how intensified agriculture and associated landscaping during the high Middle Ages harnessed and turned many rivers, it could well be one and the same.

Saturday 24 August 2019

apotropaic magic

An excavation in Pompeii, a Roman city along with Herculaneum frozen in time on 24 August in year 79 AD when with the violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius it became buried under tonnes of pumice and hot ashfall, has uncovered a trove of charms and amulets believed to have been the repertoire, arsenal of a sorceress and also serves as a repository of very intimate personal items that fleeing residents might leave in the custody of the sorceress for safekeeping and retrieval upon return.
Each of the items collected in a wooden box that had all but decayed away represents not only its peculiar wish-fulfilment but by extension narratives too intriguing not to limn complete, not to mention what each talisman and totem might signify or hold power over. Included among the evil-eyes (the virtue of keeping away like with like), phalluses, skulls and scarabs were figures of Harpocrates—a Greek syncretisation of the Egyptian Child Horus who represented the new dawn and hope to conquer the day, who matured to adult form by twilight and represented the resilience to come back again as well as discretion and confidence-keeping.

Thursday 27 June 2019

notae tironianae

Absent any comprehensive and systematic stenographical short-cuts except for what could be improvised and some legal jargon that were purposefully opaque to stave off the non-credentialed, the catalogue of glyphs, growing to some five thousand symbols, created by Marcus Tullius Tiro (*94 – †4BC) was a highly useful innovation.
An enslaved clerk who was later freed to continue working as the Roman orator and statesman Cicero’s, his former master, personal secretary, Tiro was able—through his notes—to facilitate the dictation and capture the thoughts of the philosopher and statesman, and the method was quickly disseminated. Taught in medieval monasteries, the extended character set grew to some thirteen thousand shorthand symbols that made for an abbreviated syllabary, which could be further modified and combined to compress whole sentences and still retain the words verbatim. Falling out of favour with the proliferation of the printing press, a few Tironian notes are still in use today—notably the ⁊ (the glyph for et, and) is used extensively on signage in Scotland and Ireland where the sign is called the agusan and agus respectively.

Tuesday 6 November 2018

all roads lead to rome

Covering a familiar subject, the Map Room directs our attention to an interactive and animated study of a thirteenth century reproduction of a Roman illustrated itinerarium—that is, a road map that shows the network of the cursus publicus (previously) of the Empire around the time of the reign of Augustus, called the Tabula Peutingeriana after the sixteenth century Augsburger antiquarians, Konrad Peutinger and his wife Margaretha Welser, who conserved this artefact.  The seven metre long scroll is made a bit more wieldly and accessible by depicting it as a side-scrolling animation with additional features that, for instance, allow one to toggle between the ancient and modern toponyms for places along the routes. Inscribed into the UNESCO registry in 2007, learn more about the unique strip map and the ongoing scholarship surrounding it at the pair of links up top.

Friday 6 April 2018

pomp and circumstance

Though the re-discovery of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii buried in the pyroclastic ash of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD is sourced to the excavations by Spanish engineer Roque Joaquรญn de Alcubierre in the service of the Duke of Parma that began on 6 April 1748, history records at least one previous rediscovery of the long-forgotten settlement. A century and a half earlier, a workman discovered some frescos and inscribed walls whilst digging a ditch and summoned a respected architect from Naples, Domenico Fontana (the same who oversaw the transportation and erection of those Egyptian obelisks in Rome) who assessed the site.
Either out of farsightedness or simple prudishness, Fontana ordered the artefacts reburied and not to be discussed again. Italy during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation perhaps did not have the artistic sensibilities to appreciate what was uncovered. Sort of equivalent to having neglected to delete one’s browsing history (to couch it in modern terms as death came swift and unexpectedly), archaeologists found and continue to find quite a lot of erotic art and imagery and the public was not quite prepared for it. In fact when King Francis of the Two Sicilies visited an exhibition of artefacts collected from Pompeii with the queen and princess, he was so mortified that he decreed that the explicit material be sequestered in a secret Neapolitan museum (Gabinetto Segreto—obviously NSFW) that only admitted mature adults whose morals were above question. One is given to wonder on how many occasions the finds of the past were subject to censorship when it did not fit our collective or personal narrative.  Closed and reopened numerous times over the ensuing centuries according to society’s norms and mores, it was last reopened in 2000 with people under the age of eighteen still not admitted unless accompanied by a guardian.

Monday 29 January 2018

ferrules and eyelets

Via Laughing Squid, we enjoyed discovering the portfolio of Los Angeles-based surrealist Alexandra Dillon whose latest project involves evocative portraiture painted on worn paintbrushes (donated by other artists) and other used pieces of hardware, including shovels, padlocks and cleavers. Some of the faces featured reminded me of this Roman scholarWoman with a Stylus from the ashes of Pompeii—and indeed it turns out that she was one of Dillon’s inspirations. Even if paint-brushes are thought of as fragile and disposable, the choice of medium speaks to durability and the biographies that inhabit and haunt our everyday tools.

Tuesday 4 November 2014

it happened on the way to the forum: the end or i have come to bury caesar, not to praise him

Though Ancient Rome during its last days was a poor shadow of its former glory and the academics of the disintegration were less captivating, merely a guilty glance at misfortune, I experienced separation-anxieties at seeing the epic come to an end and was sad to hear of the final succession of emperors slip away. Ruminating on the causes of the fall were well established—and sufficiently legion and with transparent allusions to contemporary times: the lack of checks-and-balances, usurpations, the taxation-scheme that destroyed the middle-class (placing a bounty and incentive for the tax-man that usually only haunted the vital demographic), racism (Rome was relatively enlightened, ruling over a multi-ethnic empire, but although the services and the fealty of the Barbarians were serviceable enough, they were forever excluded from holding high office), a standing-army with undue political influence, religious schisms, invitations that turned migrations and then invasions, not to mention the sanitising of symbols of State expressly linked to Rome's survival.
 For the haughty hegemony and revisionist history, often I found myself routing for the underdogs, but I did want Rome to linger a little longer before descending into melodrama and a soap-opera. Of course, the legacy did live on in the East for nearly a thousand years and the story could have gone on after the coup de grace at the hands of the Goths, the Huns, the Vandals and the Alans. The saga came to an end, with a flair that should not go unnoticed, with the elevation of the fourteen year old son of Orestes, a minister of Attila, named ironically Romulus Augustus. The boy ruler's namesakes were of course the founder of the Republic and the founder of the Empire and he reigned for ten months or so and made, probably, for an auspicious time to put this episode to bed. Romulus Augustus was sent into exile and claimant, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, who announced himself merely King of the Italians and packed up and shipped whatever symbols of State that had survived successive raids to Constantinople, pronouncing that the Empire and the known-world now only required one leader. The exile of this teenager, however, is not a historic cul-de-sac as he finds himself connected to King Arthur and the Matter of Britain, as mythic heirs to the Roman continuum.

Sunday 5 October 2014

it happened on the way to the forum: command economy or endangered specie

After the comic-tragedy of of a succession of rulers elevated, blindsiding both the nominees—ambitious or inuring and the state with no forward-looking policies in place and only filling the power-vacuum by whatever pretender might be sucked in next with the sufficient gravitas to plug the hole for a few years and sometimes just for a few weeks, Diocletian from Illyria (modern-day Dalmatia in Croatia) came on the scene, having risen through the military ranks to command the cavalry during campaigns in Persia and on the Danube frontier and radically reformed the way the Empire was governed, by turning the state back to the role of state-craft.
In order to prevent any potential usurpers from raising a fighting force that could unseat the incumbent, during the reign of Aulerian, the Emperor had taken personal charge of the bulwark of the legions and when crises emerged, marched his private army to whatever new insurgency, domestic uprising or incursions on the borderlands, was presenting itself. The tacit seemed to bring a measure of stability to the Empire, with Aulerian's tenure exceptionally long and productive compared to other office-holders of the time, but was very taxing and inefficient, given how the troops had to rush to counter any and all threats, and threatened to endanger the Empire any time there was an attack on more than one front. Realising these risks, either sacrificing border-security for the safety of the regime or vice versa, Diocletian took the bold and ingenious move of sharing imperium—first with a trusted co-regent—and then splitting the Empire into four united regions, reasoning that no man could let his ambitions get the better of him ruling a quarter of the civilised world with virtually full autonomy. Tax havens were eliminated and no province, even what had formerly been the home province of Italy, was accorded especial treatment, with capitals established at Antioch (on the Syrian/Turkish border), Nicomedia (near the more famous Constantinople), Milan and Trier, and demarcating a division of skill-sets that was not distinguished before, created separate military and civil-service career tracks that put professional administrators in charge of tax-collecting, the courts, assessment and public-works projects.
The bureaucratic hierarchy established put the persons of the Emperors behind endless corridors of intermediaries, answerable to the next higher officer, and lent them an air of almost a demi-god and not the the aura of the First Citizen, a common-man brought up in the ranks of soldiering and fraternising with the people, putting forth the principal of rule by the grace of God, the divine right of kings. The Empire consisted of around one hundred small provinces, which were grouped into larger political units called diocese (of the same Greek root for administration as the cognomen Diocletian), under the governance of an ombudsman called a vicar. These vicars coordinated the larger federal policies among the regional powers, and this structure was preserved, with essentially the same borders, by the Catholic Church after the Fall in the West to the present day. Of course, this apparatus was not just put in place to shield the upper echelons of leadership or to protect personal and dynastic interests, but rather, there was a lot of business, civil-affairs and economic-recovery, to attend to. These matters had been neglected for years, with emperors expected to preside over decisions large and small in trials and policy and near continual debasement of coins, reducing the precious metal (specie) content which resulted in inflation. Diocletian knew that simply coining more money made it worthless and began to round the worthless coppers and slugs and minted new currency of nearly pure silver and gold content.  His attempt was a worthy one, but Diocletian and his ministers did not take nearly enough of the old coins out of circulation and his successors did not enforce all the elements of the recovery plan, as tradesmen and later governments did not understand the economic principles in play. Money was still not worth its face-value.

Because tax revenues were falling precipitously and pur- chasing- power was declining, Diocletian suggested another bold reform that simply removed the intermediary of money and instituted payment in-kind. Sending out his legion of bureaucrats to take stock of what non-liquid assets every one possessed and how much each family needed to live, they returned and constructed a comprehensive equivalency chart to, without the medium of money, show that so many hours of work in the fields or of tending the herds or of soldiering or of shuttling munitions or of arrow-making, etc. was equal to so many units of grains, bolts of fabric, jugs of wine, tableware, etc. This thoroughly researched commissariat determined the annual budget for all the land, and actually functioned pretty well, leading to a better and more equitable return of services in exchange for what the Empire doled out. Barter such as this was naturally not conducive to international trade, the rest of the world having been introduced and now hopelessly accustomed to the Roman coin, but helped to stabilise the economy and replenish state coffers with fiat money. Diocletian even anticipated what might happen if everyone went after the easy or glamourous jobs, like prospector or astrologer, instead of more menial and harder work in exchange for their stipends, like garbage-collector or butcher, and called for the formation of trade guilds which set quotas and applied standards for admissions. Though ultimately the Empire fell in the West over invasion, military coup and economic implosion, Rome did go on existing for another one hundred or so years, already moribund when Diocletian came to power, and chose co-regents that allowed the Empire in the East to survive for another millennium. Diocletian retired graciously, the first and only Emperor to abdicate, to his homeland.

Tuesday 30 September 2014

it happened on the way to the forum: roman holiday or once in a life time

The Roman work week was not defined by the weekend or a Sabbath but by the late Empire, it was rarity for any professional, labourer or even slave to have to endure any significant stretch of time without a break, with, by then, there being almost parity between days worked and days off due to holy days—and these observations, supplemented by Imperial mandate were not something that one would quietly forgo. More than just pious libations spilt for the departed and one’s particular theophany of household gods, holidays were also public celebrations, featuring games, parades and other spectacles. Festivities were also augmented by spontaneous victory celebrations and by anniversaries and jubilees of much longer intervals.  Keeping the tradition of one Sabine man’s absolutions alive, the Romans celebrated what became known as the Secular Games—there being of course nothing secular about them, as we understand the domains of Church and State, but the word rather is the adjectival form of saecularis—something temporal and belonging to an age—whereas God and heavenly matters were considered to be outside of time, at least by medieval theologians.

Though it is not at a transparent matter why the oracles prescribed a darkly ritual to the god and goddess who ruled the Underworld in order to cure the illness of his children, nor why this particular man’s hardships are remembered—but the figure strikes me a little like the biblical Job though we have to take a lot of license with this biography and mystery cult, once his children recovered, also under the advisement of the oracles, the man pledged that this rite would be performed in perpetuity, once a secular age had passed. This once in a life time iteration was not merely a generational matter, as no one living, from the youngest infant to the oldest crone could, have been around to have witnessed the last performance—and this span of time was reckoned, even during ancient times when we think life-expectancy was not very long, as one hundred to one hundred-ten years—and in the Romance languages, the word century did derive from saecularis, defined as a round hundred. Octavian held the first Secular Games and the indeed the party was epic and unforgettable, later emperors were a bit envious—being bereft of a chance to win the peoples’ hearts and minds with spectacle. Though a good public festival requires no justification and libations do not need to be sourced, there is little in the way of explanation as to how a private ritual was performed by the person of the emperor, no less, and evolved to be attended with lavish and riotous merriment. Fairly soon there was holiday creep, with one emperor announcing the games of the century decades prematurely, and the older generation who still vividly recalled the previous revelries found the proclamation of the bash of a life time more than a bit incredulous. Rather embarrassed by this faux pas, the offending emperor quickly rebranded the celebration of the anniversary of Rome’s semi-legendary founding, allowing the parallel festivities to continue—on at least a twice-in-a-lifetime basis. The divergent schedules were brought together again under the reign of Phillip the Arab on the occasion of Rome’s Millennial celebration with a party whose legend still echoes through the ages. This turned out to be the last Secular Games, as Rome was Christianised by the time the next allotted saecularis came around and Rome, though still the Eternal City, was no longer the imperial capital.

Thursday 18 September 2014

it happened on the way to the forum: honey-badger or non-plus-ultra

Regarded as one of the Five Good Emperors for his civic-planning and long reign of peace and prosperity—only with the hallmark bookends that of violence and paranoia that attend most transitions of power, it is a regrettable commentary on the history books that Hadrian is nearly exclusively remembered only for his eponymous wall that separated the province of Britannia from the untamable wilds of Scotland.
The travelling emperor and Grecophile visited nearly every part of his realms, and on his grand-tour, left many public institutions improved and was a real bread-and-circuses kind of leader.  Other borderlands were fortified as well, and inasmuch has the Limes afforded a measure of protection from the barbarians, they also served an important propaganda purpose, white-washed and gleaming when new, the walls and towers were visible from great distances as a hearty deterrent and reminder that Rome ruled these lands. Though currying favour again with a Senate that was formerly reduced in esteem through the refusal of recent regimes to submit to protocols (despite their emptiness and the fact that the Senate’s role was almost purely ceremonial), Hadrian managed to chafe their elite sensibilities by being an unrepentant individual. 

Against the style at the time, Hadrian wore a beard, was an open homosexual, when most had the decency to stay in the closet, valued Greek culture and mannerisms over copy-cat Roman ones—which were usual poor and prudish imitators, was a big-game hunter (the Romans thought safaris were unseemly for nobility, though they had few qualms with being spectators for brutal gladiatorial bouts)—and to top it all off, he was a provincial hailing from Hispania, the first non-native emperor Rome had seen, and probably would have been its last had  not Hadrian’s tenure not been on-balance a successful one and the broader pool of talented and skilled leadership from beyond Italy would have been hence excluded from the highest echelons.  While those walls did much to help quell insurrections in much of the Empire, Judea with these radically un-Roman Christians still posed a problem, and Hadrian, towards the final years of his reign took a more tyrannical turn on the province—merging it with another entity, outlawing monotheistic worship—the Romans not yet really recognising the distinction between Christian and Jew yet, and reflagging the combined provinces as Syria-Palaestina, hoping to incorporate the Middle East into Hadrian’s envisioned Pan-Hellenic state.
The naming-convention endured through modern times and was a serious matter as the colony was renamed for an adversarial tribe. The peaceful years were surely ones hard fought for and Hadrian was no pacifist, with revolutions being staunched in many lands; the emperor’s detractors merely said that his lashing out—Rome did not care about the suffering and suppression in Jerusalem but the attendant crimes of political purges in the forum were—and that Hadrian was showing his true colours and held the Senate in contempt all along and his efforts at maintaining stability within the Empire were derided.  Though Hadrian had always demonstrated a nature that was pre-emptive rather than reactive, his change in character could have been attributed to the sudden and mysterious death of his long-time companion and lover, a Greek youth from Asia Minor called Antinous.  Antinous was accompanying the Emperor on a cruise down the Nile when his lifeless body was discovered in the water.  Theories about, including that Hadrian was growing weary with the boy—or that Antinous was off bears or even that emperor’s astrologer advised Hadrian that he would be rejuvenated and attain an advanced age—which he did—by sacrificing a youth.   I don’t know whether it was foul-play or not but I am sure that the two really did love one another. Hadrian never recovered from this tragedy, it seems, and dedicated many honours to the memory of Antinous. Somewhat outside imperial purview (the Senate conferred Godhead and although usually granted, they would have like to have been consulted first), he had his lover deified as a god and included among the Caesar family pantheon. A city in Egypt near the site where his body was recovered was demolished and rebuilt in Hellenistic style and named after Antinous, as was a constellation of stars. And as in life, Hadrian commissioned hundreds of statues of Antinous had them distributed to all corners of the Empire. Their story may not be familiar but you, gentle reader, have most likely seen his likeness already, the youth's image being the most reproduced one of the first century and the most widespread.
For a time the cult of Antinous (being conflated with Osiris who embodied similar graces) was bigger than Jesus, with more adherents than this new Christianity. The reign of Hadrian continued for several more years, and ever the architect and civil-engineering, the travelling emperor returned home and his ashes were enshrined in the mausoleum he designed, now known as Castel Sant'Angelo (the one-time home of the papacy and their jail, acquired after the Arch-Angel Michael appeared atop this tallest building in Rome and delivered the city from a medieval plague outbreak), across the Tiber from Vatican City.

Sunday 14 September 2014

it happened on the way to the forum: dynasty or i quote in elegiacs all the crimes of heliogabalus

After Julius Caesar claimed autocracy and posthumously set the precedent of dynastic rule, it was in essence just a generation that separated the empire from the relative beneficence of Caesar's heir, Octavian called Julius Augustus whose long reign, political networks and civil reforms were just revolutionary enough to endure and to weather future crises, from the absolutely corruption yielded by absolute power and inheritance. Octavian groomed his successors with great care in hopes of ensuring a smooth transition of power and keeping Rome's political model, social services and borders in Octavian's image—plus all in the family. His heirs-apparent, however, did not live to see through Octavian's dominion, both his natural sons who had been educated, trained and primed for leadership, and in the end, Octavian was compelled to rewrite his will to name his step-son, Tiberius—ancestor of Nero and daughter of Livia by her first marriage, as his successor. Interestingly, though Octavian himself warned against harbouring creatures of the court that held illegitimate or behind-the-scenes authority, Octavian also adopted his widowed wife Livia as his daughter, so that she might retain some of the unofficial powers that she wielded, becoming known in all circles as simply the Augusta.

Tiberius proved less than harmless, and always the reluctant emperor, ceded much of the day-to-day matters of governance to a single adviser, who gladly took on the extra responsibilities and quickly identified and then indulged a native sense of paranoia. Tiberius' angst was not completely unwarrented of course, as his mother, the Augusta, had conspired to make sure her son became emperor, going so far—some believe—as having Tiberius' step-brothers taken out of the picture and even poisoning the old Octavian before he changed his mind about Tiberius, and the city was full of intrigues, including the self-fulling hatred that grew amongst the citizens once the emperor's adviser started the campaign of purges to execute or exile all those suspected of treason against the regime. Eventually Tiberius grew wise to the reality of the plot against him and had the adviser dismissed and tried as an enemy of the state himself, but by then it was far too late. Tiberius had his own son, the general known by his cognomen Germanicus, put to death for not following protocol and representing a threat to his father's authority. Rome had suffered a demoralising loss a decade prior in the Teutoburg Forrest to the commander of the Germanic tribes Hermann (Latinised as Arminius). Germanicus made a few winning forays on to the Eastern banks of the Rhine and was an inspiration to his troops and to the public, including making good on some old promises of pensions and better pay—out of his own personal fortune without bothering with bureaucratic embargoes. Recognising that Germanicus was far more popular than the emperor, presented a risk of a military coup, like forefather Julius Caesar, and had violated one of the terms set forth in Octavian's last will and testament, not to expand the boundaries of the empire. The Rhine remained the furthermost frontier of the empire but the adventures of Germanicus, if left unattended, might have expanded German control. Moreover, Tiberius dispatched Germanicus' family to ensure no further resistance was nascent—sparing only Germanicus' youngest son (and young daughters) since he did not pose any sort of challenge to the paranoid emperor. In fact, after Tiberius left the capital on a permanent basis to rule in absentia from his palace in Capri, he decided to do some estate-planning of his own and adopted his young grandson, whom Tiberius recalled fondly had accompanied Germanius on his expeditions, and was outfitted with a little legionnaire's uniform—including a tiny pair of boots, lending him the pet-name, Caligula. Once, for all intents and purposes, retired from political engagements and away from the city, Tiberius, with young and already traumatised Caligula to watch, was able to engage freely in his favourite pastimes—tossing slaves off the cliffs of his mountain top retreat in the gulf of Naples. Once Tiberius died, Rome believed that this new ruler, Caligula, would restore civil order and herald a new period of peace and prosperity. That delusion was short-lived, however.
The public was made to endure a long succession of madness, precocity and wantonness with only the very briefest of respites and naรฏve honeymoon periods after new families killed each other off. In the spirit of “the king is deal; long live the king” statues erected erected to certain regimes throughout the empire, on the streets and in temples, were often without thought for the historic record beheaded and replaced with the likeness of the new emperor—which is why archaeologists find a lot of disembodied busts and unofficially treated to purge the career of their predecessors. There was even a legislative mechanism for erasing the past, called damnatio memoriae, but this statue seemed to have been enacted only sparingly—at least as far as we know, since if it did work according to the letter of law, we would never know about it. This striking from the record was imposed on the assassins of Julius Caesar, to include the proscription on the pain of death that no one from his clan ever be called Marc Antony—although later pardoned and rescinded. After the horrors of Tiberius, Caligula (who bankrupted the empire, among other things), Nero (who is reported to have burned down Rome in order to make space for the palace he wanted to construct for himself and burned Christians for candlelit dining), the first emperor whose memory was to be condemned to oblivion was a man from Emesa (Homs) in the province of Syria called Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus.  Domitian came first but as his condemnation was spearheaded by a Senate bitter for being completely bypassed by someone who refused to recognise the charade of democracy, and this selective memory was even less potent than usual.
He was given the regnal name of Elagabalus—or Heliogabalus to make the Persia name of the sun deity sound a bit more solar to Greco-Roman ears), after his service as a priest to that order in his homeland, who venerated a meteorite which was sent to Earth from the Conquering Sun, and tried to introduce this religion to Rome. For someone who historians tried to toss down the memory-hole, there are surely some other lascivious details about his emperorship aside from his proselytising, including his male-lovers and the grace-and-favour postings they received, his desire to “mate” with the Vestal Virgins to produce “godlike offspring,” and reputedly making a brothel of his palace. Although any and all of the claims cannot be elevated above the suspicion of embellishment, maybe the act that besmirched his reputation the most, aside from being a foreigner and as gender-/role-challenged as Cleopatra, was allowing his grandmother and mother to participate directly in the Roman Senate. After Elagablus' reign was cut short, his religious trappings were sent back to Syria, women were barred from the Senate and his existence erased. Though extant there's only the strain of his name sung in the Major-General's Song in the Pirates of Penzance and a Gilded Age cult following for his decadent parties, damnatio memoriae, de facto or sanctioned, seems to leave a lot of blanks to fill in.