Lives and Deaths of the Roman Emperors: A Short Data Analysis
“More fortunate than Augustus, better than Trajan!” The words of Eutropius should ring familiar, as they did in the late Roman Empire. Ironically Eutropius dedicated those words to Valens, who himself died on the battlefield concluding his 14-year reign. This was a relatively long reign for Roman Emperor standards with an average reign of 7.8 years (14 B.C. — A.D. 476) and even longer for emperors in the latter half of the Roman Empire (Average of 6.1 years A.D. 235 — A.D. 476). The Roman Empire encompassed the lands around the Mediterranean for 490 years (14 B.C. — A.D. 476) and it was ruled by 84 Emperors and even more who claimed to be. Everyone has heard of emperors such as Nero, Caligula, and maybe even Claudius. Some people even know the rather interesting ways that these emperors died ie. gruesome battle wounds, injury from hunting accidents, strangled in a bathhouse, or poisoned. The length of their reigns gives perspective on the decline of a once-powerful empire.
This was inspired by Randy Olson, a brilliant data scientist who created a similar visualization ( http://www.randalolson.com/2014/10/29/the-reigns-and-deaths-of-the-roman-emperors/ ). Data is becoming ever more important in the world, and as a lover of data visualization, I thought it fitting to continue the visualization until the end of the Roman empire in A.D. 476. For those who argue the empire continued until 1453, I continued until the reign of Justinian and the height of the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 565. The data itself is from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_emperors. I scraped and collected it using BeautifulSoup on Jupyter Notebook in Python.
A War-Like People
Figure 1 shows the distribution of the deaths of the 84 Roman emperors. Looking at the graph, most of the emperors did not die peacefully. Only 25% of them died of natural causes, while 68% of the Emperors died in a violent manner. I think this makes it rather ironic when the Romans call people such as the Celts or Germanic tribes Warlike. Eight of their emperors died in battle, and The Romans themselves killed 48% of their emperors (Assassinated and executed). This also provides insight into the Praetorian Guard, who were sworn to protect the emperor and formidable in battle. The Praetorians marched with Drusus to put down a rebellion during the reign of Tiberius, fought on the side of Otho at the battle of Bedriacum during the year of Four Emperors (A.D. 69), and aided Marcus Aurelius during the Marcomannic Wars (A.D. 166 until A.D. 180). It makes quite a statement that the Emperors even had to be wary of their own bodyguards. This adds weight to the argument that internal strife is one of the major factors that caused the Empire to decline.
Declined and Fell
Author Adrian Goldsworthy (http://www.adriangoldsworthy.com/) argues that political instability is the main reason for the collapse of the Roman Empire. While others argue for economic and outside forces destroying the Empire, the data we have would suggest that Goldsworthy has a point. Quick political turnover is common after A.D. 235 with the start of the Crisis of the Third Century. Goldsworthy notes that from A.D. 217 onwards there are only three decades without a civil war in the Roman Empire. In the last 100 years of the Empire, nine emperors are assassinated and five are executed. That is 66% of the last 21 emperors. In the last 50 years of the Empire, the average reign of an emperor is 5.1 years, and if you take out Valentinian III, an outlier who lasted 30 years, it drops the average to two years. We can compare these numbers to the eastern half of the Empire (figure 3). From the death of Theodosius I in A.D. 395 to the death of Justinian in A.D. 565 there are ten emperors over a span of 170 years, lasting an average reign of 17 years. It is also noteworthy that only two emperors in the East died from assassination. The Western Empire only lasted 81 years after the death of Theodosius I and within that time it had 14 different emperors and an average reign of 5.7 years. There is clear internal conflict that escalates as the Empire comes to an end. The fact that Emperors are around for so little time means that they have less time to do their actual job of keeping peace within the Empire and they are more focused on keeping themselves in power. Internal instability is a clear factor within the Empire and probably played a part in the decay of the West.
A final note from the data is that the number of violent deaths and high emperor turnover illustrates the strength of the Empires institutions. Through almost constant infighting, horrible emperors, and murdered officials the Empire survives for a long time.
Unique and Peculiar Deaths
Many of the Roman Emperors died in rather interesting ways: Commodus was strangled to death by his wrestling partner in a bathhouse, Pupienus and Balbinus were also killed in a bathhouse in Rome, Valerian was taken captive by the Parthians and died from ignominious slavery, Julian the Apostate died from being mortally wounded by a Spear fighting the Parthians, Maxentius drowned in the Tiber fighting Constantine, Theodosius II died from injuries suffered from falling off his horse during a hunting trip, and finally Basiliscus was starved to death by the next emperor. The Romans had their fun with their emperors.
Conclusions
Ultimately it is hard to look at the Roman Emperors from a data perspective because we have so little records of them. While the Romans themselves kept good records only .001% of ancient texts survived. If you ever have any questions about the data or want to see the code, feel free to send me an email. This is just a silly attempt to create a decent visualization using an interesting topic. If you are passionate or want to learn more about ancient history I plan on doing more analysis on Roman rebellions, Celtic tribes, and more.
