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Message:: [QUOTE="Sallent, post: 3075097, member: 76194"]All emperors had mental health issues. Kind of hard not to when you are placed in a position of absolute power, then are told constantly that there are threats against your life. Some of these threats are real and some imagined, but if you fail to act you know from the experience of your predecessors that assassins could hiding in every corner waiting to kill you....so you start to become paranoid over even the most ridiculously sounding plots. After a while you start to see a knife around every corner, and poison on every plate of food or goblet of wine....Wait, did I just see my sister whispering to a senator? What kind of treachery are they plotting? Then there is the fact that you are expected to go out and commit genocide against a barbarian tribe or two once in a while in order to show your military strength, and when you are home you are expected to throw games for the population (and attend those games) and watch hundreds of people being hacked to death or eaten by animals day in and day out, sometimes for 100 days in a row. Some emperors managed all of this better than others, but I think it was all a matter of various degrees of insanity ...namely some of them could deal with the paranoia and the personality disorders far better than others (and there you have the difference between a "good emperor" and "bad emperor.")[/QUOTE]