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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 4554649, member: 72790&quot;][ATTACH=full]1127776[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1127777[/ATTACH] To establish who was &quot;the worst&quot; there must be a definition of &quot;the bad&quot; and then see who committed more of those bad behaviors than any other. No doubt some of these emperors engaged in behaviors we might think are pathologically evil. Even decent Romans might have seen these behaviors as revolting by their own standards, but if these emperors did little more than scandalize the populace without actually harming the average citizen, just how bad does that make him? Tiberius terrorized the Roman Senate but had been an excellent army commander. He may have annoyed the urban populace by cutting back on bread and circus spending, but left a huge surplus (to be quickly squandered by his successor). Whatever he did in retirement on Capri affected few off that island. Was he a bad emperor, let alone one of the worst? I would define a good emperor as one who left the Empire, by his efforts, in better shape than he found it and a bad emperor as one who did not. Augustus was not the kind of person I would like living next door to me, and he could be as ruthless as any human can be, but by his actions, Rome was far better off in 14 AD than it was in 31 BC, and mostly by his efforts. Some of the later 4th and 5th century emperors were very religious but fat lot of good their impeccable morals did for the Empire. Some were just weird and noxious to those near them, like Elagabalus, and had he lived long enough his strange predilections might have done great harm to the Empire, but to the average Roman farmer in Gaul or the average merchant in Carthage he was harmless. I don&#039;t want to push this too far, but knowing what we do about the private lives of some of the more skilled and talented statesmen of history, I would not be too censorious on them for their earthly peccadilloes, if they did not impinge on their ability to otherwise well guide the ship of state. Benjamin Franklin comes to mind. My guess to the answer of the OP&#039;s choice of Elagabalus is that his behavior has seemed outré both to us and contemporary Romans and to those of today&#039;s more conventional religious scruples, perhaps, immoral, and by today&#039;s legal standards quite possibly criminal, and that may make him a bad emperor but comparing his behavior to that of &quot;how many had to die to make Caesar great&quot; emperors, I hardly think the worst. For those who might have found the question of the OP to be unusual or too conjectural,&nbsp; I would cite Plutarch who thought that the study of historical biography had as one of its benefits, setting up standards of acceptable or disreputable behavior. Let me put it this way. When teaching young people history I tried to accentuate the positive, to spend more time on Hippocrates than Alcibiades, more on Cicero than Caligula and nothing on Elagabalus. The coin at the top is one of the scarcer coins of Aquilia Severa from the mint of Tyre, the second and fourth wife of Elagabalus. If anyone had cause to see him as a bad emperor, it was her.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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