Creating Tyrants in Ancient Rome: Character Assassination and Imperial Investiture

Abstract

Character assassination is not necessarily limited to the living. After all, someone’s “character”—his or her good reputation—can endure long after the person in question has passed on. The Roman Empire offers many examples of posthumous character assassination. Since it was a risky business to antagonize living emperors, critics usually aimed their arrows at those rulers who were safely dead. Yet that did not make their attacks any less vicious—rather the opposite. The character assassinations of Caligula and Nero, in particular, have been so successful that both emperors are still household names in any list of “worst tyrants throughout the ages.” Many of their colleagues did not fare much better. In this chapter, I will examine how and why Roman historians and biographers attacked the character of dead emperors in their works, presenting them to posterity as stereotypical tyrants. One event in an emperors career lent itself particularly well to this purpose—namely, his investiture with imperial power at the hands of the army, the Senate, and the people of Rome.