Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Rome ran the experiment repeatedly and often with catastrophic results
Sometimes the result was a monster. Sometimes a narcissist. Sometimes an incurious brute or a man who simply did nothing useful.
The outcomes varied. The damage did not.
After spending far too much time with Roman emperors, I have rankings.
Cruelty alone doesn’t count because Roman emperors were all terrible on that score. I’m grading on damage, instability, ego, incompetence, unpredictability, and wrecking the system.
Rome’s Most Disastrous Emperors Put on Trial
#10 Elagabalus
What to make of this eccentric, oversexed teenager? Elagabalus seemed determined to violate nearly every Roman expectation at once.
Almost overnight, he upended religious convention. Temples were stripped of sacred relics.
He was Rome’s first apostate. He elevated his Syrian sun god above Rome’s traditional deities and tried to reorganize Roman religion around a foreign cult centered on a black stone. Romans were appalled.
Historians were appalled too. Ancient writers needed little encouragement to believe every scurrilous rumor, embellish it, and pass it along as fact.
The unreliability of the sources is one reason Elagabalus ranks lower on this list than you might expect. It’s a situation of source quicksand.
But religion alone doesn’t put him on this list. It’s what happened in pursuit of power.
Elagabalus kicked off his reign with purges and executions, thinning the ranks of experienced administrators and eliminating perceived enemies. Loyalty became a moving target.
Some men died because they posed an actual threat. Others died because they might someday become disloyal.
Competent generals were especially vulnerable. In a deeply unstable empire, military talent looked suspiciously like competition.
Meanwhile, Elagabalus cultivated an image that bewildered Romans. He openly challenged expectations surrounding gender and masculinity in a society obsessed with martial virtue and traditional roles.
As he waged war on Rome’s spiritual life, Elagabalus settled into a life of hedonism. He cast about the empire for well-endowed men. He had naked women pull his chariot.
He indulged in expensive food (color coded), wine and above all sex like no other Roman. He allegedly smothered his dinner guests beneath a cascade of rose petals.
Modern historians have debated how to interpret all this. Ancient Romans simply viewed it as one more outrage.
Assiduously ignoring the practical business of ruling, his support evaporated. Even his grandmother, who had helped elevate him, began distancing herself.
Eventually the Praetorian Guard solved the problem in its customary fashion. Elagabalus was murdered at 18.
#9 Honorius
Honorius came to power as a child. He had plenty of talented people in his family tree. But, since the apple doesn’t always fall from the tree, he developed no talent himself.
Honorius was no competent general. Men like Stilicho filled that role.
But he was surrounded by jealous nobles who turned the emperor against his lieutenants. A whisper in the emperor’s ear? They ended up on the chopping block.
The emperor wasn’t exactly agreeable either, and he seemed to suffer from some real personality defects.
He was petty, indulgent, and paranoid. He had no courage, no desire to take charge and lead. He sat in luxurious isolation counting his pennies.
Honorius is not really defined by a litany of dastardly deeds. It’s more that he was indecisive. He just didn’t … do anything useful.
And that mattered because, at the time, the Roman Empire was collapsing everywhere.
His greatest talent may have been survival. He retreated to Ravenna, tucked safely behind marshes and walls, while the Western Empire frayed at the edges.
Britain slipped away. Frontiers cracked. Barbarian groups poured across the Rhine. Honorius seemed less like an emperor steering events and more like a spectator watching them unfold.
When he did intervene in politics, his actions were usually disastrous. In 410, the Goth king Alaric sacked Rome. It was the first time Rome had been sacked in almost 800 years.
One story perfectly captures Honorius’ reputation. A messenger rushed in to announce that “Rome has fallen.” Honorius reportedly panicked, thinking they meant his favorite chicken, also named Rome.
Relieved to discover it was only the city that had fallen, he calmed down. The tale is probably apocryphal. But people believed it because it felt true.
#8 Valentinian III
Like Honorius, Valentinian III came to power as a comically young child, just 6 years old. And the pair had a lot in common.
Valentinian III’s reign saw the incursions of Vandals and Huns and the slow dissolution of the Western Empire.
Fortunately for Rome, there was one capable adult in the room: Flavius Aetius. A brilliant military commander sometimes called “the last of the Romans,” Aetius managed the impossible task of holding together an empire that resembled a collapsing stage set.
His big mistake? Trusting Valentinian.
Valentinian ordered his murder, and killed the very man who had saved the empire from Attila and the Huns. According to one ancient writer, a court official later remarked to the emperor that he had “cut off his right hand with his left.”
The line may be embellished. But once again, people believed it because it felt true.
Yes, it was catastrophic military and political misjudgment. But it was driven by the same traits that characterize many of Rome’s worst emperors: paranoia, indulgence, court intrigue, vindictiveness, and hesitation.
Valentinian spent the second half of his reign in Rome, despite Ravenna being the capital of the Western Empire. He focused on personal comforts, barely bothering to govern.
Valentinian was assassinated in 455. By whom? None other than Aetius’ former bodyguards.
Poetic justice, perhaps.
His death ended the dynasty that had given the Western Empire a semblance of stability. With the Valentinian line gone, the Western Empire was entering its final act.
#7 Maximinus Thrax
After the catastrophes of Caracalla and Elagabalus, Rome needed stability. For a time, it found it in the reign of the young Alexander Severus and his regents.
But Maximinus Thrax had other ideas. Rather than loyally playing his role in the imperial system, he engineered the murder of the young emperor and claimed power for himself.
Once on the throne, he reopened Rome’s familiar cycles of purges and recrimination, which had only ever weakened the empire.
Maximinus was an unusual figure: physically enormous, socially an outsider, a military strongman, and deeply suspicious.
His size became the stuff of legend. Ancient writers practically turned him into a giant.
The Historia Augusta claims he stood over eight feet tall, which is almost certainly nonsense. But even after subtracting the mythology, most historians think there was a real man beneath the exaggeration.
And for someone so massive, he appears to have been profoundly insecure. He never quite escaped the stigma of his low birth or outsider status.
Maximinus was essentially a giant of a man with a social Napoleonic complex. And Rome paid for it.
He systematically eliminated people of rank, talent, and experience. But his fury didn’t stop there. Maximinus plundered towns, drained the treasury, exhausted the empire through constant warfare, and governed with remarkable brutality.
Eventually, his own soldiers had enough and killed him. No glorious battlefield death. No final stand. Just hungry troops deciding the experiment was over.
No one mourned the giant battering ram. How could they? He had all his friends and supporters put to death.
#6 Phocas
Phocas may not be a household-name villain like Nero or Caligula. But he left behind a melancholy distinction.
The Column of Phocas in the Roman Forum feels less like a monument to glory and more like Rome’s final architectural sigh. Often considered the last monumental addition to the forum, it stands almost as an epilogue to imperial Rome.
Phocas himself felt terminal. He seized power by marching on Constantinople and overthrowing Emperor Maurice, who had actually been a capable ruler.
He then offered Maurice no mercy, forcing him to watch the execution of his six sons before killing him as well.
Phocas made it clear from the start that power mattered more than policy. He ruled through fear, purges, and political terror, swiftly eliminating anyone he viewed as a threat. Meanwhile, invasions mounted, unrest simmered, and the empire’s problems deepened.
There is one wrinkle. Some historians argue that Phocas became a convenient villain, with later writers eager to blacken his reputation.
Even allowing for propaganda, however, Phocas was objectively dreadful. Unlike Nero or Commodus, whose worst impulses often revolved around vanity, spectacle, or self-indulgence, Phocas inflicted structural damage on an already weakened empire.
Ironically, the Romans still erected a monument in his honor. Yet the column feels less like a celebration than a hollow gesture toward a fading idea of imperial unity.
By the time it was completed, the message already felt outdated. The dream of a unified Roman Empire was slipping away, thanks partly to Phocas.
#5 Nero
Nero may be history’s most successful branding exercise. More than almost any Roman emperor, he escaped death and entered legend.
He’s become the stock villain of imperial Rome: decadent, cruel, sexually excessive, and spectacularly indifferent to human suffering.
The problem is that much of Nero’s reputation comes filtered through Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, all writing long after his death and from a senatorial tradition that despised him.
As a result, Nero often feels less like a person and more like a collection of lurid set pieces. Fiddling while Rome burned. Singing while disaster unfolded. Building a ludicrous palace over the ashes. The stories are simply too sensational not to survive.
Even after discounting exaggeration, though, Nero still earns a place on this list.
He had his mother killed. He executed a wife. He purged rivals and increasingly governed through fear and suspicion.
As restraints disappeared, Nero’s private impulses began bleeding into public life. Whether driven by insecurity, paranoia, or simple self-indulgence, his rule hardened over time.
But what truly horrified Rome’s elite may not have been cruelty. Plenty of emperors were cruel. Nero’s greater offense was taste.
He loved theater, poetry, music, and public performance. He seemed convinced that his destiny was not merely to rule Rome but to entertain it. To aristocratic Romans, this was deeply embarrassing.
Then came the Great Fire of 64 AD. Rumors spread that Nero had caused it, or serenaded the flames while the city burned.
The stories may be false, but they attached themselves to him permanently. His lavish Domus Aurea rising from the wreckage did not help matters.
When the Senate finally declared Nero a public enemy in 68 AD, the verdict reflected more than misrule.
Nero had violated Roman expectations of what an emperor should be. He fled Rome and took his own life at 30, lamenting that a “great artist” had died.
Even at the end, Nero seemed to think he had been cast in the wrong role.
#4 Caligula
Caligula was the best bred man in Rome, the only surviving son of Germanicus and the only surviving grandson of Augustus. Rome had already decided to love him. His arrival in the city was like a national celebration.
His story begins with a vein of sentimentality: the tiny boy in military boots trailing after soldiers and earning the nickname “Caligula.”
That sentimental image didn’t last long. Once in power, Caligula increasingly turned himself into a populist show pony.
He loved games, theatrical displays, chariots, and dramatic gestures. He was forever demanding attention and blurring the line between ruler and performer.
Then, came a severe life-threatening illness. He recovered, but seems to have emerged dramatically altered, convinced that enemies and conspiracies blanketed him.
His paranoia also became political. He didn’t just become suspicious in the abstract.
He began a vendetta against the Senate and elite class. His governing motto supposedly became: “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.”
Today, his name is shorthand for cruelty, debauchery, and depravity. But the character of Caligula remains one of Rome’s great historical debates. Was he history’s first victim of fake news?
Some defend him as a young man warped by a horrific childhood. His mother and brothers were starved, exiled, and murdered by Uncle Tiberius.
Then, Caligula himself was summoned to Capri, where he lived at the emperor’s side and reportedly witnessed Tiberius’ darker entertainments at Villa Jovis. Of course, he had to pretend that Tiberius hadn’t ruined his family just to survive.
Other historians paint a different picture: a brilliant but cynical and sadistic young man whose life was later spun into tales of lunacy after his death.
Caligula slept with his sisters, humiliated senators, turned the palace into a harem, and dressed as Jupiter and Venus. The stories are so bizarre they drift into dark comedy territory.
Still others argue that Caligula began well, but emerged transformed after a severe illness. As Suetonius put it: “The princeps is gone. The monster is coming.”
All of this may miss the larger point. Forget diagnosis.
It ultimately matters less why Caligula threatened to make his horse consul or marched soldiers to the sea to collect shells. The obsession with psychological explanations risks obscuring the bigger picture.
The bottom line is that Caligula raped, murdered, stole, degraded institutions, and destabilized the empire. In only four years, he emptied the treasury, unsettled Rome’s political order, and left chaos in his wake.
Maybe Caligula wasn’t entirely misunderstood. Even after stripping away exaggeration and hostile propaganda, something genuinely dark remains.
#3 Didius Julianus
In 193, the Praetorian Guard assassinated Emperor Pertinax for failing to hand over fat cash bonuses. They marched on the imperial palace, butchered him, decapitated him, and stuck his head on a lance.
And then came the truly sordid part.
Now that the path to the throne effectively ran through them, the Praetorians huddled in their barracks and decided to auction off the empire to the highest bidder.
Not govern it. Not protect it. Sell it.
Enter Didius Julianus. He emerged the winner, offering each guardsman a decade’s worth of pay. The Praetorians triumphantly marched him through the streets and demanded that the Senate ratify their purchase.
No one liked this. Especially not ordinary Romans. The entire spectacle provoked grief, shame, and outrage.
Even by Rome’s standards, this was naked corruption. The empire had become a commodity. The highest office in the known world was reduced to a sordid cash transaction.
Things unraveled quickly for Julianus. Civil war erupted, and his purchased empire proved to have a rather serious design flaw: no one respected him.
The winner was Septimius Severus. He marched on Rome and ran swords through the emperor.
Julianus’ vast fortune bought him exactly 66 days on the throne. Not a great return on investment.
#2 Caracalla
Caracalla takes silver in the Worst Emperor Games. He was a genocidal maniac. He likely had the highest body count of any emperor. His reign was soaked in blood.
He liked killing. Selectively. Indiscriminately. He wiped out families and entire populations. Anyone who might oppose him. Even his portrait busts evince a terrifying menace.
He wasn’t crazy or mad. He knew what he was doing; he was consolidating power.
He began by having the Praetorian guards slaughter his co-emperor and brother Geta and his supporters. And then had his brother’s memory damned forever.
He moved on to either executing, humiliating, or degrading senators.
He would order palaces built and then demolish them. He summoned senators at dawn and then simply failed to appear. Very Caligula-like.
And he was obsessed his army. But rather than protecting the city, they became insatiable, even conducting massacres on the emperor’s behalf. As for the Praetorians? He basically gave them a license to kill.
He was also obsessed with Alexander the Great to an odd degree. He wanted people to see him as the reincarnation of the ancient world’s greatest general.
He would adopt his clothing, military tactics, eastern motifs, and used god-like imagery on his coins. Alexander could’ve been behind his relentless expansion policy.
In 213, Caracalla fell ill. He had visions of his predecessor Commodus and allegedly came out of the ordeal impotent.
His next step? Kill anyone who was having sex. He accused vestal virgins of adultery and burned them alive. People entering brothels were killed, as were those accused of sex crimes.
Still, in 212, Caracalla did one thing historians mark as positive. He extended Roman citizenship to all free-born males in the Roman Empire. Free-born women were also given the same status as Roman women.
Was he trying to inclusive? Decidedly not. His motive was purely self-serving. As Roman citizens, these people had to pay taxes and those taxes went directly into his pocket.
His end was unsurprising. He was assassinated by a bodyguard.
In the final analysis, Caracalla’s true craft was death. It was systemized. Industrialized. A new high bar for the degradation of the empire
#1 Commodus
Commodus gets gold in the Worst Emperor Games. Not because he had the highest body count or inflicted the most structural damage.
Other emperors did worse on those metrics. Commodus earns the top spot because he turned the office of emperor itself into a circus.
Everyone has seen Gladiator, right? Joaquin Phoenix plays Commodus as manipulative, calculating, and almost clever.
But that version gives him too much credit. Commodus was no master schemer. Born to the purple and handed the empire by Marcus Aurelius, he inherited Rome at the height of its power.
He inherited gold. He turned it into iron and rust.
As the years passed, Commodus became increasingly erratic, theatrical, and detached from reality. He preferred gladiatorial fantasies to governing and spectacle to statesmanship. Increasingly, Rome existed to indulge Commodus rather than the other way around.
Then came a turning point. After an attempted assassination, paranoia began creeping in. Commodus increasingly saw treachery everywhere.
Suspicion hardened into fear, fear hardened into cruelty, and his reign took a darker, bloodier turn. He began a bloodletting Rome had not seen since Sulla and the late Republic.
Edward Gibbon observed that: “When Commodus had once tasted human blood, he became incapable of pity or remorse.”
And now we arrive at the point where the emperor finally stops pretending to be emperor and fully becomes … Hercules.
Draped in lion skins and carrying a club, Commodus battled beasts and gladiators in carefully staged contests where victory was never much in doubt.
The emperor had no interest in fair competition. He wanted adoration. He wanted spectacle. He wanted an audience.
Then he began naming things after himself. Rome became Colonia Commodiana. Months, institutions, even the empire itself increasingly bent toward the cult of Commodus.
For a creature such as Commodus, you might expect a spectacular ending. Fire. Thunder. A final burst of theatrical insanity.
No. He died in ignominy, poisoned and strangled in his bath.
Rome survived monsters. What it could not survive forever was unlimited power in the hands of a man who confused ruling with performance.
Honorable Mention: The Praetorian Guard
The prosecution would also like to submit an honorable mention: the Praetorian Guard. Not technically an emperor, but responsible for enough murders, coups, extortion schemes, and political disasters to earn consideration.
The Praetorian Guard were Rome’s chaos gremlins. They were leeches, sucking power and wealth from the body public. They did little to make Rome better and a lot to make Rome worse.
The Praetorians got their start under Augustus. Ostensibly, they were the emperor’s bodyguard.
The reality, though, is that, as the only armed troops allowed in the capital, they were in a unique position to project power and influence events. Too often they used that power for evil.
Assignment to the ranks was a top notch position. They had no competition. They were loyal to the emperor only as long as the cash kept flowing in. Otherwise, it was “off with their heads.”
No one could stand in their way, unless a angry emperor willingly marched troops into the city to cow the greedy bunch. When that did happen, they just sacrificed the emperor, collecting another big cash donative for their trouble.
Time and time agin, their self-serving, myopic actions worked in direct contradiction to the best interests of Roman society. Over time, they cared less about orders and duty and more about self-interest.
The assassination of Emperor Pertinax and subsequent auctioning off off the empire to the reich but hapless Didius Julianus was classic skullduggery of the highest order.
Perhaps the most bone-chilling example is Sejanus, Tiberius’ henchmen while he lounged in Capri. He wrote the script for how a prefect could manipulate an emperor and spread a culture of fear. This may partially account for the extreme paranoia of Tiberius’ later years.
Sadly, the bad mad guard wasn’t limited to Sejanus. Nero had Tigellinus. Commodus had Perennis.
Their legacy is stained with imperial blood. By the mid-3rd century, regicide was almost routine. It’s astonishing the Praetorians lasted three centuries before Constantine finally shut them down.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my worst Roman emperor Olympics. You may find these other Roman histories interesting:
- History of the Rise and Fall of Rome
- History of the Roman Emperors
- Historical Facts about Rome
- History of Augustus
- History of Nero
- History of Caligula
- History of Julius Caesar
- History of Hadrian
- Tiberius, the Reluctant Emperor
Pin it for later.
