Why were so many roman emperors insane or just completely inept

>>2004205
lead in wine

>>2004234
Probably incest as well

Too much propaganda, actually.

>>2004248
How come?

>>2004205
Because senators are butthurt little babies who took any chance to vilify all emperors even the good ones and blew up any little gossip or court talk to show what incompetent bastards they were

>>2004275
Can you blame them? They had more power before that Emperor thing started.

>>2004262
I think hes saying many "bad" emperors were okay during their reign but had their reputations besmirched after they died.

>>2004282
ah, makes sense I guess. But wouldn't there be at least some neutral sources? Like someone countering rumours about Caligula fucking his sister or whatever if it really didnt happen?

>>2004287
Had he abolished the senate the butthurt had been overwhelming. I dont see why later emperors didnt get rid of it though

>>2004311
Lets be honest here, the story about sister fucking isn't so much "wow he fucks his sister hes a weirdo." Its meant to be seen as "wow he fucks his sister like those Eastern weirdos." Like saying "Obama is a Muslim, can we really trust him as POTUS?"

>>2004311
I always find it interesting that there are many recorded instances of emperors writing autobiographies, like augustus, claudius(he also wrote a bunch of othe crap), Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius and so on but today only senatorial accounts survive, really makes my noggin throttle
It'd be really interesting to see entire accounts of these peoples lives instead of a couple pages of biased senatorial crap

>>2004343
Makes you wonder if people 2000 years from now will think Obama was a muslim becuase of right-wingers

>>2004353
Fuck now I really want to read Augustus' fucking diary

>>2004366
Nah, the senate could get away with destroying documents because they were hard to mass produce and they were part of a small literate group.

Its easier to destroy a handful of scrolls and write your own than it is to scrub information today.

>>2004366
Well Obama is a Muslim. He shouldn't have had to hide it, but he is one.

File: 1474395464816-tv.gif (403KB, 240x184px) Image search: [Google]

403KB, 240x184px

>>2004458

>>2004205
>insane
No. Stop believing the smear campaigns written by butthurt patricians.

>>2004353
>>2004377
I really want to read Julian the Apostate's rebuttle against Christianity. It was apparently so good and the arguments so hard to refute that it was later destroyed on that basis.

>>2004507
Inshallah

>>2004672
>>2004377
>>2004353

i really wonder why an imperial archive only emperors could touch wasn't made, it's something they could have seen as useful knowing the way things worked.

a musseum for that matter, too, one that contained artifacts and documents.

>>2004287
Because the entire premise of Augustus's reign was that he was a preserving the old ways, maintaining the senate in its archaic function to act as a facade of democratic rule when in practice all of the real decisions were being made in the court of the Emperor and the praetorian guard functioned as his secret police.

Augustus was careful to maintain the facade of public rule because his predecessor Julius had been murdered for making too public a display of his authority.

They never abolished the senate because they never needed too. Over the course of about 2 centuries their posts grew more powerless and ceremonial as the court of Caesar took over a larger and larger percentage of government functions.As early as the reign of Aurelian Emperors were ruling like autocratic despots in practice, but it wasn't until the reign of Diocletian that naked autocracy was officially institutionalized.

Related question:
How could anyone trust the praetorian guard after they killed so many emperors?

>>2004760
They probably couldn't. One of the reasons it was disbanded I guess