Emperors, Usurpers, and the City of Rome

When the historian Sextus Aurelius Victor came to write (circa 360–361) his brief account of the reign of the third-century emperor Philip, he noted with approval how that emperor, after settling affairs in the East, had visited Rome, overseen the construction of a new cistern in Trastevere, and celebrated in 248 the city’s millennium with “games of all kinds.” Mention of this provided Victor with an opportunity to lament, however, that a century later in 348 the eleventh centenary of the city was celebrated “with none of the customary festivities.” For Victor this was emblematic of how concern for the city of Rome was diminishing day by day. This was no mere aside but a statement that, in Victor’s view of history, the cura Romanae urbis was one of the chief duties of an emperor. Indeed, such solicitude could distinguish even those emperors universally excoriated as bad to the core: not the least of the positive achievements of the quinquennium Neronis, for instance, had been that emperor’s embellishment of Rome; in like fashion, the early years of Domitian’s reign, before he too degenerated into cruelty, were marked by the completion of his father and brother’s building projects in the city.

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