About this
document
About this
document
This website aims to provide biographical and historical information about Roman emperors in both the East and the West from Augustus through Constantine XI Palaeologus. An ongoing project about half completed as of January 2000: http://www.roman-emperors.org/ 1
Editorial Board Director (Praeses Senior): Richard D. Weigel; System Administrator: G. Ginty.
Site Sponsor: Salve Regina University (Newport, RI).
Audience: Students of ancient history at all levels.
Peer review: Individual contributions are vetted by six regular staffers and an editorial board composed of twenty-one scholars in the United States and one each in Australia, Canada, and Germany.
Availability and Permanence: No indication of site's permanence. E-mail contact link provided for the site, and "all queries and suggestions" are directed to Richard D. Weigel (e-mail link).
Publication date: site copyright July 1996; essay authors hold copyright to their individual articles (year of copyright and exact date of most recent updating indicated).
Reviewer: James P. Holoka, Foreign Language Department, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197; e-mail: mailto:fla_holoka@online.emich.edu
Review date: 21 January 2000.
The expressed purpose of De Imperatoribus Romanis is "to supply detailed information of a high scholarly quality on the emperors of Rome … unavailable elsewhere on the Internet. DIR is intended to be an international scholarly endeavor which will serve as an online resource for scholars and students of all ages."
The heart of the project is an "Imperial Index" (either chronological or alphabetical, and optionally accessible in frames) of all Roman and Byzantine emperors (and many pretenders [e.g. Nymphidius Sabinus, Septimius Vaballathus]) up to the fall of Constantinople. Those figures in the index for whom profiles have been completed are hyperlinked to biography files, each featuring an image of the subject (head or bust, coin, or statue).
Thus far, twenty-seven contributors have written 150 biographical sketches (including two for Augustus). These are consistently well informed by careful review of the primary and secondary literature, often tracked in footnotes; despite some stylistic variation from one author to another, all articles are lucid, judicious, and enlightening. There are some flaws and oddities in the relative scale of articles: for example, Titus gets about three times the space of Nero. (This may be the result of an unstated editorial policy to allow great leeway to the individual biographers.) And one expects that such minor problems as occasional typos and inconsistencies in bibliographic format will be ironed out as the biographies are updated. Accompanying bibliographies are not exhaustive, but, like the bodies of the articles themselves, provide much more extensive guidance than do, for example, corresponding entries in OCD3. For the longer Augustus article, there are sixty-eight listings, for Nero fourteen, for Titus twenty-one. In general, the biographies are closer in size and scope to items covered in Der kleine Pauly than in OCD3. The long Augustus runs about 20,000 words, Titus about 3000 (roughly equivalent to 80 and 12 pages respectively of double-spaced typescript at 250 words per page).
The great majority of the completed biographies belong to the four centuries of the "United Roman Empire"; from Augustus through Elagabalus, only five emperors are missing. For the "Western Empire" (395-476), all twenty-three emperors have been finished. For the "Eastern Empire" (395-1453), the least completed section, twenty-five biographies nearly all fall between 400 and 700.
Some thirty additional figures are forthcoming in "pending essays" by seven contributors. New contributions are solicited at the site, and there are detailed instructions about submitting proposals and completed articles (formatting issues, etc.).
Peripheral enhancements: An "Index of Imperial Stemmata" provides family trees for seventeen of the more important dynasties. Numismatic information is accessed via a link to the "Virtual Catalogue of Roman Coins" maintained by Robert Cape at Austin College; hundreds of images of imperial (and some Republican) coins and legend transcriptions are available. An "Antique and Medieval Atlas" maintained by Christos Nüssli provides zooming city-maps of Rome and Constantinople, topographical maps reproduced from the "Interactive Ancient Mediterranean Project" at North Carolina, and a series of colorful maps showing "the political status of Europe, Africa, and Asia at the beginning of each century from the First Century to the Fourteenth Century." G. Nathan provides fifteen hyperlinks to other websites of interest to DIR users. Finally, Hugh Elton adds an "Imperial Battle Index"; still in an early stage of evolution, it includes twenty-three two- or three-sentence descriptions of major battles and maps showing the location of seventy-two specific battles (cartography by Nüssli).
This well-conceived and useful scholarly tool is neatly suited to its electronic medium. The accurate textual material, produced by reliable authorities, is being regularly revised, kept continuously up-to-the-minute, and embellished with useful graphics including high quality maps and images of coins and sculptures. Students of ancient Rome, from undergraduates through professional scholars, should immediately add this site to their internet browser's bookmark collection.