It's Good to be the King ... or Emperor

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Roman Emperor
0:00:23
The Roman Emperor was the ruler of the Roman State during the imperial period (starting at about 27 BC). The Romans had no single term for the office: Latin titles such as imperator (from which English emperor ultimately derives), augustus, caesar and princeps were all associated with it. In practice, the Emperor was supreme ruler of Rome and supreme commander of the Roman legions.

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Love the torrid lives of the Roman Rulers?
0:00:37
Read this book about the scandalous history of Rome's Caesars.

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Augustus
0:00:59
While his paternal family was from the town of Velitrae, about 25 miles from Rome, Augustus was born in the city of Rome on September 23, 63 BC. He was born at Ox Heads, which was a small property on the Palatine Hill, very close to the Roman Forum. An astrologer had given a warning to his father. However, his father decided to keep the child despite the warning (rather than leave the child in the open to be eaten by dogs).

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Republican Roman Reconstruction
0:01:37
"I found Rome a city of mud bricks, and left her clothed in marble." Perhaps the report of Augustus´ (33 BCE - 14 CE) boast is accurate, but the Roman ruins and the remaining structures we see today are not like the enduring mud-brick pueblos of the Navajo Indians, nor are they often marble, if they are as old as the Republic. What happened to those marble buildings? What were Roman buildings really like before the Empire?

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Caligula
0:01:52
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, more commonly known by his nickname Caligula, was the third Roman Emperor who reigned from 16 March 37 until his assassination on 24 January 41. Caligula was the third emperor of the Roman Empire, and a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which descended from Augustus.

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Caligula's Death Scene
0:02:27
This is the infamous "Caligula" starring Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud. This is from a Beta tape of mine from about 1989. This is from the Vestron 160 minute cut of the film.

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Trajan
0:02:35
Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus, commonly known as Trajan (September 18, 53 – August 9, 117), was a Roman Emperor who reigned from 98 until his death in 117. Born Marcus Ulpius Traianus into a nonpatrician family[1] in the Hispania Baetica province (modern day Spain), Trajan rose to prominence during the reign of emperor Domitian, serving as a general in the Roman army along the German frontier, and successfully crushing the revolt of Antonius Saturninus in 89.

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Trajan Forum in Rome
0:02:47
Pictures of the beautiful and famous forum built by Emperor Trajan.

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Interested in the statues you see?
0:02:58
Roman Art from the Louvre is now closed at the IMA, but you can still visit the online image gallery.

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Underground Art
0:03:25
Check out the next Roman Art Webisode.

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Channels: Ancient ArtExhibitionsRoman Art

Powerful, brilliant, greedy, and maniacal: a sampling of words that could be used to describe the range of Roman emperors. Take a peek into the over-the-top lives of men who shaped Western civilization, for better and for worse.

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00:00:15 At the top of the Roman religious structure, you have the worship of the emperor,

00:00:23 and he becomes the head of the state.

00:00:25 In the several hundred years of the Roman Empire, many emperors were not appointed with that fanfare. Sometimes, there was a knife in the middle of the night.

00:00:33 You have to be kind of an ambitious and aggressive kind of person, I think, to be in power. And then you've got to worry about everybody else who thinks that they would do a better job than you would in that position.

00:00:41 So, I think they have to make hard decisions, and I think, you know, commit acts that would not necessarily be considered moral, shall we say.

00:00:56 The emperor, Augustus, was the first Roman emperor. He was struggling to figure out how to portray himself

00:01:02 and so what Augustus tried to do is become the patron to the entire empire of Rome, that everybody would be his friend, his relative, or his client, in a certain way. So that meant that he was sort of a godfather

00:01:13 and early in his career, he wasn't so benevolent. He eliminated anybody who dared to defy him.

00:01:19 It seems to be that once Augustus took out those main offenders, he ruled pretty well. When he received the city of Rome, as the story goes,

00:01:33 it was a city of mud and he left it a city of marble.

00:01:37 Augustus, sort of, created a sense of propriety. He was really trying to show that this power sharing relationship between the emperor and the ruling class could work.

00:01:48 Tiberius kind of went along with it, but then Caligula decided, "Well I'm going to find out what it really means to be an emperor." Supposedly, he built a catwalk across the tops of the Temples of Forum, so he can go from his house in the Palatine

00:01:58 to the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter and would go in through a window and sit on the shoulder of this giant statue of Jupiter and, kind of, talk to him, talk to him, whisper in his ear and supposedly slap him in the head from time to time.

00:02:10 And, sure enough, over time he showed himself to be a cruel emperor.

00:02:13 Caligula is known to have said, "I wish all the Roman people had a single neck." Basically, so he can take them out in one single blow.

00:02:22 Needless to say, Caligula is eventually assassinated.

00:02:28 Trajan is part of an entire series of emperors that are known as the good emperors.

00:02:33 And it was under his reign as emperor that Rome reached its largest extent going from today's United Kingdom all the way to Mesopotamia on the Persian Gulf.

00:02:42 We can see his hand in the city of Rome in the Forum of Trajan, the great market of Trajan, massive building programs,

00:02:51 but also there is this other side to it, which is he committed a lot of resources to the military and that was one thing the empire really couldn't afford, in the long run, is this enormous military establishment.

00:03:02 The personifications of Roman emperors came in many forms and for the first time in the world, there was a single person who knit together across boundaries and civilization

00:03:12 and since then, obviously, we've had pretenders to that throne in modern history, but no one as influential or powerful as many of the Roman emperors.