Why were so many roman emperors insane or just completely inept at ruling...

Why were so many roman emperors insane or just completely inept at ruling? Where they just unlucky or was the fault with Rome itself?

lead in wine

Probably incest as well

Too much propaganda, actually.

Nero did literally nothing wrong.

How come?

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

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

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

I don't understand why emperors didn't just abolish the Senate altogether. It had no real purpose besides muh senatorial tradition.

Fuck Augustus and his autism

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?

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

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?"

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

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

Fuck now I really want to read Augustus' fucking diary

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.

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

...

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

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.

Inshallah

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.

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?

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