The Praetorian Guard and Imperial Succession: How Rome’s Elite Bodyguards Became Emperor-Makers, from Tiberius to Diocletian - Softcover

Myers, Eva

9798161297735: The Praetorian Guard and Imperial Succession: How Rome’s Elite Bodyguards Became Emperor-Makers, from Tiberius to Diocletian

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798161297735

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

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Eighty-seven days after he took the throne, the emperor of Rome was dead, killed by the soldiers whose duty was to protect him.
Within hours, two senators stood in the Praetorian camp, competing for the soldiers’ favor with offers of money. One of them walked out as emperor. Within two months he, too, was dead.

Who really made Rome’s emperors?

The Praetorian Guard began as a modest bodyguard, a few cohorts meant to keep one household safe without alarming a city that feared armed men. Then Tiberius gathered the soldiers behind a single wall at the edge of Rome. From that camp they watched the palace, the Senate and every weakness at court. They carried Claudius from the palace to their barracks and hailed him emperor. They abandoned Nero in a single night. They killed Galba in the Forum. They stood in Nerva’s palace and made an old emperor bare his throat.
Yet the soldiers could only act where they stood. Beyond the walls of Rome, the legions of the Rhine and the Danube had generals of their own, and a governor named Septimius Severus marched south to prove it. When he reached the city, he dismissed the old Guard and filled its camp with his own veterans.
What followed changed the balance of the empire. Emperors learned to fear their bodyguards and to rebuild them. Within decades, the decisive voice in choosing a ruler belonged to armies on distant frontiers, and the Praetorians heard the names of their masters from couriers.
Drawn from the accounts of Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Josephus and Herodian, this narrative history follows the Guard from Tiberius to Diocletian, through coups, mutinies and murders in the palace. By the end, you will understand what the soldiers could do in a single hour in Rome, what they never could, and why a throne with no rule for who may hold it belongs to whoever stands nearest.

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