Roman Usurper - Assessment of Usurpers

Assessment of Usurpers

The only usurpers whose early life and specific circumstances of rebellion are known with reasonable certainty are the ones who later became emperors. The unsuccessful usurpation attempts inevitably ended with the rebel's execution, murder or suicide and subsequent erasure of his life from all records. This often causes confusion in the contemporaneous sources which are contradictory in the details of a certain rebellion. For instance the usurper Uranius is placed by some in the reign of Elagabalus and by others in the time of Gallienus.

Every new emperor, either legal or illegal, marked the beginning of his rule by minting new coins, both for the prestige of declaring oneself as Augustus and to pay the loyal soldiers their share. Thus coinage is often the only evidence of a determined usurpation. But the number of coin types with the effigy of a usurper might not be equal to the total number of usurpations. The presence of minting facilities certainly allowed short term usurpers to release their coinage, but on the other hand, a man capable of sustaining a rebellion for a couple of months in a remote area might fail to produce his own coins due to the lack of access to the instruments of minting technology.

Later assessment of usurpation events demonstrated that some are questionable or even fictitious. Gallienus was the emperor who suffered greatest number of usurpations, with a record of fourteen attempts (excluding the Gallic Empire secession) in fifteen years of rule. However, three of these are clear fabrications, either contemporaneous to show the invincibility of the emperor or added by later writers to embellish their own prose.