Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome, episode 75, The Forgotten Sun.

First of all, sorry for last week's cliffhanger ending, somehow the final cut got truncated

when I wasn't looking.

Luckily or maddeningly or something, it only dropped the last eight words, so for those

of you who haven't gone back and downloaded the corrected version, which is posted by

the way, I'll just go ahead and spoil the ending.

Cenitorial historians were doing their best to confine the mission to the dustbin of

history, then the music place.

That was all that was left, sorry about that.

But as much as the senate tried to literally purge the mission from the collective consciousness,

passing in edic, damning his memory just days after the emperor was assassinated, and then

proceeding to expunge his name from public records and monuments, the mission rained

for too long and had too much of an impact to simply be ignored.

So failing to erase his memory completely, sympathetic historians of senatorial rank ran

a fairly uniform smear campaign against him that was picked up and promulgated by later

church scholars who further identified the evil demission as an early prosecutor of

Christians.

So for the better part of 1800 years, the perception that demission was one of the worst emperors

in Roman history persisted.

But in the 20th century, his memory has been rehabilitated some, most notably by Brian

Jones' The Emperor Domission, and he is now understood to be an undeniably autocratic

ruler, but one who was far more effective and rational than early sources give him credit

...