Ahve, and welcome to Empress of Rome, a podcast about to say it with me, the rulers of the

ancient Roman Empire.

I'm your host Matt Smith Smith and with me as always is Dr.

R. R. E Evens, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode L, Historia Agusta.

Before we delve headlong into the story of Hadrian,

we take a moment to look at our main source from here on out.

And brace yourself, this is going to get messy. Here's Rianna Evans.

The Historia Augusta is a series of biographies of emperors, a bit like the

biographies that we've already had with Suetonius, but unfortunately not

starting straight after Suetonius.

It starts three emperors after demission with Hadrian, so starting in the early second century and goes up to

the emperors in the late third century.

So it's covering just over 150 years of emperors. We do have a gap right in the middle of the

third century with four emperors missing. It's biographies that we don't know very

much about the origin of. So we call it the

historical Augusta, the Augustin history. We can't give it an author's name because

we don't know who the author was.

The historian Augusta, however, probably isn't what it was called in antiquity.

The titles first used in the early 1600s.

So it's a modern, relatively modern scholar who invented that name for

this series of biographies. There are very confusing body of texts as we'll see.

...