Ah they and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a podcast on the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire.

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

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

Rianna Evans, a lecturer in ancient Mediterranean studies at Latrobe University.

This is episode XLI, Nerva.

The assassination of Domition leaves a Flavian-sized hole in the fabric of Rome.

Previous voids have been filled by a quick round of my army is bigger than yours but this time it's different.

The Senate acts and makes one of their own Nerva the new emperor.

Here's Rianna Evans.

Nerva was one of the last Italian emperors that we have.

He is the follow-up to Domission, as it were,

remember Domission was assassinated violently in 96 CE and he's emperor for a very short time

after that only for 16 months. Nervo was born just north of Rome and we know little about his early life in fact so little

that we have debate about when he was born exactly we have two different accounts

possibly 30 CE, possibly 35, so that's quite a big gap. The Tacitian scholar, Sir

Ronald Seym, thought that the later date was more consistent with the kind of roles that Nerva gets later

on, so he gets them at the right age for having been born in 35, but we just don't know.

But that would kind of make sense, wouldn't it, because they're very regimented on when you become, say,

a console?

These things start to dissolve a little bit, actually, in the imperial period.

So it had been fixed in the imperial period. So it had been fixed in the Republican period.

There were laws about it.

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