Are they then welcome to emperors of Rome a podcast about the rulers of the ancient Roman Empire?

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

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

This is episode XLV-I-I-I-I-I-I-Trygian optimist Princheps. We've heard how Trajan came to become a great and respected military leader and how he took on Dacia and finally bought them to heal.

But Trajan was more than just a man of the sword. He was a man of the people and a man of the Senate.

And now we look at how he cemented that reputation of being

the greatest emperor since Augustus and the one that everybody has to live up to. He's

Rianna Evans. Trajan is widely regarded as an excellent emperor. He was sort of the polar opposite of all of those bad

emperors we've listed, so didn't do the things like that Nero and Domition did like randomly

apparently killing senators being very suspicious and paranoid like

demission being unfair not being worried about military or civil works.

So he's the opposite of all of that.

He does those things.

He behaves in the way that at least the Roman elite

seem to expect an emperor to behave.

So they who provide our admittedly rather thin sources

for this period seem to be very happy with Trajan's behavior.

So we know that Pliny, for example, was extremely happy with Trajan's

behavior, but what do we know about what other people thought specifically?

Well, of course, Pliny wrote the Panagiricus and that's that's got to be all good news hasn't it?

It's got to be all praise of the emperor. Our other main source Diyo really begins his

description of Trajan's reign with a long passage that describes

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