Free Republic

Many years ago, I wrote a brief post on the birthday of the brief-reigning Roman Emperor Claudius II Gothicus. This post was little more than a summary of his reign (from AD 268-270) based on the scanty sources we have for that period during the so-called Crisis of the Third Century. At the end, however, I included a notice about the supposed familial link between Claudius and Constantine. Claudius has been on my mind a bit lately, and so I decided to ask my preferred AI bot what it thought of this thesis. The initial result didn't surprise me: Constantine...

Sometimes history is history, sometimes history is a harbinger and sometimes history is current events. The story of Roman Emperor Aurelian is all three… Aurelian took power in 270 AD. The previous 35 years had been nothing short of a disaster for the Empire on a variety of fronts. The trouble began with the (well deserved) assassination of Commodus in 192 AD. Always a force to be reckoned with, from that point forward the army required ever increasing bribes to remain loyal. Not surprisingly, the power of the army increased accordingly. At the same time, the treasury had been reducing...