Rome's Worst Emperors: Ranked by Pure Insanity

The year is 39 AD. A Roman senator receives a summons to the palace. He arrives, heart hammering, and is led not to a throne room but to a stable. There, draped in a consul's toga, munching hay from a golden manger, stands a horse. His name is Incitatus. And the man who owns him — Emperor Caligula — is seriously considering making him a priest. Maybe a consul. The senator keeps his face perfectly still. Laughing at this moment would be fatal. Everything at this court is fatal.

This is Rome at its most unhinged. The empire that gave the world roads, law, aqueducts, and architectural genius also produced a staggering number of rulers who were, by any reasonable measure, completely out of their minds. What follows is a ranking — not of incompetence, but of sheer, documented, historical insanity. These men held absolute power over millions of lives, and they used it in ways that still make historians blink.

5. Commodus: The Emperor Who Thought He Was Hercules

Start with Commodus, son of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who must be spinning in his mausoleum. Commodus ruled from 177 to 192 AD and spent much of that time convinced he was the reincarnation of Hercules. Not metaphorically. He renamed Rome 'Commodiana,' renamed the months after his own titles, and dressed in a lion skin for official portraits.

He also fought in the Colosseum — which Romans considered deeply shameful for an emperor — slaughtering animals and disabled people he had dressed as mythological monsters. He once beheaded an ostrich mid-fight, then walked over to the senatorial seats and wordlessly held up the severed head, as if to say: you're next. The senators reportedly had to stuff laurel leaves in their mouths to stop themselves from laughing. He was strangled by a wrestler in his bath on New Year's Eve, 192 AD, after his own inner circle decided they'd had enough.

4. Elagabalus: Rome's Most Transgressive Teenager

Elagabalus became emperor at fourteen. He died at eighteen. In between, he managed to shock even the famously unshockable Romans. Born in Syria around 203 AD, he was a priest of the sun god Elagabal before his grandmother's political scheming put him on the throne. He immediately imported his god to Rome, demanding the deity take precedence over Jupiter — the Roman equivalent of moving to a new town and telling everyone their religion is wrong.

Ancient sources describe him hosting banquets where guests were buried under rose petals released from the ceiling — so many petals that some guests suffocated. He reportedly replaced the Praetorian Guard's commander with a dancer, appointed a charioteer as his chief minister, and asked doctors whether he could be surgically altered to present as female. The Senate had him murdered at eighteen, his body dragged through the streets and thrown into the Tiber. His reign lasted four years. It felt much longer for the Romans living through it.

3. Nero: Artist, Arsonist, Matricide

Nero is perhaps the most famous monster on this list, and the accusations against him are so extreme that historians still debate which ones are true. What we know: he had his own mother, Agrippina the Younger, murdered in 59 AD — after a spectacular failed attempt involving a collapsing boat designed to drown her. She swam to shore. He sent assassins instead. He also killed his first wife, Octavia, and kicked his pregnant second wife, Poppaea, to death — or so the sources claim.

The Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD burned for six days, destroying ten of the city's fourteen districts. Ancient sources claimed Nero sang and played the lyre while it burned — the origin of 'fiddling while Rome burns.' Modern historians are skeptical he set the fire deliberately, but he did use the cleared land to build his Domus Aurea, a golden palace of obscene scale. He blamed Christians for the fire and launched a persecution. He also fancied himself a great artist, forcing audiences to sit through his poetry recitals and lyre performances for hours — locking the doors so no one could leave.

2. Domitian: The Paranoid Perfectionist

Domitian doesn't get the press of Caligula or Nero, but he deserves his place near the top. He ruled from 81 to 96 AD and began reasonably enough before sliding into a terror that made Rome's elite live in constant dread. He had senators executed on flimsy pretexts, exiled philosophers, and banned astrologers from Rome — mostly because they kept predicting his death and he found it unsettling.

He also insisted on being addressed as 'Dominus et Deus': Lord and God. He is said to have spent hours alone in his palace catching flies and stabbing them with a sharpened stylus. When visitors asked if anyone was with the emperor, an attendant replied with perfect Roman deadpan: 'Not even a fly.' He was assassinated in 96 AD by a conspiracy that included his wife, his chamberlain, and members of the Praetorian Guard. Even the people closest to him wanted him dead.

1. Caligula: The Emperor Who Declared War on the Sea

No one tops Caligula. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus ruled from 37 to 41 AD — only four years, but they were four years that Rome never fully recovered from psychologically. He began popular. The people loved him; he freed unjustly imprisoned citizens, abolished an unpopular tax, and staged spectacular games. Then, a few months in, something changed. He fell seriously ill. When he recovered, a different man walked out of the sickroom.

What followed reads like a fever dream. He reportedly had sex with the wives of dinner guests, then returned to the table and rated their performance aloud. He executed people for sport, executed a man for being too good-looking, and reportedly made a senator who annoyed him run beside his chariot in a toga for miles. He declared war on Neptune, god of the sea, marching his legions to the English Channel and ordering them to collect seashells as 'spoils of the ocean.' He built a temporary bridge of boats across the Bay of Baiae — nearly two miles long — just to ride across it on horseback, because a soothsayer had once said he had no more chance of becoming emperor than riding a horse across that bay.

He declared himself a living god, installing a statue of his own head on the body of Jupiter in the temple. He may have planned to make Incitatus, his horse, a consul — though some historians believe this was a calculated insult to the Senate rather than genuine madness. The distinction feels academic. He was stabbed thirty times by Praetorian Guards in a palace corridor in January 41 AD. The Senate briefly considered restoring the Republic. They didn't. But the fact that they even discussed it tells you everything about what four years of Caligula had done to Rome's faith in its own system.

Two thousand years later, his name is still a synonym for tyranny. That's a legacy, of a sort.

Dive deeper into the full cast of Rome's tyrants and visionaries in Roman Emperors: The Tyrants & Geniuses Who Built & Destroyed the Roman Empire — every chapter reads like this. Get the book on Amazon →