BEING THE ROMAN EMPEROR WAS HARD WORK. I read Michael Grant’s THE TWELVE CAESARS many years ago. One of the things I remembered from it is Grant’s opinion that Roman emperors worked hard. Grant says in his concluding chapter that: “…the labours that a successful emperor found himself compelled to undertake were not only terrifyingly responsible but enormously extensive and never ending.” The excessive work broke the health of all of the twelve first emperors.
Grant says that: “Lord Acton might usefully, though less elegantly, have rewritten his assertion in the following terms: ‘Overwork combined with fear tends to corrupt and continual overwork and fear corrupt absolutely….'”