Acknowledgments

I began working on this project in early 2013, when teaching a course on the Roman empire at the University of Queensland.Engaging with both Fergus Millar's magisterial The Emperor in the Roman World and Keith Hopkins's review of that book, "Rules of Evidence, " prompted me to start thinking about how to write a different history of Roman emperorship.I apologize to my Queensland students (and to those who took later incarnations of the course at Macquarie University and the Australian National University [ANU]) for my constant refrain: "But did it matter who the emperor was?"The original manuscript was completed in December 2021, after which I assumed a new leadership role at the ANU.This meant the process of revision slowed considerably, but it also gave me valuable time to refine and rethink ideas and arguments.During this book's long gestation period, I have benefited from the support of numerous institutions and individuals.I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE150101110), and to the research assistance provided by Nicola Linton and Charlotte Mann.The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded me an Experienced Researcher Fellowship, which I held at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, generously supported by Hartmut Leppin.These funding bodies gave me precious reading and thinking time to engage with both the range of ancient sources (spanning some eight centuries) and the modern scholarship necessary to construct this book and its arguments.I would like to thank colleagues at the University of