What is it about?
60% of emperors died violently. But scholars seem to have dismissed Roman imperial violence as essentially random -- just a fitting backdrop to the insanity and sexual innuendos of Rome’s Nero’s and Caligula’s. Careful multidisciplinary analysis, however, unearths previously unseen patterns involving waves of instability – this sheds light not only on the Roman Empire, but also on modern violence.
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Why is it important?
Is violence really contagious, or does modern media simply make it appear so? Clues come from 2000-year-old data from the Roman Empire. Despite a backdrop of apparent chaos and frequent imperial insanity, Roman violence was not random. Many hapless Emperors were caught in a ‘social trap’ leading to their assassinations or forced suicides. These occurred in waves or clusters. Violence and reign instability, apparently, begets more of the same – even before television and Twitter. Patterns uncovered here (based on cumulative effects of prematurely terminated reigns) also provide a simpler framework for understanding Imperial Rome’s rise and fall.
Perspectives
I am a Boston- and Italy-based physician-researcher trained in biological anthropology and public health. I first became interested in the transmission of violence while serving as a physician on a psychiatric ward. One night I was paged twice to the same floor in a psychiatric hospital to examine the aftermath of two fistfights involving different sets of combatants. I had just been reading a history of Imperial Rome when it dawned that this bloody period of history could serve as a ‘virtual laboratory’ for studying transmission of violence (albeit over a different course of time!).
Dr Ashok Nimgade
massachussets general hospital
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Instability and violence in Imperial Rome: A “laboratory” for studying social contagion?, Complexity, October 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/cplx.21839.
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