The Night Three Roman Emperors Were Assassinated Before Sunrise (238 AD)

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Imagine you were standing in the Roman Forum on the morning of July 29th, 238 AD. The marble beneath your sandals is still cold from the night before. The sun hasn't risen yet. The city smells of woodsmoke, horsed, and something else.

[00:00:16]Something metallic and wrong that drifts down from the Ptorian camp on the hill.

[00:00:20]You don't know it yet, but in the span of a single night, Rome just went through three emperors. Not three emperors in 3 months. Not three emperors in three years. Three emperors one night. And the man responsible for all of it, the man who pulled the strings from inside a fortress of stone and iron while the rest of Rome slept, never once had to get his own hands dirty. His name was Maximus Thrax. He was the first emperor in Roman history who had never set foot in the Senate. He was also by most accounts nearly 7 ft tall, built like a siege engine, and completely illiterate. He wore his wife's bracelet on his finger because no ring in the empire was large enough for his hand. He was also, as of this morning, a dead man. He just didn't know it yet. But to understand how three men died before the sun came up on July 29th, you need to go back to where this chaos began. Not in Rome. In a small sweltering town in North Africa, where a 79-year-old tax collector got pushed just a little too far. Welcome to 238 AD. Rome's worst year and somehow also one of its most fascinating. His name was Gordian Marcus Antonius Gordianis Sronianis to be precise because Romans were constitutionally incapable of keeping names short. He was 79 years old and he was the governor of the Roman province of Africa proconsularis which today is roughly Tunisia and coastal Libya.

[00:01:48]Gordian was not a warrior. He was a poet, a scholar, a man who hosted elaborate dinner parties and reportedly owned 62 concubines, each representing a different day of his schedule. He had spent his entire career doing exactly what Roman aristocrats were supposed to do. Accumulate titles, avoid scandal, and survive long enough to retire in comfort. But in the early weeks of 238 AD, Maximus Thrax, the emperor, was squeezing the provinces dry.

[00:02:17]The tax collectors working under Maximinus were not subtle. They confiscated private property. They stripped temples. They bullied landowners, arrested anyone who complained, and executed local leaders who pushed back too hard. In the province of Africa, the locals finally snapped. A group of young men, sons of wealthy land owners who had watched their family's estates stripped by imperial agents, killed the procurator, which is a fancy Roman term for the emperor's chief tax enforcer. They then marched to Gordian's villa, >> dragged him out in the middle of the afternoon, and declared him emperor on the spot. Gordian did not want to be emperor. He said so explicitly.

[00:03:00]He reportedly wept. Nobody cared. Within hours his son also named Gordian because again Romans was declared co-emperor.

[00:03:09]Gordian I and Gordian II a father and son imperial team. Both of them deeply reluctant. Both of them aware that challenging Maximus Thrax was roughly equivalent to challenging a grizzly bear to a fist fight. The Senate in Rome who had despised Maximus from the beginning erupted with relief. They formally recognized the two Gordians as legitimate emperors and declared Maximus a public enemy. For a brief shining moment, it looked like the ordeal might actually work. Gordiani sent his son south to handle a local military threat, a rival governor named Capilianis, who remained loyal to Maximus and commanded the Three Augusta Legion, one of the most battleh hardened units in North Africa. Gordian 2 had no real military experience. His troops were enthusiastic but largely untrained. The battle lasted less than an afternoon. Gordian II was killed in the fighting.

[00:04:05]>> Gordian I upon hearing the news walked into his bedroom, removed his belt, tied it to a rafter, and hanged himself. Both Gordians had been emperor for exactly 22 days. Here's a question for you in the comments. Do you think the Roman Senate genuinely believed the Gordians could win, or were they simply desperate enough to try anything? Let me know what you think. And now Rome had a problem.

[00:04:28]Two emperors were dead.

[00:04:31]>> Maximinus was still alive, still marching and absolutely furious.

[00:04:38]What happens next is where the story gets genuinely strange.

[00:04:42]>> When the Senate received news of the Gordians deaths, the reaction in the chamber was something between panic and despair.

[00:04:50]>> By declaring Maximinus a public enemy, they had made themselves targets.

[00:04:55]Maximinus was already marching his army toward Italy. If he reached Rome, there would be no mercy. So, the Senate did what Roman institutions always do under pressure. They formed a committee. 20 senators were selected to organize Rome's defense. From that committee, two men were elevated to emperor, a rank that at this point in 238 AD was beginning to feel less like an honor and more like a terminal diagnosis. Their names were Pupanus and Balinus. Pupinus full name Marcus Claius Pupinus Maximus was an experienced military commander, disciplined and competent. The kind of man who actually understood logistics and field tactics. If you were casting a Roman emperor in a film, Pinis would be your reliable character actor. Not glamorous, but deeply capable. Balinis was his opposite in nearly every way.

[00:05:47]He was a poet, a patron of the arts, >> a man of enormous personal wealth who had spent his career navigating the social world of Roman high society. He was charming, cultured, and entirely unprepared for the job of co-ruling an empire on the brink of civil war.

[00:06:04]Together, they were supposed to compliment each other.

[00:06:08]>> In practice, they despised one another within weeks. But the Senate's decision sparked an immediate crisis. The Ptorian Guard, the elite military unit responsible for protecting the emperor and more realistically for deciding who the emperor was, had not been consulted.

[00:06:23]They were furious. They rioted in the streets of Rome, setting fires and attacking civilians. They demanded a say in the imperial succession. The Senate, backed into a corner, offered a compromise.

[00:06:36]Gordiani's 13year-old grandson, a boy named Gordian III, would be elevated to Caesar, a junior rank of emperor, to appease the Ptorians. So Rome now had three emperors, Pupinus, Balinus, and a child. The arrangement was, to put it diplomatically, not ideal. Pupinus left Rome to march north and meet Maximinus's army. He never had to fight a single battle. Maximus had besieged the city of Aquilea in northern Italy, modern freely, and his siege was going badly.

[00:07:08]His supply lines were stretched. His soldiers were hungry. The people of Aquilea had flooded the surrounding fields, destroying forage for the horses. The army of Maximinus, one of the most feared fighting forces in the empire, was slowly starving outside the walls of a city that refused to open its gates. On a morning in late spring, the soldiers of the two paraca legion Maximinus' own personal bodyguard unit had simply had enough. They killed him while he was taking a nap in his tent.

[00:07:38]Then they killed his son. Then they sent both heads to Rome wrapped in cloth as proof. Maximus Thrax, the emperor who had terrorized the empire for 3 years, died not in battle but in his sleep, murdered by men who were tired of being hungry. How do you feel about a military force having that kind of power over who rules? Sound familiar? Drop your thoughts in the comments. The threat was gone. The war was over. And now Pupinis and Balinus could finally settle into ruling Rome together in peace. They lasted approximately 39 more days. Here is something that the popular image of Rome gets dramatically wrong. When you picture a Roman emperor, you probably imagine a man in a white toga standing on a marble balcony, serene and untouchable, surrounded by loyal legions and adoring citizens. The reality in 238 AD was considerably less dignified. Pupinis returned to Rome after the death of Maximus to a genuine hero's welcome. The city celebrated.

[00:08:39]Statues were commissioned. The Senate praised both co-emperors with the kind of extravagant flattery that Romans had turned into a competitive sport. For a few weeks, everything seemed stable. But the Ptorian Guard were watching, and they did not like what they saw. The Guard had existed since the time of Augustus, nearly three centuries before, as the emperor's personal military household. Over the decades, they had evolved from a protective unit into something much more dangerous.

[00:09:07]kingmakers. They had assassinated Caligula. They had installed Claudius.

[00:09:11]They had killed Pertinax and auctioned the throne to the highest bidder during a particularly chaotic episode in 193 AD that historians have since diplomatically labeled the year of the five emperors. The Ptorians were not soldiers in the conventional sense anymore. They were Rome's permanent shadow government and they resented the fact that Pupionus and Balbinus had been chosen without their input. More practically, they feared what Pupinus was doing. Pupinus had returned from the campaign against Maximinus with a personal bodyguard of Germanic warriors fierce, loyal, and answerable only to him. If Pupianus consolidated power with this private army, the Ptorians leverage would evaporate. Their ability to make and unmake emperors depended entirely on being the only armed force inside the city of Rome. They could not allow that to continue. On July 29th, 238 AD during the capital line games, when most of Rome's population was packed into the streets and the stadium watching athletic competitions, a detachment of Ptorian soldiers entered the palace. It was not a large group. It didn't need to be.

[00:10:19]>> The palace staffing, >> whatever loyal soldiers remained on duty, offered minimal resistance.

[00:10:25]Pupinis and Balinus were seized separately before they could reach each other or organize any defense. They were dragged through the streets of Rome.

[00:10:33]These two men who had been emperors of the world's greatest empire just hours before stripped of their imperial clothing. Beaten, tortured, and killed.

[00:10:42]Their bodies were dumped in the street.

[00:10:44]The Germanic bodyguard, hearing what was happening, attempted to intervene. They arrived too late. In a single morning, Rome had lost its fourth and fifth emperors of the year. What is worth sitting with here is not just the violence, but the system that made the violence inevitable. The Ptorian Guard had no legal accountability to anyone except the emperor and they had just demonstrated again that they could remove any emperor they chose. The Senate had no army inside the city. The people had no mechanism to protest. The Germanic bodyguard was loyal to a man who was now dead. The institution designed to protect power had simply become power itself. This is the part of the story I find genuinely unsettling.

[00:11:25]Not the bloodshed, but the structural logic behind it. Has a system ever felt completely broken to you where the very things meant to provide safety become the source of danger? Tell me in the comments. Three emperors dead, but Rome cannot function without a ruler. So, the Ptorians dragged their chosen candidate out in front of the crowd. He was 13 years old. His name was Gordian III. And on July 29th, 238 AD, he became the sole emperor of Rome at the age of 13. Let that sit for a moment.

[00:11:57]13. In the modern United States, a 13-year-old is an eighth grade. In Rome, in 238 AD, a 13-year-old was now responsible for the military, >> the treasury, >> the administration of provinces stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia, and the diplomatic management of an empire bordered by increasingly aggressive enemies on every front.

[00:12:21]Gordian III was not stupid. Contemporary sources describe him as intelligent and good-natured, genuinely popular with the Roman public in a way that his predecessors had not been. He had the enormous advantage of being the grandson of a well-liked emperor and the convenient quality of being too young to have made any serious enemies yet. But a 13-year-old emperor meant in practice that someone else was making the real decisions. For the first years of his reign, that power rested with the Ptorian prefects, the commanders of the very guard that had just murdered his predecessors. The irony was not lost on anyone.

[00:12:56]>> The boy whose elevation was meant to appease the Ptorians was now entirely dependent on them for survival. For a few years, the arrangement worked surprisingly well. Rome stabilized. The economy improved marginally. The frontiers held. Gordian, as he grew into his mid- teens, showed genuine promise as a ruler. He was educated, curious, and reportedly willing to listen to advisers, which in the context of Roman imperial history practically makes him a saint. Then in 24, Tamistheus did something clever that none of his predecessors had managed. He made himself indispensable, not through fear, but through competence.

[00:13:37]>> He reorganized Rome's supply systems. He reformed the military logistics that had been creaking since the crisis of the previous decade. He gave Gordian good advice and the advice worked. And then he gave Gordian his daughter in marriage, making himself not just the emperor's top adviser, but his father-in-law. By 242 AD, Rome was at war with the Cisanian Persian Empire on the Eastern frontier.

[00:14:03]Gordian, now 17, led the campaign personally. He was not a bad general for his age. The campaign had early successes. Tim Cytheus managed the supply lines with characteristic efficiency. Then Tim Cytheus died of illness. According to the sources, though Roman political history tends to make one suspicious of convenient illnesses. A new Ptorian prefect was appointed to replace him. A man named Philip, known to history as Philip the Arab. Philip was not interested in supporting a young emperor who was getting increasingly competent. In early 244 AD during the Persian campaign, the Roman army's supply lines were mysteriously disrupted. The soldiers running short of food and unsure of their prospects began to lose confidence in their young emperor. Philip moved against Gordian. Depending on which source you trust, Gordian was either killed in a battle, died of wounds, or was murdered outright by Philip's agents. He was 19 years old. Philip the Arab declared himself emperor. He sent a politely worded letter to the Senate explaining that Gordian had died of natural causes. The Senate, who had watched five emperors come and go in a single year and were by this point professional survivors, accepted this explanation without visible objection.

[00:15:21]None of this happened in secret. By the way, Roman historians like Herodian and the authors of the Histori Augusta documented all of it. The system didn't hide its dysfunction. It just relied on everyone being too exhausted or too afraid to stop it. Does any of that sound disturbingly recognizable?

[00:15:37]Think about it and share your thoughts below. But here is the question that the history books rarely ask. What did 238 AD actually cost Rome? And what did it teach the empire or fail to teach it about how power should work? The year 238 AD is called the year of the six emperors. Maximinus Thrax, Gordian 1, Gordian 2, Pupinus, Balinus, Gordian 3.

[00:16:02]Six men held the title of emperor over the course of a single year. Three of them died in a single night. Two of them were never meant to rule at all. One of them was a child. But the real damage of 238 AD was not measured in bodies. It was measured in what the events of that year revealed about the structure of Roman power and what they set in motion for the century that followed. 238 AD sits at the beginning of what historians call the crisis of the 3rd century. a 50-year period from 235 to 284 AD during which Rome experienced near continuous civil war, economic collapse, plague, and foreign invasion. In that half century, Rome went through more than 20 emperors, the vast majority of whom were elevated by their armies and killed by those same armies when they became inconvenient. The average reign lasted about 2 years. Several lasted months. At one point, the empire fragmented into three separate successor states simultaneously. The mechanisms that destroyed Rome's stability in 238 AD, were not new. The Ptorian Guard had been murdering emperors since the first century. The military had been a king-making force since at least 69 AD, the year of the four emperors. What was different about 238 AD, was the speed, and what the speed revealed. The Roman system of imperial succession had no legitimate mechanism for removing a bad emperor. There was no election, no term limit, no constitutional process for impeachment. Power once seized could only be ended by death. That meant that every actor who wanted political change had exactly one tool available.

[00:17:40]>> Violence. The Ptorian Guard understood this better than anyone. They had turned imperial assassination into a rational, almost bureaucratic process. An emperor who threatened their power was removed.

[00:17:52]An emperor who served their interests was supported. The question of who was best for Rome, its citizens, its provinces, its long-term stability was entirely irrelevant to the calculation. And here is where the history stops being merely interesting and starts being genuinely instructive.

[00:18:09]Every political system has enforcement mechanisms, institutions that hold power accountable. When those institutions answer only to themselves rather than to the people they are meant to serve, they don't protect the system, they become predators inside it. The Ptorian Guard was not an anomaly in Roman history.

[00:18:27]>> They were the logical end point of a system that had placed military force above constitutional legitimacy for two centuries and had never built a genuine alternative. Rome's experience in 238 AD echoes in ways that are not comfortable to name too directly. the speed with which legitimate authority collapsed, the ease with which armed actors filled the vacuum, the paralysis of deliberative bodies like the Senate in the face of organized violence. These are not uniquely Roman problems. They are problems that recur wherever institutional accountability is eroded faster than it can be rebuilt. What Rome lost in 238 AD was not three emperors.

[00:19:07]It lost the last pretense that succession could be orderly. After 238, every general with a loyal army knew that the throne was available. The result was 50 years of catastrophe. The irony is that Rome survived anyway for another two centuries through the reforms of Dialesian and Constantine, through structural reinvention that 238 AD had made necessary by making the old system obviously unsustainable.

[00:19:34]Sometimes collapse is the only thing powerful enough to force genuine change.

[00:19:39]This is the part of the story I really hope you'll carry with you. What do you think? Can broken systems reform themselves?

[00:19:47]Or does it always take a crisis first?

[00:19:49]Leave your honest thoughts in the comments. I read every single one and your perspective genuinely shapes what I cover next. You've made it to the end and that means you've earned the full picture of what the morning of July 29th, 238 AD actually meant. Remember that cold marble in the Roman forum at the beginning of our story? The wood smoke and the metallic smell drifting down from the Ptorian camp. Now you know what that smell was. It was the moment Rome's political immune system finally failed publicly, irreversibly, and in a single night. Three emperors died before sunrise, not because any individual was uniquely wicked or any soldier was uniquely treacherous. They died because a system built on force rather than legitimacy had finally consumed itself from the inside. Gordian I wept when they made him emperor. He understood something that the ambitious men around him did not. That the throne in 238 AD was not a prize. It was a sentence. The Senate, the Ptorian Guard, and the Roman legions each believed they were preserving Rome. In competing to control it, they broke it instead. That is the lesson that 238 AD offers. Not a lesson about ancient Rome specifically, but about what happens when institutions designed to serve the whole begin serving only themselves? Before you go, I genuinely want to know what part of this story stayed with you. Was it the speed of it all? The fact that a 13-year-old was the solution anyone agreed on, or something else entirely?

[00:21:22]Take 30 seconds and drop it in the comments. For a creator making these videos, your feedback is not just appreciated. It is literally how this channel gets better and how I choose what to dig into next. The sun eventually rose over Rome on July 29th, 238 AD. The forum looked exactly the same as it had the night before, but everything underneath it had changed.