Titus Flavius Sulpicianus

Titus Flavius Sulpicianus bid for the Roman empire and was outbid by a man standing outside the wall. He was a senator of no great family who had governed provinces and reached a suffect consulship, and whose daughter Flavia Titiana was married to Pertinax. When Pertinax became emperor on the first day of 193, Sulpicianus was made prefect of the city - the senior civilian office in Rome. Pertinax lasted eighty-seven days. He had tried to restore discipline among the Praetorian Guard and to pay them less than they had been promised, and in March they killed him in his own palace. Sulpicianus was sent to the camp to calm them, which is how he came to be inside it when the guard announced that the empire would go to whoever bid highest. He bid. Didius Julianus, a wealthy senator who arrived too late to get through the gate, shouted his offers up from outside, and the two men raised each other until Julianus promised twenty-five thousand sesterces a man - several years' pay - and was let in and proclaimed. The auction is the emblem of the year of the five emperors, and it is worth being precise about what it shows: not that the empire was for sale in principle, but that a body of nine thousand armed men in the capital could make it so whenever no army was near enough to object. Julianus reigned sixty-six days before Septimius Severus marched on Rome and had him killed. Sulpicianus survived that, and was executed by Severus in 197 for having supported his rival Clodius Albinus.

• Lived: 137 CE – 197 CE
• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: politician