A Year of Four Emperors
I’d forgotten I’d meant to put something like this in the printed book for Chapters I-IV. I was flipping through some printer’s proof pages and remembered all the future emperors Felix stumbles across in Chapter II.
The fact that one person can meet, say, 7 emperors in a single lifetime doesn’t say much for imperial longevity, does it…
I imagine someone like Tacitus may have met all the emperors thus noted, as there must have been no shortage of people born in the 50s that were of sufficient rank to have known or have met emperors or future emperors.
So true! And for a while Rome went through emperors like popcorn. Which, if it’s a more-or-less peaceful and uncontroversial transition, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The stabbings and wars and whatnot were a little bad.
A long way back in the comic I embedded a hint of how long Felix might be around/how many emperors he’d end up crossing paths with; I just wanted to know it was in there since I wasn’t sure how far I’d go with the story…. But I’m kinda fond of these characters and will be hanging around with them a while longer 🙂
A pity, then, one cannot plausibly have Felix at both the Year of Four Emperors, and subsequently the Year of Five Emperors!
That would be stretching it. Just a little bit.
Maybe someday there’ll be a sequel–“Chapter VII: Felix’s Great-Grand-Kids and the Really Weird Year.”
Hm. First Felix has to have kids. Oh, wait, he’s got at least one son. Okay, then his son has to have kids. Then… (etc)
And he even has a daughter who isn’t related by blood to his son. They could marry and get all dynastic (not that being a blood relation ever stopped the imperial families of Rome from “getting dynastic” together).