Roman emperors faced a statistical probability of violent death, which followed a pattern similar to one found in reliability engineering, including in handheld devices, says a study by Dr. Joseph Saleh, an aerospace engineer from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Analyzing data obtained from De Imperatoribus Romanis, a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia of Roman emperors, Saleh found that of 69 reviewed Roman emperors who ruled the Empire over several centuries, 43 (62 percent) suffered violent deaths by assassination, suicide or combat.
Saleh applied statistical methods frequently used to test the reliability of components in engineering, and modelled the typical length of time between an emperor’s ascension to the throne and their subsequent death. Surprisingly, seemingly random deaths of Roman rulers and seemingly random failures of components followed a similar pattern: when drawn on a board, the graph resembled a bathtub – a picture familiar to the engineers.
Chances were particularly high during the emperor’s first year of rule, but the risk steadily declined over the next seven years.
“In engineering, the reliability of a component or process is defined as the probability that it is still operational at a given time. The time it takes for a component or process to fail is referred to as its time-to-failure and this shows similarities to the time-to-violent-death of Roman emperors,” Saleh said about his research.
Historians usually view lives and deaths of each emperor as separate events, a Eurekalert report says, and it is unknown whether any attempt to discern a pattern has previously been made.
“It's interesting that a seemingly random process as unconventional and perilous as the violent death of a Roman emperor--over a four-century period and across a vastly changed world--appears to have a systematic structure remarkably well captured by a statistical model widely used in engineering. Although they may appear as random events when taken singularly, these results indicate that there may have been underlying processes governing the length of each rule until death."
The full text of the study was published in the journal Palgrave Communications.