The goal of this book was to construct an alternative approach to the Roman emperor. The conceit was to take a subjective view, which strives to reconstruct how the emperor seemed from the perspective of the inhabitants of the Roman empire. This approach, though, moves away from overt biographical approaches to emperors, which dominate ancient and modern historiography alike. The point here is less to find out what people thought about, say, Tiberius or Pertinax as individual emperors and more about how their examples contributed to the discourse about the emperor more widely: What were the expectations placed on the emperor? What were the duties that he was expected to fulfil? How did people talk about him?