With the death of Domitian, we now enter the age that some historians call the High Roman Empire—the pinnacle of the pinnacle. For just shy of a century, from AD 96 to 180, Rome is ruled by a succession of five emperors. And while each of them had their flaws, some more obvious than others, they are generally regarded as among the best that Rome had to offer. Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, would call this span of time: “the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”. Lofty words, but are they true? Were these years the best years in Roman history, let alone the history of the whole human race?