skasion posted:

The nerdiest emperor was probably Julian. He was basically under house arrest for his entire youth because his uncle Constantius had murdered most of their other relatives and didn't trust him. So he had no friends except his tutors and studied really hard and became an edgy philosophy major and grew a really ugly neck beard. Then all of Constantius' remaining relatives died (because Constantius killed them basically) and he decided he needed Julian to take care of France while he did the ruling elsewhere. Eventually Constantius died and Julian set about trying to recreate the glory of Rome like he had read about it in the history books. This meant being a pagan civil leader who was first among the equals of the aristocracy and left administration to local government instead of a Christian absolutist warlord with a giant bureaucracy. Nobody liked it.

He moved to Antioch to try and fix poo poo up there, but the locals thought he was an undignified douche with lovely facial hair, so he wrote a very sarcastic book called "The Beard Hater" about how everyone who didn't like him was just superficial and couldn't see that he was really a nice guy deep down. He then invaded Iraq, hosed it up and got killed, possibly without ever having had sex.