The Thirty Tyrants, or Thirty Pretenders (Latin: Tyranni Triginta) were a group of 32 people declared by the author of the notoriously unreliable Historia Augusta, writing under the name Trebellius Pollio, to have been pretenders to the throne of the Roman Empire in the time of the legitimate emperor Gallienus. Scholarly consensus is that the author artificially increased the number of his protagonists in conscious parallelism with the Thirty Tyrants of Sparta.

The list is a very mixed one, including:

• nine pretenders of roughly the same time, the reign of Gallienus;
• one pretender of the time of Decius;
• two pretenders of the time of Claudius II and Aurelian;
• two other persons of uncertain date;
• four men who certainly never held the imperial power;
• three men who probably never held the imperial power;
• two women and six children who never held the imperial power;
• three almost certainly fictitious names.

The nine men felt by David Magie, the editor of the Loeb Classical Library edition of the Historia Augusta, to have been real pretenders to the throne at the time of Gallienus are: Postumus, Laelianus, Marius, Ingenuus, Regalianus, Aureolus, and Macrianus and his two sons. At least some of these men issued coins.

External link

• Historia Augusta: the Thirty Tyrants (Latin text and English translation)