Editing Pretender (section)

==Roman Empire==
[[Ancient Rome]] knew many pretenders to the offices making up the title of [[Roman emperor]], especially during the [[Crisis of the Third Century]].

These are customarily referred to as the [[Thirty Tyrants (Roman)|Thirty Tyrants]], which was an allusion to the [[Thirty Tyrants]] of [[Athens]] some five hundred years earlier; although the comparison is questionable, and the Romans were separate aspirants, not (as the Athenians were) a Committee of Public Safety. The [[Loeb Classical Library|Loeb]] translation of the appropriate chapter of the [[Augustan History]] therefore represents the Latin ''triginta tyranni'' by "Thirty Pretenders" to avoid this artificial and confusing parallel. Not all of them were afterwards considered ''pretenders''; several were actually successful in becoming emperor at least in part of the empire for a brief period.