Editing Roman usurper (section)

==Assessment of usurpers==

The only usurpers whose early life and specific circumstances of rebellion are known with reasonable certainty are the ones who would become emperors. The unsuccessful usurpation attempts often ended with the rebel's execution, murder or suicide and the subsequent erasure of his life from all records.{{sfn|Szidat|2010|pp=322-328}} That often causes confusion in the contemporaneous sources that are contradictory in the details of a certain rebellion. For instance, the usurper [[Uranius]] is placed by some in the reign of [[Elagabalus]] and by others in the time of [[Gallienus]].

Every new emperor, either legal or illegal, marked the beginning of his rule by minting new coins, both to have the prestige of declaring oneself as ''Augustus'' and to pay the loyal soldiers their share. Thus, coinage is often the only evidence of a determined usurpation, but the number of coin types with the effigy of a usurper might not be equal to the total number of usurpations. The presence of minting facilities certainly allowed short-term usurpers to release their coinage, but on the other hand, a man capable of sustaining a rebellion for a couple of months in a remote area might fail to produce his own coins by lack of access to the instruments of minting technology.

Later assessment of usurpations demonstrated that some are questionable or even fictitious. Gallienus was the emperor who suffered greatest number of usurpations, with a record of 14 attempts (excluding the [[Gallic Empire]] secession) in 15 years of rule. However, three of these are clear fabrications, either contemporaneous to show the invincibility of the emperor or added by later writers to embellish their own prose.