Five Good Emperors

The Five Good Emperors is a term used by the 18th century historian, Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The term was first used by Niccolò Machiavelli in Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (Book I, Chapter 10). According to Gibbon, they were five consecutive emperors of the Roman Empire who ruled from 96 to 180: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Gibbon believed that this was a time when "the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of wisdom and virtue." (I, 78) Gibbon believed these benevolent dictators and their moderate policies were unusual and contrast their more tyrannical and oppressive successors (their predecessors are not covered by Gibbon). The five emperors are sometimes called the Nervan-Antonian Dynasty, which is actually a conflation of the Nervo-Trajanic and Antonine dynasties, the latter including Commodus.
See more at Wikipedia.org...