Power laws in the Roman Empire: a survival analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the survival patterns of Roman emperors using a new power-law model with change points, revealing the prevalence of power-law distributions in historical survival data and demonstrating its broader applicability.

Contribution

Introduces a novel power-law survival model with change points that accounts for censoring and long-term survivors, improving predictions of emperor mortality.

Findings

Power-law distributions are present in Roman emperor survival data.

The new model outperforms previous models in prediction accuracy.

Power-law patterns are common in natural and artificial systems.

Abstract

The Roman Empire shaped Western civilization, and many Roman principles are embodied in modern institutions. Although its political institutions proved both resilient and adaptable, allowing it to incorporate diverse populations, the Empire suffered from many internal conflicts. Indeed, most emperors died violently, from assassination, suicide, or in battle. These internal conflicts produced patterns in the length of time that can be identified by statistical analysis. In this paper, we study the underlying patterns associated with the reign of the Roman emperors by using statistical tools of survival data analysis. We consider all the 175 Roman emperors and propose a new power-law model with change points to predict the time-to-violent-death of the Roman emperors. This model encompasses data in the presence of censoring and long-term survivors, providing more accurate predictions than previous models. Our results show that power-law distributions can also occur in survival data, as verified in other data types from natural and artificial systems, reinforcing the ubiquity of power law distributions. The generality of our approach paves the way to further related investigations not only in other ancient civilizations but also in applications in engineering and medicine.