About this ebook
When Emperor Tacitus died in the summer of 276 CE, his half-brother Florianus didn't deliberate. Didn't petition the senate. Didn't build coalitions or negotiate terms. He simply reached out, took the purple, and declared himself master of the Roman world.
It was the most efficient seizure of power imaginable. It was also a death sentence.
Sixty Days is a forensic, fast-paced reconstruction of one of antiquity's most brutally compressed political careers — the story of an experienced administrative heavyweight who made one fatal miscalculation and spent every hour of his brief reign paying for it.
Drawing on classical historical records and the cold testimony of numismatic evidence, this clinical biography tracks the exact countdown: the illegal assumption of power that alienated the senate before a single order was issued, the grinding march east to Tarsus to confront the rival claim of the battle-hardened general Probus, and the sweltering Anatolian summer that did what enemy steel could not — breaking army morale day by suffocating day until the mathematics of loyalty shifted beyond recovery.
Florian never lost a battle. He never got the chance. In September of 276 CE, his own soldiers did the arithmetic, reached their conclusion, and delivered it with blades.
This is not a story of weakness. It is something colder and more instructive — the story of a competent man destroyed not by an enemy, but by a system so broken that even seizing it perfectly was never going to be enough.
For readers who want history without mercy — this is the throne as a trap.
