I’ve recently been interested in reading about the lives of the Roman Emperors and their various intrigues. I’m having trouble keeping things in memory so I’ve started charting out the lines of succession.

Below is an example starting from Antonius Pius’ rule as part of the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty and ending on the last ruler of the Severan Dynasty.

I’d love to automate this process but I’m having trouble tracking down resources. The best bet seems to be the wikipedia API plus a manual parse of the wikitext to get the successor information.

I’ve had some success using the Wikiepdia category and subcategory APIs but I still have a lot of unanswered questions:

• Can it be generalized to other lineages?
• Is the wikitext formatting specific to each lineage?
• Are usurpers and co-emperors included in the wikitext data?

Lots of work to be done :)