This book offers the first comprehensive study of the funerary monuments made for the Roman emperors as a genre. These monuments, which include the Mausoleum of Augustus, Trajan's Column, and the Column of Marcus Aurelius, are among the best known and most extensively excavated and documented structures of Roman antiquity In this study, Penelope Davies demonstrates that these monuments served a dual role, as memorials to the dead and as accession monuments that would guarantee dynastic continuity for the monarchy on the precarious occasion of the emperor's death.