Roman emperor from Sept. 18, 96, to January 98, the first of a succession of rulers traditionally known as the Five Good Emperors.

A member of a distinguished senatorial family, Nerva was distantly related by marriage to the Julio-Claudian house and had been twice consul (AD 71 and 90) when, on the assassination of the emperor Domitian, he became emperor. A number of elder statesmen emerged from retirement to help him govern the empire. The keynote of Nerva's regime was a skillfully propagandized renunciation of the terrorist means by which Domitian had imposed his tyranny. An agrarian reform measure and the last lex populi in Roman history were implemented in Italy. The one imaginative innovation commonly attributed to Nerva's government, the system of alimenta, or trusts for the maintenance of poor children in Italy, may have been the work of Trajan. In order to secure the succession, Nerva in 97 adopted and took as his colleague Marcus Ulpius Trajanus (Trajan), governor of one of the German provinces, who became emperor on Nerva's death.