Let's not beat about the bush, the Roman Empire was pretty racist. I mean, there were plenty of people of all sorts of races living within its borders but when you look at the emperors they were a pretty white lot. Okay, there was Septimius Severus and he was from Africa but he was still more "coffee with cream" than "rich dark chocolate", if you know what I mean; and even then he made all those white-boy senators a bit nervous. So you can imagine how it was in 217AD when Marcus Opellius Macrinus, the blackest emperor until Haile Selassie, proclaimed himself Augustus and made the senate recognise his black ass!