Caracalla

• 1. Introduction

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  Caracalla was born Lucius Septimius Bassianus on the 4th of April 188 in Lugdunum, Gaul, the city now called Lyon, France. He would die on the 8th of April 217, stabbed by a soldier while stopping to urinate on a road in the eastern empire. Between those two April dates, separated by exactly twenty-nine years, he ruled the Roman Empire in a fashion that ancient writers found difficult to describe without reaching for words like cruelty, savagery, and massacre.

  Who was this man whose nickname came from a Gallic hooded tunic? Why did he grant citizenship to millions of people across the empire, yet slaughter thousands in Alexandria on what amounted to a personal insult? What drove him to arrange his soldiers in ancient Macedonian battle formations that the Roman army had long abandoned? And why, in the late eighteenth century, did French painters become so fascinated with a Roman emperor who had been dead for fifteen hundred years that they kept putting his face on canvas?

  Those are the questions this documentary will answer. The life of Caracalla pulls at threads of ambition, family violence, military obsession, and the complicated machinery of how empires sustain themselves, and how they crack.

• 2. A Dynasty of Names

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  Septimius Severus, Caracalla's father, had an eye for political theatre. When Caracalla was seven years old, his father engineered a posthumous adoption by the deified emperor Marcus Aurelius, connecting the Severan dynasty to the celebrated Antonine line that preceded it. The boy was renamed Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, shedding the birth name Lucius Septimius Bassianus entirely.

  The nickname that history remembers came later. According to the 4th-century historian Aurelius Victor in his Epitome de Caesaribus, Caracalla acquired his agnomen from a Gallic hooded tunic he wore so often he made it fashionable. He may have first put it on during his campaigns along the Rhine and Danube. The writer Cassius Dio, who was still composing his Historia romana during Caracalla's reign and therefore knew him as a living presence, preferred a different nickname altogether: "Tarautas", after a gladiator of the era who was both small in stature and famous for violence.

  The layering of names onto a single man was itself a political act. When Caracalla issued his great citizenship edict in 212, every newly enfranchised free man in the empire took on the praenomen and nomen "Marcus Aurelius", the same names Caracalla had been given as a child. The empire's newest citizens shared the most Roman-sounding name of a man whose ancestry stretched to Punic North Africa through his father and to Arab lands through his mother Julia Domna.

• 3. The Fratricidal Throne

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  Septimius Severus died on the 4th of February 211 at Eboracum, the city now known as York in England, while leading a campaign in Caledonia, the land north of Hadrian's Wall. He left the empire jointly to his two sons, Caracalla and Geta, who were already co-emperors and already deeply hostile to one another.

  The brothers considered a territorial split, carving the empire in half along the Bosphorus, with Caracalla ruling the west and Geta the east. Their mother Julia Domna talked them out of it. The arrangement they settled for instead lasted less than a year. On the 26th of December 211, at a meeting arranged by Julia Domna as a reconciliation, members of the Praetorian Guard loyal to Caracalla killed Geta. Geta died in his mother's arms.

  What followed was systematic erasure. The Senate pronounced a damnatio memoriae against Geta. His image was cut from paintings. Coins bearing his face were melted down. Statues were broken. His name was removed from papyrus records. Speaking or writing Geta's name became a capital offence. In the aftermath, an estimated 20,000 people were killed, the members of Geta's inner circle of guards, advisers, friends, and military staff.

  Caracalla tried to frame the killing as self-defence, a claim the residents of Alexandria would later mock in a public satire. Portraits of the two brothers on coins between 209 and their father's death in February 211 show mature young men who appeared ready to inherit the empire. What the coins could not show was that Geta had been cultivating a long beard like his father's, a calculated image choice meant to signal dynastic legitimacy. It was an effort that ended in December 211.

• 4. The Edict and Its Motives

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  In 212, Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana, the document that would become, by most historical measures, the most consequential act of his reign, though it was barely noticed in ancient writings. The edict granted full Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire, with the exception of the dediticii, people who had submitted to Rome by surrender in war, and freed slaves.

  Before 212, Roman citizens had been a narrow group. At the death of Augustus in AD 14, roughly four to seven percent of all people in the empire held citizenship. Outside Roman Italia, citizenship was largely confined to Roman colonists and their descendants, residents of specific towns, and small numbers of local nobles such as client kings. Provincial inhabitants were generally not citizens, though some magistrates and their relatives held what was called the Latin Right, a partial form of civic status.

  Cassius Dio argued the edict was primarily a revenue measure. Rome was struggling financially, and the inheritance and emancipation taxes fell only on Roman citizens; expanding the citizen body expanded the tax base. Historians Olivier Hekster, Nicholas Zair, and Clare Rowan challenge this explanation, pointing out that most of those newly enfranchised were poor and therefore unlikely to generate substantial inheritance tax revenue.

  A papyrus fragment bearing part of the edict itself offers a third motive: Caracalla presented the expansion of citizenship as a thank-offering to the gods who had protected him from conspiracy, a reference to the threat that arose after Geta's murder. A fourth explanation flows from the empire's own logic, that the provinces had grown so central to Roman existence that extending citizenship was a natural conclusion of the empire's long drift toward including its periphery.

• 5. Soldiers, Coins, and Alexander

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  Caracalla raised the annual pay of an average legionary from 2,000 sesterces to between 2,700 and 3,000 sesterces. His father's deathbed advice, by the account of ancient writers, was simple: always look after the soldiers and ignore everyone else. Caracalla followed this counsel with visible enthusiasm, spending so much time among the troops that he began to imitate their dress and adopt their habits of speech and manner.

  This generosity had a financial cost. To pay for the military bonuses, Caracalla debased the silver coinage. The denarius, which had carried approximately 55% silver purity at the end of his father's reign, fell to around 51% by the time Caracalla was done with it. In 215 he introduced the antoninianus, a coin intended to pass as a double denarius. It had a silver purity of around 52% in the years between 215 and 217, and its actual metal content was closer to one and a half denarii than two. The predictable outcome was that people hoarded the older, purer coins, worsening the inflation his debasement had already set off.

  Beyond his identification with Roman soldiers, Caracalla developed a fixation on Alexander the Great that his contemporaries found alarming. He arranged 16,000 men in Macedonian-style phalanxes, a formation the Roman army had rendered obsolete long before. He visited Alexandria while preparing for his Persian campaign and persecuted philosophers of the Aristotelian school, based on a legend that Aristotle had poisoned Alexander. The historian Christopher Matthew notes that the term Phalangarii used for these formations carries two possible meanings, one referring to a standard Roman battle line and one suggesting pikemen in the Macedonian mould, leaving the precise nature of the formation historically unclear.

• 6. The Baths and the God

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  Construction on the Baths of Caracalla began in 211, at the outset of Caracalla's sole rule, though ancient accounts suggest the planning was more likely his father's work. A partial inauguration took place in 216. The outer perimeter was not completed until the reign of Severus Alexander.

  The complex covered around 50 acres, equivalent to roughly 202,000 square metres, and could hold approximately 1,600 bathers at once. The baths ranked as the second-largest public bathing complex in Roman history. Within their walls were swimming pools, exercise yards, a stadium, steam rooms, libraries, meeting rooms, and fountains, all set within formal gardens. The interiors were finished with coloured marble floors, columns, mosaics, and large-scale statuary.

  Alongside the baths, Caracalla cultivated a particular religious relationship with Serapis, the Graeco-Egyptian god of healing. At the start of his reign he declared imperial support for the cult. When he became sole ruler in 212, the imperial mint began striking coins bearing Serapis' image. After Geta's death, Caracalla dedicated the weapon that had killed his brother to Serapis, apparently casting the god as his protector against treachery. In 212 he erected a temple to Serapis on the Quirinal Hill in Rome. A fragmented inscription found in the church of Sant' Agata dei Goti records this construction, though it names only Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and scholars assign it to Caracalla rather than the later emperor Elagabalus because of Caracalla's documented and unusually intense connection to the deity.

• 7. Death on the Road to Carrhae

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  On the 8th of April 217, Caracalla was travelling from Edessa toward Carrhae, the site where in 53 BC the Romans had suffered a catastrophic defeat at Parthian hands. He had turned 29 just that day. He had stopped briefly along the road when a soldier named Justin Martialis approached and stabbed him. A Scythian bodyguard killed Martialis with a lance almost immediately afterward. Two Praetorian tribunes then rushed forward as though to help the wounded emperor, and completed the assassination.

  Martialis had a personal grievance: Caracalla had refused to promote him to the rank of centurion. But the praetorian prefect Macrinus, who had reason to fear for his own position, saw opportunity in that resentment and used it. Three days after Caracalla died, Macrinus declared himself emperor with the support of the Roman army.

  Julia Domna was in Antioch when news reached her, sorting through correspondence, setting aside routine messages so that her son would not be overwhelmed with administrative duties when he returned. She had been a central figure throughout the reign, handling petitions and correspondence while Caracalla campaigned, because Caracalla found administration tedious. Her role in the Severan court represented an early instance of an emperor's mother holding real influence in governance, a pattern that would persist through the remainder of the dynasty.

• 8. The Long Afterlife

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  Caracalla did not receive a formal damnatio memoriae after his death. His popularity with the military meant that Macrinus and the Senate could not openly condemn him as a public enemy, or hostis. Instead Macrinus ordered the quiet removal of his statues. Macrinus had Caracalla deified and commemorated on coins as Divus Antoninus, the divine Antoninus. The erasures of his name that did occur were mostly accidental or incidental to later reuse of stone.

  In the 12th century, Geoffrey of Monmouth wove Caracalla into a legend in his History of the Kings of Britain, calling him by his birth name "Bassianus" and making him a king of Britain who ruled until being overthrown by Carausius. Geoffrey's timeline placed Carausius' revolt roughly seventy years after Caracalla's actual death, a discrepancy that did not discourage medieval readers.

  In the late 18th century, French painters including Greuze, David, Bonvoisin, J.-A.-C. Pajou, and Lethiere returned to Caracalla's image with striking frequency. The art historian Susan Wood connects their interest to the political crisis of the French monarchy: Caracalla's distinctive soldier-like style and the abundant surviving busts made him visually accessible, and his tyranny read as a warning about what absolute power unchecked by reform could become. Wood notes the parallel between Caracalla's assassination and the eventual execution of Louis XVI, two rulers whose apparent tyranny made their violent ends seem, to contemporary observers, almost inevitable.

  Historian Shamus Sillar has pushed back on the bleakest readings, citing road construction and frontier fortification in the western provinces as evidence that Caracalla's reign produced things that outlasted his cruelties. The Baths of Caracalla remained in use in Rome into the 6th century AD, long after the dynasty, the western empire, and the currency he debased had all ceased to exist.