Commodus

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Commodus was born on the 31st of August 161 into perhaps the most gilded circumstance a Roman child could occupy: his father was the reigning emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the empire at that moment was still basking in what later generations would call the Pax Romana, a long era of peace and prosperity. Yet within three decades, historians would describe that same empire as having descended, in the words of the senator and eyewitness Cassius Dio, "from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust."

  The man who presided over that descent was an emperor who fought lions in the Colosseum, renamed Rome after himself, and was finally strangled in his bath by his own wrestling partner. Commodus ruled for twelve years as sole emperor, and his reign ended the Nerva-Antonine dynasty that had produced some of Rome's most admired leaders. How did the son of Marcus Aurelius become Rome's most theatrical tyrant? What happened to the boy educated by the physician Galen and a roster of distinguished tutors? And what does his story reveal about the fragility of good governance when it depends on a single person's character?

• 2. Born in the Purple

  ›

  Commodus entered the world at Lanuvium, near Rome, and his circumstances were unprecedented in Roman history. Marcus Aurelius was the first emperor since Vespasian to have a legitimate biological son, and the four emperors preceding him had each adopted a chosen successor. Commodus broke that pattern. He was, as the sources describe it, the first emperor "born in the purple" - meaning born while his father already held the throne - and he would remain the only such emperor until 337.

  His early years were shaped by loss. His twin brother, Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, died in 165. Another younger brother, Marcus Annius Verus, died in 169 after failing to recover from a surgical procedure. These deaths left Commodus as Marcus Aurelius's sole surviving son, a position that made his eventual succession inevitable.

  The education arranged for him was extensive, drawing on multiple tutors. Onesicrates, Antistius Capella, Titus Aius Sanctus, and Pitholaus are all mentioned in the sources. The physician Galen himself looked after the boy's health. Yet Cassius Dio, who knew Commodus personally, would later describe a character shaped less by education than by weakness: "not naturally wicked but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived," whose simplicity and cowardice made him easy prey for the companions who surrounded him.

  On the 20th of January 175, Commodus entered the College of Pontiffs, the formal gateway to public life. He was thirteen years old and already being groomed to rule half the known world.

• 3. The Reluctant General

  ›

  At Carnuntum on the Danube in 172, the boy who would one day prefer the arena to the battlefield received his first military title. He was present, presumably, when his father's forces defeated the Marcomanni, and on the 15th of October 172 he was given the victory designation Germanicus. He was eleven years old.

  His formal entry into adulthood came on a military frontier rather than in Rome. On the 7th of July 175, on the Danubian front while preparations were underway to suppress the rebellion of the Syrian governor Avidius Cassius, Commodus assumed his toga virilis - the garment marking the passage from boyhood to Roman manhood. Cassius was killed by one of his own centurions before the campaign against him could begin, sparing Commodus and his father a lengthy eastern war.

  What followed instead was a tour. Commodus accompanied Marcus Aurelius through the Eastern provinces, visiting Antioch, and the two traveled to Athens where they were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. They returned to Rome in the autumn of 176.

  On the 27th of November 176, Marcus Aurelius formally gave Commodus the title of Imperator. On the 23rd of December, father and son shared a triumph. Then, on the 1st of January 177, Commodus became consul for the first time, aged fifteen - the youngest person to hold that office up to that point, in a magistracy whose minimum age convention was around thirty. His co-emperor status was confirmed on the 17th of June 177, though he backdated his own reckoning of the reign to November 176.

  Marcus Aurelius died at the Danube on the 17th of March 180, leaving an eighteen-year-old as the sole ruler of Rome. Commodus quickly negotiated a peace treaty with the Danubian tribes, returned to the city, and on the 22nd of October 180 celebrated a triumph for the conclusion of wars he had barely fought. The man who had marched to the front with his father showed, from the outset, that he preferred to be in Rome.

• 4. Currency, Conspiracy, and Control

  ›

  Among his first acts as sole emperor, Commodus devalued the Roman currency. He reduced the weight of the denarius from 96 per Roman pound to 105 per Roman pound, and cut the silver purity from 79 percent to 76 percent. In 186, he took the debasement further, dropping purity to 74 percent and raising the coin count to 108 per pound. His historians note this was the largest devaluation since Nero's reign.

  The money was needed. Commodus spent heavily on gladiatorial shows, imperial handouts, and the kind of spectacle that kept the urban poor loyal and the senatorial class quietly resentful. He taxed the Senate to fund it. On inscriptions across the empire, the traditional formula Senatus Populusque Romanus - Senate and People of Rome - was provocatively reversed to Populus Senatusque, putting the people first.

  The first major political crisis came in 182. Lucilla, Commodus's eldest sister, who outranked him in age by more than ten years and held the title of Augusta as the widow of Emperor Lucius Verus, organized a plot against him. Her alleged motive was jealousy of the Empress Crispina. The actual assassins were two men linked to Lucilla: Marcus Ummidius Quadratus Annianus, the consul of 167 and also her first cousin, and Appius Claudius Quintianus. They moved against Commodus as he entered a theater and were seized by his bodyguard. Both men were executed. Lucilla was exiled to Capri and later killed.

  The aftermath of this plot began a pattern that would define the reign. One of the two praetorian prefects, Publius Tarrutenius Paternus, had been involved in Lucilla's conspiracy. His colleague Sextus Tigidius Perennis used the confusion to arrange the murder of Saoterus, the chamberlain from Nicomedia who had been Commodus's first favourite. Then Perennis implicated Paternus in a second conspiracy involving the jurist's son Publius Salvius Julianus. Salvius and Paternus were executed. Didius Julianus - a future emperor himself - was dismissed from the governorship of Germania Inferior as a consequence of these purges.

• 5. Cleander's Empire

  ›

  Cleander was a Phrygian freedman who had, before rising to power, murdered Saoterus - the very man whose death had enabled Perennis's ascent. He became Commodus's new chamberlain and favourite, having married one of the emperor's mistresses, a woman named Demostratia. For years, Commodus spent much of his time away from Rome, largely at the family estates in Lanuvium, while Cleander ran the state as his private business.

  What Cleander did with that access was remarkable in its brazenness. He sold Senate seats, army commands, governorships, and suffect consulships to the highest bidder. In 188, after disposing of the existing praetorian prefect Atilius Aebutianus, he took command of the Praetorian Guard at a newly invented rank he called pugione - the Latin word for dagger-bearer - with two prefects formally subordinate to him. The year 190 produced a record that stood across the entire thousand-year history of the Roman consulship: twenty-five suffect consuls appointed in a single year, all of them Cleander's nominees. Among those consuls was the future emperor Septimius Severus.

  Cleander's end came through a food crisis and a food official's cunning. The praefectus annonae Papirius Dionysius, who actually controlled the grain supply, contrived to direct public anger at Cleander for a shortage in the spring of 190. At the end of June, a crowd attacked Cleander's men at a horse race in the Circus Maximus. Cleander sent the Praetorian Guard to suppress them, but Pertinax - then City Prefect of Rome - dispatched the Vigiles Urbani to oppose the Guard. The mob pursued Cleander to the estate at Laurentum where Commodus was staying.

  At the urging of his mistress Marcia, Commodus ordered Cleander beheaded and his son killed. Papirius Dionysius, who had engineered the whole crisis to destroy his rival, was also executed. Commodus then ruled through a tighter inner circle: Marcia, his chamberlain Eclectus, and the new praetorian prefect Quintus Aemilius Laetus.

• 6. Hercules Romanus

  ›

  The fire that swept Rome in 191 destroyed the Temple of Pax, the Temple of Vesta, and sections of the imperial palace. What Commodus did next suggests he saw in the disaster not a catastrophe but an invitation. Early in 192, declaring himself the new Romulus, he ritually re-founded the city and renamed it Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana.

  Every month of the year was renamed to match one of his twelve names: Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus, Exsuperatorius, Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, and Pius. The legions became Commodianae. The fleet importing grain from Africa was renamed Alexandria Commodiana Togata. The Senate was retitled the Commodian Fortunate Senate. The Roman people themselves were given the name Commodianus. The day of these decrees became Dies Commodianus. An inscribed altar found at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates confirms that his titles and the calendar renaming were disseminated to the farthest reaches of the empire, reaching even auxiliary military units.

  His identification with Hercules had been building for years. Innumerable statues depicted him in a lion's hide with a club. He also had the head of the Colossus of Nero, which stood adjacent to the Colosseum, replaced with his own likeness, gave it a club, and placed a bronze lion at its feet. An inscription he added boasted of being "the only left-handed fighter to conquer twelve times one thousand men."

  His gladiatorial performances were genuinely scandalous to Roman sensibilities. Herodian records that spectators thought it beneath an emperor to fight in an amphitheater for sport. Yet Commodus fought as a secutor, the heavily armored gladiatorial type. He killed animals from above the arena floor with a bow. When he fought fellow gladiators, they submitted deliberately. Cassius Dio wrote that citizens of Rome who had lost their feet through accident or illness were brought to the arena and tethered together so Commodus could club them to death while pretending they were giants. On one occasion he killed a hundred lions in a single day. On another, he decapitated a running ostrich with a specially designed dart and then carried the severed, bleeding head toward the senators' seating area in what Dio describes as an implicit threat. The senators, Dio notes, were more inclined to find this ridiculous than terrifying, and chewed on laurel leaves to hide their laughter.

• 7. Death on the Last Day

  ›

  In November 192, Commodus staged the Plebeian Games. Each morning he shot hundreds of animals with arrows and javelins; each afternoon he fought as a gladiator and won every bout. He then announced that he intended to inaugurate the year 193 himself, appearing on the 1st of January as both consul and gladiator.

  What finished him was a list. Marcia discovered among his papers the names of people Commodus intended to have killed. Her own name was on it, along with those of Eclectus and Laetus. The three of them decided to act first. On the 31st of December 192, Marcia poisoned Commodus's food. He vomited up the poison. The conspirators then sent Narcissus, his wrestling partner, into his bath to strangle him. Commodus was thirty-one years old.

  The Senate's response was immediate. He was declared a public enemy, which functioned in practice as a formal condemnation of memory. The name Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana reverted to Rome. Statues were demolished. His body was buried in the Mausoleum of Hadrian.

  His successor Pertinax, who had governed Britain under Commodus and had served as City Prefect, lasted only a short time before being overthrown in the period historians call the Year of the Five Emperors. In 195, the emperor Septimius Severus - one of Cleander's suffect consuls from the record year of 190 - reversed the Senate's verdict, rehabilitated Commodus's memory, and had him deified, seeking the political benefit of a connection to the family of Marcus Aurelius.