Lucius Verus

• 1. Introduction

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  Lucius Verus became Roman emperor on the 7th of March 161, the day his adoptive father Antoninus Pius died. What makes that moment extraordinary is not just who he was, but what he and his co-emperor Marcus Aurelius represented: for the first time in the history of Rome, two men held the purple simultaneously. No emperor had ever shared the throne as an equal before. The question that follows is why Marcus Aurelius, who could have ruled alone and who the senate intended to confirm alone, refused to take office unless Lucius received equal powers. And then there is Lucius himself: a man who would spend the majority of his reign directing a massive war against Parthia from a comfortable position in the Syrian city of Antioch, surrounded by actors, a mistress from Smyrna, and a golden statue of his favorite chariot horse. How did someone like that end up at the head of the Roman Empire, and what did he actually accomplish before his death in January or February of 169?

• 2. An Inherited Throne

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  Born Lucius Ceionius Commodus on the 15th of December 130, Verus entered life as the eldest son of Lucius Aelius Caesar, the man Hadrian had chosen as his first heir. That lineage gave him a kind of proximity to imperial power even before he could walk. His mother Avidia came from a family with senatorial roots; her father was the senator Gaius Avidius Nigrinus. Verus had two sisters, Ceionia Fabia and Ceionia Plautia, and was raised in Rome.

  When his father died on the 1st of January 138, everything shifted. Hadrian was forced to choose a new heir and settled on Titus Aurelius Antoninus, instructing him to adopt both the young Lucius and Marcus, who was Antoninus' nephew by marriage. The adoption meant that Lucius, who was already Hadrian's adoptive grandson through his natural father, remained connected to the imperial family through his new one. Antoninus had also betrothed his daughter Faustina to Lucius, though that arrangement was cancelled shortly after.

  Immediately after Hadrian died, Antoninus rearranged the betrothal picture entirely. Marcus would marry Faustina instead; Lucius would be released from that promise. Marcus agreed. The effect was to draw a subtle line between the two boys even in childhood: Marcus was being groomed more deliberately for the senior role.

  Lucius received his education from the celebrated grammaticus Marcus Cornelius Fronto, and was reported to be an excellent student with a fondness for writing poetry and delivering speeches. He started his political career as a quaestor in 153, one year before the legal age for that office, and became consul in 154. In 161 he held the consulship again, this time alongside Marcus Aurelius. That shared consulship came just weeks before Antoninus died, leaving both men to inherit everything at once.

• 3. Two Emperors, One Authority

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  Marcus Aurelius' refusal to take sole power forced the senate into unprecedented territory. The senate granted Lucius the imperium, the tribunician power, and the title augustus. In official titulature, Marcus became Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus; Lucius, dropping his name Commodus and taking Marcus's original cognomen, became Imperator Caesar Lucius Aurelius Verus Augustus.

  Nominal equality was not real equality. Marcus had been consul one more time than Lucius, had shared in Antoninus' administration, and held alone the office of Pontifex maximus. The biographer of the period captured the dynamic plainly: "Verus obeyed Marcus as a lieutenant obeys a proconsul or a governor obeys the emperor." The public would have understood exactly which man was the senior partner.

  The new emperors moved quickly to secure the army's loyalty. They went in person to the Castra Praetoria, the praetorian camp, where Lucius addressed the assembled troops. He promised the soldiers a donative twice the size of any previous such gift: 20,000 sesterces per capita, and more for officers. That sum amounted to several years' pay. In return, the troops swore to protect both emperors.

  The funeral arrangements for Antoninus Pius showed the pair acting in concert. They nominated their adoptive father for deification, and this time the senate did not resist, as it had during Antoninus' own earlier effort to deify Hadrian. A cultic priest was appointed to the deified Antoninus. His remains went into Hadrian's mausoleum alongside Hadrian himself and the children of Marcus. The temple Antoninus had dedicated to his wife became the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and it survives today as the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda.

• 4. A Court of Letters and Floods

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  Fronto, now in his final years as the empire's most celebrated orator and teacher, rushed back from Cirta to Rome as soon as news of his pupils' accession reached him. He arrived at his Roman townhouse at dawn on the 28th of March and sent a note to the imperial freedman Charilas, asking if he could call on the emperors. He did not dare write them directly.

  The reunion revealed how different his two students had become. Marcus spoke to Fronto of his reading: Coelius, and a little Cicero. He mentioned his daughters, who were staying in Rome with their great-great-aunt Matidia Minor because Marcus thought the evening country air was too cold for them. Lucius, by contrast, asked Fronto to settle a dispute he was having with his friend Calpurnius over the relative merits of two actors. Fronto called on Marcus alone. Neither thought to invite Lucius.

  The early reign was, by the evidence of the sources, genuinely popular. The comedy writer Marullus was able to criticize the emperors without punishment, something the biographer notes would have meant execution under almost any other ruler. Marcus gave himself over to philosophy and the pursuit of public goodwill.

  Then in the spring of 162 the Tiber flooded its banks, destroying much of Rome and drowning enough animals to cause a famine. Marcus and Lucius gave the crisis their personal attention. In other famines, the emperors are recorded as providing for Italian communities directly from the Roman granaries. The 11-year-old Annia Lucilla, Marcus's daughter, had by this point already been betrothed to Lucius, despite being his niece by adoption. At the ceremonies marking that betrothal, new provisions were made for the support of poor children.

• 5. The Parthian War

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  The war that would define Lucius's reign began in late summer or early autumn 161, when Vologases IV of Parthia entered Armenia, expelled its Roman-client king, and installed his own man, Pacorus. The Governor of Cappadocia at the time was Marcus Sedatius Severianus, a Gaul who had fallen under the influence of Alexander of Abonoteichus, a self-proclaimed prophet who carried a snake named Glycon and was, as the sources make clear, a confidence man. Alexander convinced Severianus he could defeat the Parthians easily.

  Severianus led a legion, perhaps the IX Hispana, into Armenia and was trapped by the Parthian general Chosrhoes at Elegeia, a town just beyond the Cappadocian frontiers near the headwaters of the Euphrates. The campaign lasted three days. Severianus committed suicide; his legion was massacred. That disaster was followed by news that the Governor of Syria's army had also been defeated and had retreated in disorder.

  Reinforcements flooded east. Three full legions were transferred: I Minervia from Bonn, II Adiutrix from Aquincum, and V Macedonica from Troesmis. Fronto, trying to calm an anxious Marcus, sent him a long letter labeled in later editions De bello Parthico, pointing out that Rome had survived reverses at Allia, Caudium, Cannae, Numantia, Cirta, and Carrhae, and had prevailed in the end. He also sent a selection of Cicero's pro lege Manilia, in which Cicero had argued for giving Pompey supreme command in the Mithridatic War, a conflict that had also taken Rome's armies to Armenia. The parallel may have contributed to the decision to send Lucius east in person.

  Lucius set out in the summer of 162. He traveled through country houses, hunted in Apulia, fell ill at Canosa, probably from a mild stroke, and recovered after three days of fasting and a bloodletting. He then continued through Corinth and Athens, where he stayed with Herodes Atticus and joined the Eleusinian Mysteries. He stopped at Ephesus and Erythrae, lingered in the pleasure resorts of Pamphylia and Cilicia, and eventually arrived in Antioch.

• 6. Antioch and Its Pleasures

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  Lucius spent most of the Parthian campaign based in Antioch, wintering at Laodicea and summering at Daphne, a resort just outside the city. He took a mistress named Panthea, from Smyrna. Lucius described her as a woman of perfect beauty. She was musically inclined and spoke Ionic Greek with an Attic edge. She also had genuine influence: she made Lucius shave his beard, and the Syrians mocked him for it.

  Panthea had intellectual standing of a kind. When the writer Lucian showed her a draft piece in which he had compared her to a goddess, she criticized him for flattery. She did not want to become the next Cassiopeia.

  Critics accumulated. Lucius was said to gamble through the night. He enjoyed the company of actors and requested dispatches from Rome so he could follow his chariot team, the Greens. He carried a golden statue of the Greens' horse Volucer wherever he went. Fronto defended him: the Roman people needed bread and circuses, and it was Lucius who supplied the circuses.

  The biographer acknowledges, at least in part, that much of this material is suspect. The section of the ancient life of Lucius dealing with his debaucheries is described as an insertion into an otherwise sourced narrative, relying at points on nothing better than the biographer's imagination.

  What is less contested is the actual military situation Lucius inherited. The Syrian army had grown soft during a long eastern peace. Soldiers were found at the city's open-air cafes rather than in their quarters. The legate Pontius Laelianus ordered the padding stripped from their saddles. Gambling and drinking were policed. Fronto wrote that Lucius himself inspected troops on foot and visited the sick bay in person. In the middle of the war, perhaps in autumn 163 or early 164, Lucius traveled to Ephesus to marry Marcus's daughter Lucilla, who was not yet fifteen.

• 7. Victory and Its Generals

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  Roman forces under Statius Priscus captured the Armenian capital Artaxata during the campaign season of 163. At the end of that year, Lucius took the title Armeniacus, having never personally seen combat. Marcus declined to accept the title until the following year, though when Lucius was hailed as imperator again, Marcus did not hesitate to take the honor jointly.

  In 164, Armenia was rebuilt on Roman terms. A new capital, Kaine Polis, replaced Artaxata, positioned on Birley's reckoning some thirty miles closer to the Roman border. Detachments from Cappadocian legions were attested at Echmiadzin, beneath the southern face of Mount Ararat, some 400 kilometres east of Satala, meaning a march of twenty days or more through mountainous terrain. A new king was installed: Gaius Julius Sohaemus, a Roman senator of consular rank and Arsacid descent. Imperial coinage of 164 showed Verus seated on a throne while Sohaemus stood before him in salute.

  In 165, Roman forces moved into Mesopotamia. Edessa was retaken and its client king Mannus reinstated. The Parthians fell back to Nisibis, which was besieged and taken. The Parthian general Chosrhoes swam down the Tigris and hid in a cave. A second Roman force under Avidius Cassius and the III Gallica moved down the Euphrates and fought at Dura. By year's end, Cassius's army had reached Seleucia and Ctesiphon. Ctesiphon's royal palace was burned. Seleucia opened its gates to the Romans but was sacked regardless, a black mark that the official version tried to pin on a Seleucid betrayal.

  Cassius's men made it back to Roman territory despite plague and supply shortages. Lucius took the title Parthicus Maximus. In 166, Roman forces crossed the Tigris into Media; Lucius added the title Medicus. Most of the real credit, the sources are clear, belonged to subordinate commanders: Statius Priscus, Martius Verus of V Macedonica, M. Claudius Fronto of I Minervia, and above all Cassius, the low-born senator from the north Syrian town of Cyrrhus whose father had served as Hadrian's secretary. Cassius and Martius Verus, still probably in their mid-thirties, shared the consulships for 166.

• 8. Rome, the Danube, and the End

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  The two years from 166 to 168 were spent in Rome. Lucius kept his troupe of actors and favorites close, had a tavern built in his house, probably at Acquatraversa, and celebrated parties with friends until dawn. He roamed the city without revealing his identity. Marcus disapproved but acknowledged that Lucius continued to perform his official duties with efficiency, leaving little basis for formal complaint.

  In 168, the Marcomanni broke across the Danubian border, opening what would become a war lasting until 180. Lucius did not live to see its end. As he and Marcus Aurelius returned from the field toward Rome, Lucius fell severely ill. He died in January or February of 169. Poisoning was suggested by some sources, but is considered unlikely; the Antonine Plague, which had spread from Cassius's returning army, is the more probable cause.

  Marcus Aurelius, who had insisted on Lucius's elevation to co-emperor eight years earlier and whose first book of Meditations bears evidence of genuine feeling for those close to him, grieved the loss. He escorted the body back to Rome and offered games in Lucius's honor. The senate then voted Lucius divine honors, and he was worshipped thereafter as Divus Verus. The title Iunius Maximus had once carried news of the Parthian victory to Rome and received cash and a quaestorship on the spot; the news of Lucius's death required no messenger, only a funeral procession.