4
THE LAST OF THE ANTONINES
In 172, while Marcus was proclaiming success on the Danube front, there was either a fully fledged uprising or an outbreak of intensive banditry in the Egyptian delta. At the same time, the Parthians attempted to bring Armenia back under the tutelage of Ctesiphon, no doubt emboldened by the detachment of some imperial troops from Cappadocia to the Danube. But the scale of the Danubian war meant Marcus could not give the east the attention it needed, and there was no longer a Lucius Verus available to serve as the face of the imperial dynasty. Avidius Cassius, the long-serving governor of Syria and a native Syrian himself, was granted extraordinary imperium in the east, of the kind that no one outside the imperial family had possessed since the days of Augustus’s trusted lieutenant Agrippa a century and a half before. In practical terms, Cassius had become Marcus’s plenipotentiary east of the Bosporus and the suppression of Lower Egypt was his first task.
Meanwhile, Marcus passed most of the campaigning season of 173 beyond the Danube, possibly reaching as far as the headwaters of the Vistula. The Quadi were certainly one target, perhaps because they had broken their oath not to help the Marcomanni. In the following year, he turned against the Iazyges beyond the Danube bend, in the Great Hungarian plain between the river and the Carpathians, or, in Roman terms, between Pannonia and Dacia. He did well enough to refuse the Iazyges the peace terms they sought, preferring to continue the fighting in 175. That year brought something far worse than another round of frontier warfare: Avidius Cassius, perhaps the most reliable man Marcus had, revolted and claimed the imperial title.
The proximate cause of rebellion was a rumour that Marcus had died on the Danube. Our sources, retrospective and unreliable, suggest that Faustina became worried that Marcus would die of an illness he had contracted and sent word to Cassius to prepare to seize power if Marcus died. While not intrinsically implausible, the story cannot be proved. But whether he believed the rumour to be true, or whether it served as a useful pretext for his ambitions, Cassius was acclaimed emperor by his troops early in 175. The governor of Cappadocia, Martius Verus, stayed loyal to the emperor and sent word to the Danube as soon as he learned of the uprising beyond the Taurus mountains. When Cassius learned the truth – Marcus was not dead and thus he was now de facto a usurper – he decided to press ahead with his rebellion and fight for the throne. He was popular in the east – his royal Seleucid background lent him real status there – and backing him he had the powerful Syrian army, which had won the throne for generals in the past. The whole of the Roman Near East south of the Taurus sided with him, including Egypt and its vital grain supply. But he got no encouragement from his fellow senators in the west, and he would need to deal with the loyalist Martius Verus, at the head of the Cappadocian legions, sooner rather than later.
For Marcus the situation was very alarming. In bad health himself, he was fully aware of Cassius’s strengths. He moved quickly, sending Vettius Sabinianus, governor of Pannonia Inferior, to hold Rome. The senate had obligingly condemned Cassius as a hostis publicis, but Marcus knew it would duly reverse itself if the ‘public enemy’ looked likely to pull off his coup. The teenage caesar Commodus, back in Rome when news of the coup arrived, oversaw the distribution of liberalitas (the emperor’s free gift of coined money) to the people to calm them in their emperor’s absence. He rejoined his father on the Danube, where he immediately assumed the toga virilis, well before the March festival of the Liberalia when Roman boys traditionally marked the transition to adulthood. He received the title princeps iuventutis and was presented to the army, which was meant to signify that Marcus had an heir who would succeed him when he died, and to play on the long-standing military habit of dynastic sentiment.
Marcus declared publicly, to the army and the senate, that he hoped Cassius would not be killed or take his own life, still less force war upon the empire, and that he should instead allow Marcus to make him an example of his mercy. This was implausible, even from as forbearing and philosophical an emperor as Marcus: it was an iron law of Roman history that, once committed to his usurpation, an imperial challenger should not be permitted to live. Before Marcus was forced to take action, however, one of Cassius’s own centurions assassinated him, to the emperor’s great relief. Martius Verus advanced into Syria to settle affairs. On the emperor’s orders, he burned Cassius’s correspondence unread. With this act of leniency, Marcus not only exculpated those genuinely implicated in Cassius’s rebellion, but also any innocents who might have been suspected by dint of having written to the usurper in times long past.
Given how much support Cassius had enjoyed, Marcus could not afford to delay a trip to the east. He concluded a peace with the Iazyges, took the victory title Sarmaticus and enlisted a large number of their cavalry into the auxiliaries, sending them to faraway Britain. Pompeianus was left on the Danube frontier as Marcus’s proxy, while the imperial family began a tour of the eastern provinces that had supported Cassius. Along with Marcus, Faustina and Commodus went one of the year’s consuls, none other than Helvius Pertinax, son of a freedman, and thus even more than his patron Pompeianus an indicator of the changes overtaking the ruling class of the empire. The imperial party overwintered in the east, where Faustina died, at the village of Halala near Tyana in Cappadocia. Marcus renamed the village Faustinopolis and the senate, as was customary, deified her as diva Faustina.
On the whole, Marcus was extremely lenient, granting Cassius’s younger children freedom of movement, and only banishing his elder son Heliodorus. He did, however, ostentatiously spurn the city of Cyrrhus, where Cassius had been born, and forbade public spectacles at Antioch, the capital of the revolt, also stripping it of its rights as a metropolis. He treated Alexandria in Egypt more lightly, and Antioch would have its privileges restored by Commodus after his father’s death. More significantly, Marcus decreed that henceforth no man should be allowed to govern the province of his birth, lest that kindle dangerous ambition. On the overland journey back to Rome, the imperial party stopped in Athens, where Marcus and Commodus were together initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries. The emperor also endowed professorships of the arts and sciences in the city in, among other topics, Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy.
In the autumn of 176, the family returned to Rome, and later that year, on 27 November, Commodus was granted imperium maius, thus standing beside Marcus as Lucius Verus had once done. The two of them celebrated a joint triumph for the Danubian victories. The next year opened with Commodus and his brother-in-law, Fadilla’s husband M. Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus, as consuls. At fifteen, Commodus was the youngest consul in Roman history, an explicit exception to the Augustan lex annalis that still cloaked imperial government in republican dress – at the time, it was seen as an affront to ancient tradition, but child emperors would become an increasing feature of imperial government as the centuries wore on. A month after inaugurating the year as consul, Commodus received the tribunician power. This meant that, like Marcus in the last years of Pius, he now had all the constitutional trappings necessary to be emperor, and he was officially made an augustus in the middle of 177. In final celebration of his son’s accession, Marcus cancelled all outstanding debts to the aerarium and the fiscus going back to the year 133; Marcus’s adoptive grandfather Hadrian had done the same thing in 118, so the gesture emphasised dynastic memory as much as it bought good will.
Marcus still expected to die soon, and he was unsettled by what he saw on the frontiers. The Mauri in Tingitania remained uncontrollable: a group had again crossed into Baetica to raid and had even laid siege to the town of Singilia Barba (modern Antequera in Málaga province). Meanwhile, the Danube was again calling and, though Marcus would take personal charge of the campaign, he wanted Commodus to gain the experience of real war. To shore up the dynasty before they set out, he married Commodus to Bruttia Crispina, the descendant of a leading Hadrianic aristocrat; her father, Bruttius Praesens, already a prominent man when he was made consul in 153, was designated as consul for the second time for 180. In August 178, the emperors left for the Danube front. Old Pompeianus went with them as always, and now Commodus’s father-in-law Bruttius did, too. Both guard prefects, Tarruttienus Paternus and Tigidius Perennis, accompanied the expedition and both would keep their posts into the next reign. Helvius Pertinax was made governor of Dacia, to support the flank of the main army, and Paternus was put in charge of the field army; the campaign proper was launched in 179 into Quadic territory at the Danube bend. Modern scholars are divided over whether Marcus intended to conquer and hold a new province of Marcomannia beyond the Danube, but the sources, written and archaeological, reveal dozens of Roman forts throughout what is now Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and it is certainly possible to discern in them a prelude to occupation and provincialisation.
At the start of the next year’s campaigning season, however, Marcus fell gravely ill yet again. It may be that he had finally succumbed to the plague, but he had never been particularly robust, so we cannot be sure. Nor are we sure quite where he was when this final sickness overtook him – perhaps near Sirmium. He summoned Commodus, commended him to the counsel of his own senior advisers and begged him to continue the war effort whether or not he was personally inclined to do so. The old emperor then proceeded to starve himself, perhaps hoping that this would cure his illness, perhaps trying to hasten death. After seven days, on 17 March 180, he knew he was dying. When the duty tribune asked him for the day’s watchword, which it was the emperor’s task to set, Marcus sent the man to Commodus: ‘Go to the rising sun,’ he said, ‘for I am now setting.’
Commodus’s first decision as sole emperor, so far as we can tell, was to conclude a treaty with the Marcomanni and the Quadi. This left intact the old line of the Danube frontier, scotching any plans Marcus might have had for imperial expansion, and it brought to the region a peace that endured for half a century. The terms were very much in Rome’s favour. The defeated tribes were required to supply the empire with an annual tribute of grain and to collectively contribute more than 20,000 soldiers to the Roman army. They would be posted to distant auxiliary units and kept away from their homeland to break down any lingering sense of tribal identity they might have. Back home, both the Marcomanni and the Quadi were partially disarmed and forbidden to attack their neighbours – the Iazyges, the Buri and the Vandals – without Roman permission. They were also forbidden to make use of the Danube islands and even of a strip of land on their own, left bank of the river. Large-scale political meetings could take place only when a Roman centurion was present to supervise.
In many ways, Commodus’s decision to end his father’s war was wise. It restored the old imperial preference for client kingships in regions not worth the effort of conquest and it made sure those clients would be dependent upon Rome for their hold on internal power. An unintended, but ultimately more lasting, consequence was the efflorescence of civilian life and Roman civil society in the Danubian provinces, which had developed very quickly thanks to two decades of wartime investment in the region’s infrastructure. Thus it is not true, as many have argued, that Marcus’s worthless son threw away the chance to create a great trans-Danubian province as his father had planned. There is no definitive evidence that Marcus was planning to extend the frontiers into central Europe, and the return to the pre-war status quo was both strategically sound and tactically sensible. What is more, however much Marcus’s trusted old adviser Claudius Pompeianus, brother-in-law to the new emperor, might argue against the return to Rome, Commodus would have to present himself to the people to be acclaimed by them and the senate. Delay would breed their resentment, while the military’s dynasticism would keep the frontiers quiet for a time. As soon as the treaty was concluded, Commodus presented himself at Rome as the son of the deified Marcus and the bringer of peace through conquest. He celebrated a formal triumph on 22 October 180.
Spectacular as that triumph may have been, Commodus’s reign did not begin well – Saoterus, his a cubiculo (private chamberlain) and a Bithynian freedman, rode with the emperor in his triumphal chariot. Whether known or merely rumoured to be Commodus’s lover, Saoterus was deeply resented by all who thought they had a stronger claim on the emperor’s attention, and the presence of the low-born imperial favourite antagonised senatorial sentiment. On the other hand, the first consuls of the new reign were both sons of consulars, a traditionalist move that may have appeased some portion of senatorial opinion, and Pompeianus stayed loyal to Commodus despite his brother-in-law’s unwillingness to take advice. The new emperor got no such loyalty from his own sister, Pompeianus’s wife Lucilla, who attempted to organise a coup, perhaps in 182. The motives behind imperial court intrigue are never easy to uncover, because contemporary writers were often as much in the dark as we are. The mere jealousy imputed to Lucilla by our sources is surely not enough and it may be that she found her younger brother insufficiently pliable and resented playing second fiddle to Commodus’s wife Crispina.
Lucilla manifestly loathed old Pompeianus, her father’s creature and a husband to whom she had never reconciled herself. She therefore conspired against Commodus with her lover, Ummidius Quadratus, the adoptive son of Marcus’s nephew. Their fellow conspirator, Claudius Pompeianus Quintianus, was a nephew of Pompeianus himself, a reminder that ‘dynastic crime and secret politics’ were central to the palace intrigues of the principate. Lucilla relied upon Quadratus and Quintianus to have her brother killed, but their farcical effort ended in shambles. As Commodus entered the amphitheatre, Quadratus confronted him and stagily proclaimed the enmity of the senate, rather than simply doing the job. The coup ended before it began, Quadratus and Quintianus were seized and executed, and Lucilla was exiled and later killed at a discreet moment.
Claudius Pompeianus withdrew from public life, knowing how lucky he was to have survived. The guard prefects, both of whom had been appointed by Marcus before the last Danubian campaign, used the disruption to do away with the hated a cubiculo Saoterus; he was murdered by the frumentarii (‘inspectors of the grain supply’), who were often used as secret police and special agents by the early Roman emperors. With Saoterus dead, the guard prefect Tigidius Perennis assumed the position of trust that the a cubiculo had once held. He got Commodus to make his fellow prefect Tarruttienus Paternus a senator, thus rendering him ineligible for the equestrian post of guard prefect, and then put it about that Paternus had been party to Lucilla’s conspiracy, for which crime the newly minted senator was executed. The prominent jurist Salvius Julianus (whose son was betrothed to Paternus’s daughter), several ex-consuls and the emperor’s own ab epistulis, Vitruvius Secundus, were executed at the same time. Two of Marcus’s trusted advisers, the brothers Quintilii, were also executed. In the provinces, other senators and commanders who might have been involved in treasonable conspiracy were hunted down and killed. Many others who had been appointed in the last years of Marcus’s reign or at the very start of Commodus’s sole reign were thrown out of office, among them three future emperors: Didius Julianus, then governor of Germania Inferior, forced into retirement at his native Mediolanum (Milan); Helvius Pertinax, the governor of Syria; and Septimius Severus, legionary legate of IV Scythica. C. Aufidius Victorinus, who had been appointed praefectus urbi at the end of Marcus’s reign, remained in favour and in office until 186, but in that year he was forced to commit suicide, the last of the old guard to have survived so long.
Commodus himself, so we are told, proceeded to retire from the business of government altogether, leaving state affairs first to his prefect Perennis and later to another favourite, M. Aurelius Cleander (actually a freedman of Marcus’s who had taken the praenomen and nomen of his former master when he was manumitted). The period of Perennis’s domination was a bad one – he was deeply hostile to the senate, having started off his career as praefectus annonae (the equestrian official in charge of the grain supply of the city of Rome). Government, where we can see it in action, was dominated by equestrian officials; the emperor’s advisory council, the consilium principis, is documented by the occasional inscription and at times it met with no senators present, something hitherto unprecedented. Equally unheard of was the explicit inclusion of a freedman in the consilium, even one like Cleander who had had free birth bestowed upon him retrospectively by a legal fiction known as a restitutio natalium. Throughout Roman history, freedmen and eunuchs could gain tremendous influence with their masters, but that was always a source for scandal and meant to be handled with discretion. A freedman taking part in an imperial council that excluded senators offended every sense of propriety.
Worse, although Commodus’s generals continued to win frontier victories and he continued to be acclaimed imperator for them, relations between the court and the senatorial legates were poor. In Britannia the general Ulpius Marcellus, who had won a major victory against a rebellion there, was overthrown in a mutiny. Thereupon the legates of all the British legions were cashiered and replaced by senior equestrians, risen from the ranks. Indeed, we can see a consistent trend towards the appointment of equestrians to positions of power in this reign, with only the most prestigious, chiefly the consulship, remaining the preserve of the old consular families. The downgrading of the most important legateships was one among many insults felt deeply by the senate. It was Perennis who shouldered the blame, because the emperor was known to have no interest in governing. The prefect’s fall came soon enough. Precise circumstances are murky, for our sources all contradict each other, but it seems that a military delegation, possibly of British troops, negotiated the guard prefect’s dismissal and execution in 185. In this, they were abetted by the a cubiculo Cleander, who now took control of government.
He was determined that no praetorian prefect should disrupt his hold on Commodus and so the prefecture passed through numerous hands between 186 and 190, while Cleander took to styling himself a pugione, ‘dagger man’, and the emperor’s personal guardian, dominating each of the successive prefects. Thanks to Cleander, the enemies of Perennis were all now brought back to their lost commands, among them the future emperors Septimius Severus and Helvius Pertinax. By contrast, some of Marcus’s remaining trusties, like the praefectus urbi Aufidius Victorinus, committed suicide rather than put up with Cleander’s habit of openly selling public offices. In 185, while Pertinax was sent to govern Britannia and mollify its restive troops, Severus received his first provincial governorship, in Gallia Lugdunensis. Pertinax was faced with yet another violent mutiny of the British troops, but, unlike Ulpius Marcellus a year earlier, he was not recalled to court in disgrace. Instead, he played upon the emperor’s paranoia, claiming that Commodus’s brother-in-law Antistius Burrus was plotting to seize the throne in concert with another Numidian general named Arrius Antoninus, a relative of the imperial house who had recently been honoured with the proconsulate of Asia.
We cannot be quite sure what lay behind these intrigues, but they may be the first hints of tentative jockeying for the succession as it began to dawn on people that Commodus would at some point be overthrown. We know that several of the main intriguers, among them Pertinax, Burrus and Arrius Antoninus, had all first risen to prominence in the last years of Marcus Aurelius during the Marcomannic wars. They would have got to know each other well in the intervening period and shared strong views on the manifold failings of the Commodan regime. Burrus and Antoninus, with their connections to the imperial house, were genuinely plausible candidates for the throne, while Pertinax returned a hero from Britain and took up the cura of the alimenta, an honourable post in which he could keep his head well down. Cleander, meanwhile, grew bolder, having both Burrus and Antoninus executed in 189 and also eliminating Atilius Aebutianus, a praetorian prefect who showed too many signs of independence.
As Cleander thrived, so too did Pertinax, who went to Africa as proconsul in summer 188. We should note how extraordinary this appointment was for a man like Pertinax: the proconsulates of Asia, Africa and Achaea were strongly associated with the old senatorial governorships of the republic and, as such, were the jealous preserve of the highest born senators. Pertinax was the son of a freedman and, though he was himself equestrian at birth, his successes had come thanks to the patronage of the similarly arriviste Pompeianus and later the hated Cleander. That he was a brilliant commander whose talents more than justified his promotion could not stifle the whiff of improper novelty in his ongoing successes, something that was not helped when he returned from Africa to take up the post of urban prefect.
The British disturbances, with all their subsequent consequences for palace intrigue, were not the only rumblings in the empire at large. In 185 a certain Maternus revolted in Germania Superior, in what is known as the Deserters’ War, the bellum desertorum. This was an unfortunate consequence of Marcus’s unremitting warfare on the Danube, which had required the forced impressment of many soldiers with little professional loyalty. Left idle, they rebelled, joined by discontents of various stripes, from runaway slaves to indentured labourers to impoverished peasants. Thus reinforced, Maternus’s rebels dared to challenge a Roman legion in the field: the VIII Augusta was given a new honorific title, pia fidelis constans Commoda, for resisting the rebel army. The rebels were suppressed by summer 186, probably by M. Helvius Clemens Dextrianus, but the episode demonstrates the social problems endemic to the military provinces of the empire, where it took only the right combination of events to release surprising reserves of latent violence.
The escalation of paramilitary violence in the provinces, and the continuing intrigue at court, meant that the orderly conduct of government began to suffer. Thanks to Cleander’s sale of offices, there were fully twenty-five consuls in the year 190, among them the future emperor Septimius Severus. Cleander had been hated, even by those who profited by him, ever since he had done away with Paternus and established his hegemony over the paranoid but inattentive Commodus. He had hung on remarkably well for a dominant favourite without family connections in the imperial elite. But the rise of a more suitable equestrian rival, the praefectus annonae Papirius Dionysius, would end his hold on the court.
In the spring of 190, Papirius manipulated the grain supply of the capital to cause a bread shortage. The plebs predictably rioted, perhaps during the ludi Caeriales, held in the Circus Maximus on 19 April. The angry crowd was met by a group of children who were let into the circus and began to chant, calling down blessings on Commodus and curses on Cleander. This carefully orchestrated spur to public expression was taken up by the assembled masses, who marched several miles out of Rome to the villa where Commodus was ensconced. When the imperial mistress Marcia learned what was going on, she urged the emperor to execute Cleander, knowing that a mob of this sort would turn still uglier if not propitiated. The terrified emperor had his a pugione executed at once, and not one of Cleander’s protégés, least of all the urban prefect Pertinax, lifted a finger to protect him. They had got what they needed from the former slave who had smoothed their path to power; his death rid them of a nasty reminder of an embarrassing debt.
Cleander’s execution sparked more killing. His protégé, the guard prefect Julius Julianus, had his colleague Regillus murdered, before being executed in turn on the emperor’s orders. Despite the many conspiracies, real and imagined, no one had yet actually managed to eliminate Commodus. In the early 190s, however, it seems clear that the emperor stopped behaving with the mere caprice of an absolute ruler and began his descent into actual madness. He proclaimed a new Golden Age of Commodus on his coinage, and he implicitly rejected the memory of Marcus by ceasing to style himself Marcus Antoninus and instead minting coins in his original name, Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus, thus recalling the emperor Hadrian. He also amplified his appeal to a Hadrianic precedent by becoming an Athenian citizen and having himself inscribed in the same deme (the traditional Athenian voting group) as Hadrian had done, inaugurating a tradition that would last at least as late as the reign of Gallienus (r. 253–68) – the people of Athens reciprocated by making the emperor their archon, or chief magistrate, in the year 188/9. (All the various Greek calendars used a year that overlapped two different Roman years.)
Meanwhile, Commodus’s identification with the god Hercules became more intense. It had played a small part in dynastic propaganda ever since Marcus had made the boy a caesar in 166, but in the 190s coins began to show Commodus as an actual personification of the god. Statues of him dressed as Hercules, with the traditional attributes of lionskin and club, were put up everywhere. While this heroic disguise may have been calculated to appeal to the soldiers and particularly the urban plebs, it offended the senators intensely. They would happily deify emperors once they were safely dead, but had no desire to serve a self-proclaimed divinity. Modern scholars disagree about how seriously Commodus took his new Herculean identity. Some argue that we are looking at an aspect of formal propaganda in which the emperor had a distinct role to play before different audiences, but which he did not necessarily have to believe in. Although it is possible that he was merely trying to convey his special relationship to the divine, the whole historical tradition, though hostile, uniformly claims that he did believe he was a god. Other traces of madness exist as well.
The emperor had always been fond of the arena and enjoyed the company of gladiators. Now, his power unchecked, he began to appear in the arena himself. The gladiator, though often a popular hero, was by definition a slave, a barbarian or a criminal. That the ruler of the Roman world should choose to play such a debased role was yet another gross offence to traditional values. Worse still, it conjured the awful historical exemplum of another tyrant who had revelled in inappropriate behaviour – Nero, the actor and cytharode. Whether as god or gladiator, Commodus could be nothing but a hate figure for the senatorial elite, and the emperor began to reciprocate. The ordo senatorius was violently purged. No fewer than twelve ex-consuls were put to death during the last two years of Commodus’s reign. These killings, unlike the earlier purges of the reign, destroyed not just individuals but whole families.
No story was too implausible to believe of a megalomaniac tyrant whose father, in striking contrast, had been able to swear on oath that he had never caused the death of a senator: Commodus, it was rumoured, went so far as to order the execution of anyone, senator or not, whose hunting skills equalled or excelled his own. Criminals, it was said, stalked the streets of Rome with poisoned needles, infecting victims with plague – a rumour that had previously surfaced in the reign of Domitian, another archetypal tyrant. But, as in the past, all the hatred he inspired among the senate could not in itself bring Commodus down. It took his own household to do that.
Along with the new imagery, the emperor surrounded himself with new protectors: there was a new praetorian prefect, Q. Aemilius Laetus, a Numidian, who held the office alone, and there was also a new a cubiculo named Eclectus, who had served Lucius Verus and Ummidius Quadratus before. Eclectus, while in the service of Quadratus, had known the latter’s freedwoman concubine Marcia, who after Quadratus’s execution was used by Commodus for the same purposes. While Commodus disported himself in the arena, Eclectus and Marcia ruled the palace, and Laetus more or less ruled the empire. The provincial appointments made by Laetus are essential to our understanding of the aftermath of Commodus’s fall, even though it is a struggle for scholars to explain them convincingly. Septimius Severus, for instance, who had never served on the northern frontier, was given command of Pannonia Superior and its three legions, while his brother Septimius Geta held Moesia Inferior, with two. Another African senator, Clodius Albinus, was given Britannia – still a very difficult military command – while his relative Asellius Aemilianus was made proconsul of Asia. Cornelius Anullinus, later a key prop of the Severan regime, also got his first appointment in this period. These were not the only Africans holding provincial commands at this time and we can perhaps link them together through joint service under Helvius Pertinax; a new prefect of Egypt, Mantennius Sabinus, was also probably related to Pertinax in some way. Pertinax had proved himself a survivor, actually managing to prosper through all the upheavals of Commodus’s reign. His term as urban prefect had been successful enough that he and the emperor were designated to inaugurate the year 192 as ordinary consuls. By the time they did so, old Pertinax had joined a plot to overthrow the emperor.
Laetus, for reasons that are genuinely obscure, had decided to make Pertinax Commodus’s successor. As sole guard prefect, and on cordial relations with the palace staff, he was in a position to ensure that a plot against the emperor did not go awry. Allies were in place across the northern provinces, while the large and potentially hostile Syrian army was under the command of Pescennius Niger, something of a nonentity who owed his appointment, it was said, to one of Commodus’s favoured athletes.
The conspirators were encouraged by the fact that Commodus’s behaviour was becoming ever more bizarre. In 192, he officially renamed Rome the colonia Commodiana, in effect subordinating the eternal city to himself, while he renamed each month of the year after his grandiose, indeed imaginary, imperial nomenclature. (He had by now added unprecedented names like Amazonius and Exsuperatorius to his title, which are attested in inscriptions, not just in hostile literary texts.) In the guise of Hercules, he revelled in new orgies of bloodshed. At the plebeian games of November 192, the emperor slaughtered thousands of red and roe deer, lions and leopards, and shot the heads off ostriches with special arrows so that they continued to run headless for a time. In a scene famously described by the senatorial historian Cassius Dio, who was present at the time, Commodus brandished the head of a decapitated ostrich at the assembled senators, forced to watch the display from their special gallery, proclaiming his wish to decapitate the whole senate in the same way.
He went further, replacing the solar portrait head of the colossal statue that gave the Colosseum its name with his own portrait, an unfortunate echo of its builder, the tyrant Nero, and providing it with the attributes of Hercules – a club and a crouching bronze lion. These excesses made wild rumours seem plausible – that the emperor would shoot spectators at his games, forcing them to play Stymphalian birds to his Hercules, or that he planned to personally murder the ordinary consuls of 193 (Sosius Falco and Gaius Erucius Clarus) dressed as a gladiator and then assume the role of sole consul. Even the gods seemed angry, as a portentous earthquake made clear: the fire it caused destroyed many of Rome’s libraries and archives and the enormous temple of Peace was consumed by the flames. So, too, was the temple of Vesta; in order to save the sacred Palladium, the Vestal Virgins were forced, in an unprecedented act, to expose it to public view and carry it openly through the city down the via Sacra to safety in the imperial palace on the Palatine. Commodus, who had given up residing on the Palatine for a more private villa on the Caelian hill, would not be permitted to anger the heavens any further.
Laetus and Eclectus brought the emperor’s concubine Marcia into their plot. On New Year’s Eve 192, she administered poison to the emperor. It put him to sleep but, burly and strong, he soon awoke in a fit of vomiting and began to recover. Eclectus and Marcia had to bring in Narcissus, a wrestler with whom Commodus regularly trained, to strangle him in his bath.
By the next morning Pertinax had been proclaimed emperor. Our sources agree that the final decision to kill Commodus was taken quite suddenly, but also make clear how long the plot had been in train. Even Claudius Pompeianus, the original sponsor of Pertinax, who was now over a decade into his retirement, was in Rome when Commodus died. Having been married to Lucilla, a daughter of Marcus and the widow of Lucius Verus, Pompeianus could lend moral support and a tangible sense of dynastic legitimacy to the sudden change of regime. With his advanced age and uncanny instinct for avoiding trouble, he did not put himself up as contender for a throne that had been secretly designated for another. Pertinax got the news of Commodus’s murder when he was already at the praetorian camp, proof of his deep complicity in events. With an escort of praetorians, he made his way before dawn to Commodus’s residence on the Caelian. There, he was presented to the troops guarding the court as their new imperator, successor to the dead Commodus. These soldiers responded slowly and suspiciously, refusing to believe that Commodus had died naturally. But by morning of New Year’s Day 193, the soldiery had acclaimed Pertinax their emperor.
When the senate house was opened, Pertinax made the now traditional gesture of recusatio imperii – he did not want the burden of the imperial purple, so he said. But he was widely acclaimed by his senatorial peers, who heaped abuse upon the memory of Commodus and loudly demanded that his body be abused – ‘dragged on a hook’ was the phrase. But Pertinax had more sense than that, knowing that Commodus’s memory was revered rather than execrated by much of the army. He allowed his predecessor’s statues to be pulled down, but he had already arranged for the body to be safely buried in the mausoleum of Hadrian. He dared not provoke those who still honoured Commodus’s memory.
The praetorians remained grudging and suspicious, and the extravagance of the dead Hercules had so denuded the treasury that Pertinax auctioned off items from the imperial household to pay the guard his accession donative. Meanwhile, news of the coup went out to the provincial governors. By March, all had announced the succession of Pertinax, though none, it seems, were quite satisfied. The latter half of 193 would witness a flurry of imperial proclamations and inaugurate a confused half-decade of civil war. One of the imperial aspirants was Septimius Severus, the governor of Pannonia Superior. We need to give some attention to his origins before returning to our narrative, for he and his future rival Clodius Albinus illustrate how far the provincial Roman world had come in displacing the old dominance of the imperial centre.