The Book of Ancient Bastards (21 page)

How Screwing Your Employees’ Wives Can Cost Ya!

(CA. a.d. 250–285)

[Carinus] put to death very many innocent men on false charges, seduced the wives of nobles, and even ruined those of his school fellows who had taunted him at school, even with trivial banter.
—The Historia Augusta

While many Roman emperors had trouble keeping their pants on, Carinus is one of the few whose proclivities actually cost him his life.

That Carinus was a man of ability is beyond doubt. After he became his father’s junior co-emperor in A.D. 283, he fought a series of battles first against the Germans on the Rhine frontier, then against the Scots in northern Britain, beating them so soundly that the words “Britannicus Maximus” were added to his imperial title.

When Carinus’s father and then his younger brother died under suspicious circumstances while fighting the Parthians on the empire’s eastern frontier in A.D. 285, Carinus led his army east to confront Diocletian, the general whom his father’s legions had proclaimed emperor in their place.

Along the way, Carinus put down the revolt of a pretender to the throne in northern Italy, again showing considerable strategic ability. The two armies finally met in battle in the Balkans on the River Margus. Carinus had more troops and had the superior strategic position; it seemed as if his winning streak would continue.

That’s when several of Carinus’s own staff officers took matters into their own hands.

Apparently the emperor had developed a taste for bedding the wives of his subordinates, and wasn’t shy about it, having seduced or raped several of them over the previous several months.

Seeing their opportunity and driven by a mixture of anger, fear of what Carinus might do next to them or their families, and a thirst for revenge, these same officers turned on their emperor, cutting him down at his moment of greatest triumph.

With Carinus dead and the fortunate-beyond-all-reason Diocletian inclined to be merciful, the entire army ceased fighting and went over to the other side. Because Diocletian won the day, his propagandists got to tell the story, and Carinus went from being a boss who couldn’t keep his hands (and other things) off of the “help” to the cartoonish bastard portrayed in
The Historia Augusta.

Bastard Propaganda

That scandal sheet of ancient sources,
The Historia Augusta
, claims of Carinus that “it would be too long to tell more, even if I should desire to do so, about his excesses.” This after laying out a smorgasbord of sins on Carinus’s part: that he married and divorced no less than nine wives in succession (outdoing fellow bastard Henry VIII of England), some of them while still pregnant with his offspring; that he possessed a voracious bisexual appetite; that basically he screwed everything with a pulse that came within reach; and of course that “he defiled himself by unwonted vices and inordinate depravity,” and that “he set aside all the best among his friends and retained or picked out all the vilest.” The reality is that he only had one wife of record, and he likely wasn’t as bad as painted in this source.

The Best Place to Be Standing When Lightning Strikes Your Boss

( A.D. 245–311)

Diocletian was an author of crimes and a deviser of evil; he ruined everything and could not even keep his hands from God. In his greed and anxiety he turned the world upside down.
—Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum (“On the Deaths of the Persecutors”)

The son of a former slave, Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocles was a career soldier who worked his way up through the ranks—first as Roman provincial governor, then as commander of emperor’s cavalry bodyguards, and finally as emperor.

Diocletian brought nearly a century of warfare to an end, and reorganized the empire so that it was ruled by two senior emperors (augusti) and two junior emperors (caesars), stabilizing it for the first time in decades. When he retired (another rarity for Roman emperors in any era) in A.D. 305, Diocletian was universally hailed as the restorer of the Roman Empire.

Just how did Diocletian make the leap from chief bodyguard of an emperor to emperor himself? Simple: he made a deal with an equally ambitious army officer willing to help with the planning and the heavy lifting.

This officer was none other than the praetorian prefect (commander of the Praetorian Guard) Arrius Aper, perfectly placed to take out the emperor Carus and his son Numerian. Carus and Numerian were fighting in Parthia (in modern-day Iran). One day just a few months into the campaign, Carus was found dead as a stone in his tent the morning after a fierce thunderstorm. Aper let it out that the emperor had died from being struck by lightning.

Really.

Numerian was immediately hailed as emperor and continued the war against Parthia, with inconclusive results. In the spring of A.D. 284, Numerian began to make his way back to Rome. The journey took months. Numerian eventually began to stick to his litter with the blinds pulled, because, as Aper explained to those around him, the young emperor was suffering from an infection of the eyes.

Persecuting Bastard

Diocletian and his caesar Galerius carried out an escalating series of persecutions of the Christian sect during his twenty years of rule. Among these acts were the burning of Christian churches, the dismissal of any army officer proven to be a Christian, and the jailing of leading Christians, insisting that they could be released as soon as they sacrificed to Rome’s ancient state deities. Those Christians who refused to do this were tortured and killed.

As the army neared the city of Nicomedia in modern-day Turkey, the stench of decaying corpse emanating from the emperor’s litter proved too powerful to ignore. Several soldiers opened the litter and found Numerian dead. No one was sure how long he’d been rotting away.

Aper claimed he’d died of natural causes, and immediately called for Numerian’s troops to proclaim him his successor. Standing in competition was none other than Diocles. In a meeting held in front of the entire army, a vote was taken during which the soldiers loudly proclaimed the popular Diocles (who equally quickly adopted the more grand sounding name of “Diocletian” as his ruling name) as emperor.

Diocletian’s first act was to disavow any complicity in the death of his predecessor. His second was to draw his sword there on the platform where he had just been acclaimed moments before, turn, and kill his rival (and co-conspirator) on the spot, claiming that Aper was the guilty one!

While the depth of Diocletian’s involvement in this double plot on the imperial house of Carus is unknown, it’s pretty clear that he was involved at some point, and in the end, profited the most from it.

Profiting bastard.

The Next Best Thing to Being God

( A.D. 272–337)

With such impiety pervading the human race, and the State threatened with destruction, what relief did God devise? . . . I myself was the instrument he chose. . . . [W]ith God’s help I banished and eliminated every form of evil then prevailing, in the hope that the human race, enlightened through me, might be recalled to a proper observance of God’s holy laws.
—Constantine the Great, quoted by Eusebius in De Vita Constantini

The first Christian emperor of Rome, the man who reunited the empire following the chaotic unraveling of Diocletian’s tetrarchy into a decade of civil war, Flavius Julius Constantinus, son of one of the tetrarchs, comes across in the quote above as a ruler with one outsized ego.

No surprise then that he was a paranoid who trusted no one and killed off most of those close to him.

In A.D. 312, Constantine supposedly experienced a revelation leading him to convert to Christianity the night before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (in northern Rome), a decisive victory over rival imperial claimant Maxentius that left Constantine the most powerful man in the Roman world. After he consolidated his power by first defeating and then killing all of the other claimants to the imperial throne, Constantine set about making Christianity the most powerful religion in the Roman Empire, reversing the policies of previous emperors, who had persecuted Christians. Constantine instead persecuted pagans.

By the mid-320’s, Constantine had an heir-apparent ready to step into his shoes; his eldest son Crispus was already an experienced general, popular with the army, and also the focus of growing jealousy and suspicion on the part of his father. It was a tense situation when the imperial entourage headed for Rome in A.D. 326 with the empress Fausta (daughter and sister respectively of Constantine’s rivals Maximian and Maxentius, one killed on her husband’s order and the other killed fighting him in battle), Crispus, Constantia (Constantine’s half-sister and the widow of his rival Licinius), and Licinius’s son Licinianus in tow.

At some point during the visit, Constantine’s simmering envy and paranoia exploded in a bloodbath. Crispus and Licinianus were arrested on charges of conspiring to depose Constantine and usurp the throne. A few days later, they were executed. A week later, the empress was also put to death on Constantine’s order. The evidence against all of these conspirators is scanty. Whether they were guilty of anything is open for debate. But with a ruthless, paranoid nut like Constantine running things, and them likely in constant fear for their own lives, who’d really blame them if they did plot against the emperor?

When Constantine finally died after a long illness in A.D. 337, having reigned for thirty-one years, his court carried on as if he were still alive for three months. Maybe they wanted to be sure that the crazy bastard was actually dead before they worked out the problem of who would succeed him?

Actual Bastard Bastard

Constantine was the product of his father Constantius Chlorus’s union with a tavern-keeper’s daughter named Helena. Whether or not he actually bothered to marry her is open to some conjecture. Regardless, Chlorus swiftly set Helena aside in order to enter into a political marriage with the daughter of one of the other tetrarchs as part of an attempted shoring up of Diocletian’s succession plan.