The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Roman Empire (42 page)

The Flavians and the “good” Emperors presided over 150 years of relative stability and development, but it had come with some weak links and at a price. Trajan's conquest of Dacia brought in the rich gold reserves of that country, but it masked the fact that Rome's economic systems were unequal to its size and needs. As these resources played out, the cost of maintaining social programs, not to mention the military and its loyalty, was a burden that could not be sustained. Marcus Aurelius, for example, had to sell off the imperial dinnerware to fund his campaigns! Rome was never very good at long-term budgeting, but then the record for economic long-range planning isn't very good for most states.

This period also witnessed the emperor's increasing power over and involvement with military, civil, judicial, and religious aspects of imperial Roman life. As the
princeps
drew power to himself, and the senate either lost or relinquished it, the emperor and his staff became the micro-managers of a macro-system. This led to a situation wherein one person could not attend to the whole, but the whole depended on the one to function. This system often experienced large-scale paralysis, disenfranchisement, and apathy while awaiting the emperor's direction.

Defense of the borders increasingly occupied most of the emperor's time and resources. Trajan had taken the Empire beyond the limit of what its populations, resources, and technology could maintain. Hadrian scaled back these borders, but Rome still barely managed, and only through great effort, to maintain territorial integrity. As pressures increased, especially along the Danube, in Dacia, and in the east, Rome needed more resources. Without new sources of revenue, it could raise money only by increasing taxes and diverting resources from the center of power toward the provincial armies.

Despite these preexisting conditions, you will often read that things went bad when Marcus Aurelius abandoned the “good” emperors' practice of adopting a successor by merit and went back to the practice of hereditary succession. Trust me: There were enough problems with the Empire already going bad. To single out Commodus's succession is a kind of
post hoc propter hoc
argument. Besides, no one was waiting in the wings who could have stopped the downslide. Marcus Aurelius himself couldn't do it, and odds are his successor, whoever that was, wouldn't have either.
Besides, what if the best man for the job (which includes keeping the peace among rival armies and such)
is
your son? Marcus tried to buffer his son Commodus's inexperience by surrounding him with trusted advisors. It is unfortunate, however, that Commodus turned out to be a disaster of Herculean proportions.

 
When in Rome
Post hoc propter hoc
is one of many informal logic fallacies that still bear Latin names. In English, it translates as “after this (then) because of this” and describes the fallacy of claiming a cause and effect between two events based on their succession in time. For example, it may
seem
that your purchase of a particular stock causes its value to drop because that's what happens after you buy it, but there isn't really any correlation between
your
purchase and the stock's performance.

 
Veto!
Many blame Marcus for making his son his heir, but it wasn't as if the emperors before him had abandoned the practice. They preserved the concept of dynastic succession by adopting their successors. Furthermore, by marrying successors into their own families, the good emperors showed that they retained dynastic aspirations of their own. Besides, of the “good” emperors, only Marcus had a natural son!

Marcus Aurelius, Commodus's father, had groomed Commodus from youth to be emperor, and Commodus had accompanied him on his military campaigns. Commodus was on campaign with him when Marcus died in 180. He settled affairs in Germany by negotiation (which some thought cowardly but which really made sense) and returned to Rome. There he let a series of personal advisors run the Empire while he pursued what every red-blooded 18-year-old Roman male with all the power in the world wants: sports and sex. These advisors became notorious and were either assassinated by the senate or by Commodus as he fell out with them. A few to mention are . . .

• Saoterus,
  who first appeared in a chariot with Commodus in the new emperor's first triumph. Commodus shocked the crowd by making a display of periodically kissing him. Saoterus was murdered by opposing senators in 182.
  
• Perennis,
  commander of the Praetorian Guard. Commodus put him in control of the government after Saoterus. Perennis indulged the emperor's interests, but Commodus had him and his sons executed when disgruntled soldiers accused Perennis of plotting Commodus's death.
  
• Cleander,
  a Phrygian slave who rose to power in the imperial household. He became notorious for indulging Commodus while running the government for his own profit. Commodus had him killed to save his own skin during riots against Cleander.
  

 
Great Caesar's Ghost!
Commodus's gladiatorial fervor and madness recently came back out of the mire to serve as the historical backdrop and story line for the film
Gladiator.

Commodus slipped into megalomania during his reign. He insisted on being called “Hercules” and demanded that the senate deify him while alive and worship him. He wore a Hercules outfit in public and appeared as the hero in the games. When a fire ravaged the city, he decided that he would be the second founder of Rome and officially renamed Rome “Colonia Commodiana” (“Colony of Commodus,” or “Commodeville”).

Commodus is most famous for his sex-capades (he is said to have kept a supply of 300 concubines and 300 young boys) and his enthusiasm for gladiatorial games. He became very skilled at archery and javelin throwing—he could cut the head off of an ostrich at 50 paces. He participated in games of the hunt and reportedly even finished off a few cripples in the arena. The senatorial class was disgusted. It would be as if a president or governor became a participant in professional wrestling. The crowds, however, loved it and flocked in from beyond the city to see Commodus, who demanded a high fee for his appearances.

After surviving several assassination attempts, Commodus began to threaten both the senate and those around him. In one particularly vivid display, he walked around the arena shaking a severed ostrich head and bloody sword at senators. Finally a group of senators and Commodus's favorite concubine, Marcia, pulled their collective head out of the sand. They poisoned him the night before a big event in which the emperor planned to appear as “Hercules, Founder of Rome.” When he threw up the poison, they called in his personal trainer to finish him off.

That same night the assassins smuggled Commodus's body out of the palace. They brought it as proof of the tyrant's death to the house of a respected senator, the 66- year-old Publius Helvius Pertinax, and offered him the emperorship. With large bribes to the Praetorian Guard, Pertinax was “reluctantly” proclaimed emperor in a midnight meeting of the senate worthy of any Fellini movie. Calling Commodus “more
savage than Domitian and more foul than Nero,” senators called for the desecration of Commodus's body, but Pertinax and cooler heads prevailed. They wiped Commodus's name from all monuments but eventually buried him in Hadrian's Mausoleum.

Pertinax sold off Commodus's gladiator outfits and other personal paraphernalia, and tried to bring finances back in line. But he didn't last long—he didn't pay off the praetorians while trying to rein them in. They tried to assassinate him several times. Finally, about 300 of them broke into the palace, and Pertinax bravely tried to talk them down. “Hey,” a soldier shouted as he stepped forward with his sword, “The soldiers have sent you this sword!” and struck. The rest then hacked Pertinax to death. He had been emperor for 87 days.

Pertinax was dead. As the soldiers stuck his head on a pole and paraded it around a bit, they realized that they had no exit strategy. They beat a quick retreat to their barracks and waited. As news spread, a candidate for emperor, a senator and Pertinax's father-in-law, Sulpicianus, showed up. He promised them a big bonus to support him. Then
another
senator, the wealthy Didius Julianus, showed up and offered them a bigger bonus. A bidding war for emperor went on until Julianus won. (Just think if they had had eBay at that time.) His wife, who always wanted him to amount to something, was very pleased.

But neither the people nor the provincial armies were pleased. In Rome, people jeered and threw stones, and then voted to ask Niger, the governor of Syria, to take the throne. Meanwhile the legions of Britain proclaimed their commander, Albinus, and the legions of the Danube proclaimed their commander, Septimius Severus, emperor. All three commanders made a rush for Rome, and Severus's forces got their first. Julianus tried to organize resistance and then to negotiate, but the senate proclaimed Septimius emperor and Julianus a criminal. Guards found Julianus deserted in the palace, wailing something akin to “Why
me?
What have
I
done?” and killed him. He had been emperor for 66 days.

 
Roamin' the Romans
The magnificent ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya show Septimius's success at furnishing his home provincial city with all the grandeur of a capital. The artificial harbor, temples, public buildings (such as the basilica), four-sided triumphal arch, and other urban developments made Leptis Magna into a shining star along the Empire's African coast.