097 - The Fall of Hercules

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Hello, and welcome to The History of Rome, episode 97, The Fall of Hercules. Okay, so last time, Maximus was totally framed by Joachim Phoenix, and even though he was able to escape his own execution and make it back to his estates in Spain, the fugitive general was eventually captured by slave traders, but not before learning that Joachim Phoenix had murdered his entire family. This week, now a gladiator, Maximus must fight or die in the arena, and maybe, hopefully, one day have his revenge. Okay, not really. There was no Maximus. The non-existent Maximus did not kill Commodus in single combat, and that certainly did not lead to a great restoration of the Republic. Good movie, though. And, funny enough, the bit about Commodus fighting as a gladiator was no joke, and if anything, the movie actually downplayed the emperor's obsession.

Following the purges that surrounded the fall of Perennis, the imperial chamberlain Cleander rose to power, and along with a circle of corrupt and decadent allies, Cleander ran the empire for his own benefit from 185 to 190 AD. During those years, Commodus withdrew even further from the real world, and when not drinking or dabbling in his harem or sitting in the baths, he spent the majority of his free time training to be a gladiator. The emperor's obsession with gladiatorial combat dated back to his childhood and was the centerpiece of that reputation I talked about earlier, the one Marcus hoped Commodus would eventually outgrow. But rather than outgrow it, Commodus let it grow with him. Disinterested in the real work of soldiering, Commodus was fascinated with the staged fights of the arena, and from very early on aspired to join the pantheon of gladiatorial gods. Now an emperor, and with no one to stop him, he let this ambition off its leash.

Now, in the Roman social hierarchy, an emperor was at the very tippy-top of the pyramid, and a gladiator was in the sub-sub-basement, down with the prostitutes and the actors. A free citizen fighting in the arena was unseemly. An equite fighting was scandalous. A senator fighting was a barely conceivable horror. An emperor fighting as a gladiator? Well, that would be the equivalent of the president turning up one morning in a crack den. Commodus cared not a whit about the social taboos, though. He wanted to stand over 10,000 dead opponents and bask in the adoration of the crowd. Nothing else mattered. At first he confined himself to private contests, but as he grew more confident in his abilities, the emperor started naming himself the headline attraction for the all-too-frequent games thrown during his reign.

Now, Commodus was no slouch here. Commodus was no slouch here. He was young and athletic, and seems to have taken his training seriously. He was an excellent shot, and handy with every kind of weapon imaginable. But there is no getting around the fact that he never did fight a fair fight. Obviously, you can't have the emperor going out there and getting killed by some random slave, so Commodus typically fought pre-wounded opponents, or, more commonly, opponents who had been given a lead sword to match up against the emperor's sharpened steel. These widely known secrets of the emperor's success made all his boasting about what a great warrior he was ring a bit hollow, and far from elevating his reputation, it made him the object of persistent, if private, mockery.

Adding a malevolent edge to his somewhat ridiculous displays of alleged gladiatorial prowess was the fact that Commodus took particular delight in killing anything that seemed freakish. He would bring in midgets so he could pretend to be a mighty giant, he would bring in amputees and watch them hobble around feebly as he toyed with them, and at times he would put his surgical skills to the test and slowly dismember victims while avoiding major arteries. His most famous routine, though, was the hunt, and in addition to the old, reoccurring line about having slain a hundred lions in a single day, he was fond of bringing in exotic oddities— ostriches, giraffes, elephants, and the like— and felling them with a few well-placed arrows.

For a long time, the masses got a kick out of the ludicrous novelty of watching the emperor do horrible things to handicapped opponents, but the novelty eventually wore off. For members of the Senate, meanwhile— at least the non-Commodus-appointed members of the Senate, anyway— there never was any novelty to begin with. The whole spectacle was an affront to the dignity of the emperor, the senators themselves, and the empire at large. Commodus suspected that if given a chance, his friends and colleagues in the Senate would find other places to be on game day, so he made attendance at his performances mandatory. That is, one of the quickest ways to find yourself on the emperor's hit list was to call in sick to the Coliseum. And when you found yourself on the emperor's hit list, it wasn't like he just didn't invite you to dinner or something. No, that meant that charges of treason, property confiscation, and execution were right around the corner. So the senators went and watched the emperor club cripples to death. Really, the whole thing was just cruel, pathetic, and sad.

Meanwhile, the empire continued to plunge unchecked towards a system-wide failure. The legions, upon whom Commodus was in part resting the legitimacy of his reign, were beginning to slip away from him. At first, their ire was directed to the emperor's favorites, like Perennis, but as their dissatisfaction mounted, Commodus began to become an object of their anger as well. Commodus had dispatched Pertinax to Britain, which had been a recent hotbed of insubordination, with instructions to get the situation there back in hand. Pertinax was an old soldier who had earned his name and reputation putting out Rome's fires across the empire, and when he got to Britain, it did not take long for him to be embraced by the heretofore rebellious troops. But at this point in the history of the empire, being embraced by the troops was a dangerous proposition. So when the British legions got together and decided to hail Pertinax their new emperor, Pertinax outright refused. Deeply unsettled by the position he found himself in, he wrote to Commodus requesting immediate reassignment.

Now, you would think the fact that the British legions kept trying to declare new emperors would have led to some sort of imperial action. But apparently, Commodus, and at this point Cleander, vastly underestimated the severity of the situation. Soon enough, though, they would no longer be able to ignore it. In 186, a charismatic army deserter in Gaul named Maternus began to round up a motley crew of followers consisting of fellow deserters, ex-soldiers, and brigands. At first, they were concerned mostly with raiding the countryside for their own enrichment. But eventually, after more and more men flocked to his banner, Maternus began to think of himself as the second coming of Spartacus. His force grew to the point that raids on towns turned into sieges of small cities. He led his men back and forth across the Pyrenees, causing havoc in the under-garrisoned portions of Spain and Gaul, before finally the powers that be realized that there was a renegade army running loose within the empire.

The response to this brief uprising, sometimes called the Deserter's War, was spearheaded by Pescenius Niger, who was finally able to confront Maternus' force and defeat it in open battle. But, undeterred, in March of 187, Maternus regrouped with a corps of supporters and headed south into Italy. The plan now was to infiltrate Rome during an upcoming festival, get close to the emperor, and assassinate him. The plot was not as outlandish as it sounds. The festival involved citizens of every class putting on costumes and partying in the streets. Maternus managed to secure some Praetorian guard uniforms and figured that with everyone, including the guard, getting good and drunk in an atmosphere of shifting identities, that he might just be able to bluff his way into the imperial entourage. But before the conspiracy got off the ground, Maternus was betrayed by one of his followers over some personal slight, and the assassins were all rounded up and executed.

The already paranoid communist was driven further round the bend by the revelation that his life had been saved not by the fact that his bodyguards were so super great at their jobs, but because the conspiracy had been betrayed by a disgruntled ex-member. Further compounding his agitation was a note passed along by Pertinax that one of Commodus' brothers-in-law and a few other senators were gathering support for their own assassination attempt. It seems that Pertinax thought the chances of the conspirators dim, and so decided to make double sure that he wasn't implicated in the plot, and alerted the emperor after he himself was invited to join.

From this point on, Commodus was rendered practically inert. He never left the safe confines of the palace, or, if he wasn't in Rome, the safety of his country villas. The only public appearances he made for the rest of his reign were when he performed as a gladiator, seemingly the only time that he actually felt safe and comfortable. But though Commodus was a publicly invisible emperor, he was still a force to be reckoned with in private, and not in a good way at all. With Pertinax as his colleague, Commodus had taken a shine to debasing the Senate, making erratic bureaucratic appointments, and doing whatever he could to personally humiliate individual members of the aristocracy. But now, with Cleander as his partner in crime, everything was ratcheted up a couple of notches. Cleander made a fortune selling offices, membership in the Senate, and plum overseas appointments, while Commodus encouraged his freedmen to harass senators, confiscate their property, and, when the mood struck him, murder them. Further compounding the mockery they were making of the government was the fact that the two men actually spent very little time thinking about the government, and chose instead to focus on exploring the vast and wide depths of sexual depravity. I won't go into the details because, hey, this is a family podcast, but suffice it to say that there was some pretty brutal stuff going on at the palace, and not at all behind closed doors.

In mid-187, Cleander took the lead in a new round of purges, this one aimed at anyone connected to the conspiracy Pertinax had decided to expose. Luckily for Cleander, the families involved were also personal enemies, who represented the last real organized threat to his power. So, off with all their heads. This latest round of political murders is further notable for sweeping up the Empress Crispina along with everyone else. It doesn't look like she was in any way involved in the plot, but rather that she simply fell victim to the whims of a probably sociopathic emperor who had grown tired of his wife. Bad enough that she was exiled and then killed, but her crime, the one so heinous that she was exiled and killed for it, was simply being caught up engaging in an extramarital affair. You know, the kind her husband had engaged in every single day of their marriage. Stay classy, Commodus.

In 188, Cleander further solidified his grip on power by creating a new office that superseded the two Praetorian prefects, effectively putting him in charge of the emperor's secret police. Up to this point, Cleander had controlled the guard much as Perennis had, by constantly hiring and firing the prefects so none of them could create enduring loyalty within the ranks. But having finally set the record by allowing one poor appointee to remain in office a mere six hours, Cleander finally decided that this was maybe getting a little ridiculous, that there needed to be some kind of institutional stability. What if the guard actually needed to do something? So he invented a new office, assumed it, and then ran the Praetorians himself.

At this point, it seemed like things would go on like this forever. Cleander had a stranglehold on Rome, the enemies of the new imperial order were all dead or exiled, and Commodus cared only about chariot racing, sitting in the baths, and gladiatorial combat. The empire was slowly being driven into the ground, but anyone in a position to actually do anything about it were the ones already behind the wheel and doing said driving. But as so often happens in these sorts of bloodily, tyrannical, quasi-police states, one minute you're up, and the next minute, you're being airbrushed out of that photo of you and Stalin enjoying a nice glass of vodka together.

For Cleander, the end came in 190, a year in which he and Commodus conspired to appoint 25 different men consul, a record that would stand unchallenged for the rest of the life of the empire. Remember when consulships were a sacred office that marked the prestigious climax of a long and distinguished career? Yeah, no one else does either. Included in that infamously long roll call of consuls for 190, though, was a man who was about to reach the new climax point for the Roman politician, Septimius Severus.

In one of those classic, it's-the-economy-stupid moments, Cleander's fall from power was precipitated by a grain shortage in Rome. Without a major crisis getting in his way, Cleander was able to more or less come and go as he pleased, but as soon as the grains stopped flowing, and someone needed to be scapegoated, well, that someone was naturally the man who had just spent five years lording over everyone how much power he had. The few active enemies of the imperial chamberlain left alive seized the opportunity the food shortages presented, and organized a very public display against the emperor's favorite, at the one place the emperor was bound to hear about it, in the Circus Maximus.

In April of 190 A.D. at a set of chariot races, a group of children were given anti-Cleander banners, and were snuck down onto the field, where they began shouting anti-Cleander chants. The hope was that if children were used, that the praetorians wouldn't be able to just march out and club them all to death, and the trick seems to have worked. The crowd eventually joined in the chanting, and before too long, they had worked themselves into a frenzy, and marched out of the Circus Maximus, towards the villa Cleander was staying at. Facing down a crowd of nearly 150,000, Cleander ordered the praetorian guard to move in, and beat the mob into submission. But when he called for backup from the urban cohorts, who were at this point led by newly appointed urban prefect Pertinax, Pertinax not only ignored the call, but he ordered his own troops into the crowd, to help them drive off the praetorians. Cleander fled to the imperial villa Commodus was relaxing at, but as with Perennis, the emperor was more than willing to throw his favorite under the bus, if that seemed like the safest course of action for Commodus. So rather than face the wrath of the mob himself, Cleander was handed over to the crowd, who promptly killed him, and dragged his body through the streets.

The fall of Cleander was accompanied by yet another round of purges, and anyone with a close connection to the dead chamberlain, found themselves added to the emperor's prescription list, rather than being asked to help draw them up. These are the times when you start to understand the appeal of a philosophy like Epicureanism, with its emphasis on leaving politics to those cruel enough and dumb enough to get caught up in it. During the reign of Commodus, you were either up and orchestrating the murder of your enemies, or you were down and being murdered by your enemies. Those leaders who survived to see the other side, were either like Pertinax, and willing to follow the winds wherever they blew, personal honor be damned, or like Septimius Severus, who kept his head down, but in witnessing the petty bloody back and forth in Rome, developed an entirely cynical philosophy of government, that would help transform the empire into the unstable, banana-republic-style military dictatorships of the 3rd century.

But before we get to the founding of the new Severan dynasty, we still have to cover the last ignoble phase of the Nervan-Antonine dynasty. The unbroken line of high-quality emperors that stretched back nearly a century, and produced some of the most recognizable names in Roman imperial history, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, was about to be broken. Just as Nero had wrecked the Julio-Claudians, and Domitian had wrecked the Flavians, Commodus was about to wreck the Antonines. In defense of the first two, the legitimacy of the Julio-Claudians was already a shaky proposition by the time Nero arrived, and Domitian was toppled not for being a terrible emperor, but for being an unusually arrogant one. Commodus, on the other hand, took an entirely healthy dynasty, spun a hard right, and just drove it into a brick wall. He was arrogant like Domitian, but instead of offsetting this by establishing an effective autocracy, he oversaw a sloppy, corrupt, and decadent administration that bankrupted the empire, left its infrastructure to rot, and purged out most of its talented leaders.

Commodus saved the best for last, though, and during his last two years in office, he really kicked the crazy up a notch. Basically, if Commodus had had his way, this podcast would not be called The History of Rome, it would be called The History of Commodiana, and I wouldn't be talking about how the Romans kicked off this or that campaign season in the month of April, but instead, talking about how the Commodians kicked off this or that new campaign season in the month of Commodus. And also, did you know that Commodus was the reincarnation of Hercules? Not just that he liked to associate himself with Hercules, mind you, but that he was literally the reincarnation of Hercules? Yes, good times were ahead.

The crazy really got rolling right after Cleander and his allies were liquidated. Rather than elevate some new favorite to power, the now 29-year-old Commodus decided that it was time to rule in his own right. He still surrounded himself with corrupt sycophants, most notably his mistress Marcia, new Chamberlain Eclectus, and new Praetorian Prefect Quintus Letus. But unlike in his past dealings with Soterus, Perennis, and Cleander, Commodus did not delegate his imperial responsibilities. But then again, neither did he really embrace them either. Instead, the governance of the Empire was just sort of set adrift. Commodus spent nearly every day fighting as a gladiator or enjoying the races, and his only real concern was making sure that he had enough money to pay for it all, usually by confiscating property or levying new taxes. But of course, he never did have enough money to pay for it all, and he would leave the imperial treasury deep, deep in the red.

By 191, Commodus was beginning to lose touch even with the masses, who had always supported an emperor as obsessed with the games as they were. They began to look sideways at his obsession with Hercules, and took as mighty impious the claim that he was actually the reincarnation of the old Greek hero. When Commodus began erecting statues across the city featuring himself dressed as Hercules, and began carrying around a great big club, which he called the Club of Hercules, the people joined in the aristocracy's concern over the sanity of their emperor.

Delusions of lineage aside, Commodus' association with Hercules did introduce a new theme to the political order that in time would become a staple of imperial propaganda. As we all know, Hercules was the son of Jupiter. This meant that if Commodus was literally an incarnation of Hercules, that his true father was not Marcus Aurelius, but Jupiter himself. Commodus further implied that this meant that he did not rule by virtue of the Senate's consent or the will of the masses, or because he had the backing of the legions, but because it was the will of his father, Jupiter, greatest and best. Commodus was, in other words, a divine monarch, and he himself was a living god. It would take a little while for this new conception of where imperial sovereignty lay to catch on, but Diocletian would eventually make the business about being a divine monarch a cornerstone of his empire-wide reforms. Now, of course, unlike Commodus, Diocletian probably did not actually believe that he was divine, and that he was simply grasping for anything that would help restore the dignity of the imperial throne so he could reassert some control over the legions. But still, that was where political theory was headed, and Commodus, at least in this one respect, was an innovator ahead of his time.

But if he was a divinely appointed ruler, then it did not take long for Jupiter to realize his mistake. In 191, a fire broke out in Rome that raged for days, and among other things, burned the temple of the Vestas to the ground. Commodus seemed unconcerned about the damage, but rather seemed thrilled at the prospect of getting to re-found Rome in his own image. So, in early 192, he fully embraced his own outsized megalomania, and declared that henceforth, Rome would no longer be called Rome, but instead the Colonia Ania Commodiana, in other words, the city of Commodus. He further decreed that the legions would now be called the Commodiani, and the Senate would be called Commodus' Fortunate Senate, a sort of darkly comic rebranding. Having already changed his full name to Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Hercules Romanus Ex Superitoris Imperatoris Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius. He then changed the names of the months, so that each lined up with one of his twelve corresponding names. All this began to worry even his inner circle, who tried to dissuade the emperor from indulging himself too much in these fantasies, for fear that he would alienate the whole population with his strange declarations. But all that they got in response was a suspicious snarl, leaving them all with the justified true belief that they were about to be purged for having the temerity to question the Son of God.

In late 192, Eclectus, Marcia, and Letus got together and agreed that the emperor had to be done away with, or they would all lose their heads, either at the hands of the emperor or at the hands of the mob who seemed to be prepping for a mass uprising. But having seen multiple attempts on the emperor's life fail, they laid their plans carefully. Being so close to the emperor, they knew they would have the means, motive, and opportunity to do the job, but what they didn't yet have was someone willing to replace Commodus on the throne. Killing the emperor was one thing, ensuring that the assassination would not cause a civil war was quite another. So they had to find someone who would be palatable to all three interested parties in the outcome, the senate, the army, and the masses. In the end, they figured there was only one man for the job, and that was Pertinax. I'm not entirely sure why they thought Pertinax would do anything but just rat them out, but the conspirators approached the old general, and this time he concurred that Commodus' time was up. Pertinax agreed to wait in the wings and take no direct part in the killing, but when the deed was done, he pledged that when asked, he would reluctantly agree to don the purple.

Even with their plans carefully laid, things got off to a bad start. On New Year's Eve 192, Marcia attempted to poison her lover, but Commodus caught wise to the poison and forced himself to vomit it all back up. Not sure who was behind the attempt, Commodus retired to his private bath so he could be alone with his paranoia. Quickly switching to plan B, the conspirators sent Commodus' wrestling partner Narcissus into the bath with instructions to strangle the emperor. Just as with the assassination of Domitian, Commodus did not go quietly, but eventually Narcissus got the upper hand and Commodus lay dead on the floor. He was 31 years old and had ruled the empire very very badly for 12 years.

Next week, the empire will wake up with a massive hangover and try to take stock of the damage that had been done over the previous decade by Commodus and his friends. But before they could even find the aspirin, the people of Rome will be forced to endure a political situation spinning violently out of control. Pertinax will not last 100 days in power. The reign of his successor Didius Julianus will be even shorter. Then three men representing different regions of the empire will all vie for the throne on the battlefield. Rather than emerging into the safety of a Commodus-free world, the empire will instead find itself sucked into something far more treacherous, a year with five emperors. Thanks for watching!