Commodus

Commodus: The Emperor Who Fought His Own Crowd

In November 192 the Roman emperor spent his mornings in the arena shooting hundreds of animals with arrows and javelins, and his afternoons fighting as a gladiator. He won everything. He then announced that he would open the new year as both consul and gladiator on 1 January. Five weeks later he was strangled in his bath by his own wrestling partner. Commodus was thirty-one. He had inherited the most stable empire in the ancient world from his father, the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, and he had spent twelve years dismantling it.

The Purple-Born

Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus was born at Lanuvium, near Rome, on 31 August 161, the son of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina the Younger. He had a twin, Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, who died in 165.

His education was serious. He was tutored by Onesicrates, Antistius Capella, Titus Aius Sanctus and Pitholaus, and treated for his childhood illnesses by Galen. He accompanied his father on the Marcomannic frontier in 172 and through the eastern provinces in 176. On 27 November 176 Marcus made him Imperator; by June 177 he was Augustus, and on 1 January 177, aged fifteen, he became the youngest consul Rome had recorded. He married Bruttia Crispina before joining his father on the Danube in 178. When Marcus died on 17 March 180, Commodus was eighteen and sole ruler of the world.

Peace, and Then Absence

His first decision was reasonable and has been argued over ever since: instead of prosecuting his father's northern wars to a conclusion, he negotiated a swift treaty with the Danubian tribes and celebrated a triumph on 22 October 180. What followed was less defensible. He showed almost no interest in administration and handed it to favourites, beginning with a freedman from Nicomedia named Saoterus.

Cassius Dio, a senator who watched much of this at first hand, wrote that with Commodus's accession the empire descended "from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust."

Lucilla's Knife

In 182 his eldest sister Lucilla, more than ten years his senior and holding the rank of Augusta, organised his murder — jealousy of the Empress Crispina is the reason the sources give. Two men, Marcus Ummidius Quadratus Annianus and Appius Claudius Quintianus, tried to stab him at a theatre and failed. Both were executed. Lucilla was exiled to Capri and later killed.

The attempt permanently changed him. Thereafter, Romans could be killed simply for annoying him, and the palace became a machine for producing and consuming favourites. Saoterus was murdered at the instigation of the praetorian prefect Sextus Tigidius Perennis, who then destroyed his colleague Paternus and ran the government until British soldiers accused him of scheming to make his son emperor; Commodus had Perennis, his wife and his sons killed. Power passed to Cleander, a Phrygian freedman who had physically carried out Saoterus's murder, and who monetised the state — selling Senate seats, army commands, provinces and consulships, so that the year 190 saw a record twenty-five suffect consuls, all of them his appointments. When a grain shortage was blamed on Cleander and a mob chased him from the Circus Maximus to the emperor's villa at Laurentum, Commodus had him beheaded on the urging of his mistress Marcia.

Meanwhile the coinage was being hollowed out. Commodus reduced the denarius from 3.85 to 3.35 grams and its silver from 79 per cent to 76, then to 74 per cent and 2.22 grams by 186 — the sharpest debasement since Nero.

Hercules Romanus

What he did with his attention instead was build a religion around himself. Statues of Commodus as Hercules proliferated; he claimed descent from Jupiter through Hercules; the Colossus of Nero was recut with his face, given a club and a bronze lion, and reissued as Hercules Romanus. He took the titles Pacator Orbis, pacifier of the world, and Dominus Noster, Our Lord.

After the fire of 191 destroyed the Temple of Peace, the Temple of Vesta and part of the imperial palace, he ritually refounded the city as the new Romulus and renamed it Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana. All twelve months were renamed after his own names and titles: Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus, Exsuperatorius, Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius. The legions became Commodianae, the Senate the Commodian Fortunate Senate, the African grain fleet Alexandria Commodiana Togata, the Roman people themselves Commodianus. Altars from Dura-Europos on the Euphrates show auxiliary units carrying the title, which means the scheme reached the far edge of the empire.

The Arena

He was, by ancient report, an extremely handsome man, left-handed and enormously proud of it — one inscription boasts of "the only left-handed fighter to conquer twelve times one thousand men." The skills appear to have been genuine. He could shoot the head off an ostrich at full gallop with a crescent-headed dart and kill a panther in mid-leap. He fought in the amphitheatre as a *secutor*, which Rome found not impressive but obscene: the emperor's place was on campaign against barbarians, not in the sand.

Dio's account of the atrocities is the reason the reign is remembered as it is. He records citizens who had lost their feet being roped together in the arena so that Commodus could club them while pretending they were giants; a hundred lions killed in one day; the decapitated ostrich head carried over to the senators' benches and brandished at them in promise. The senators, Dio says, chewed laurel leaves to stop themselves laughing.

Why Commodus Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that he is not, and it is better to say so than to manufacture a case. No ancient source and no modern historian describes Commodus as a genius. The word attaches to him only through the arena, and there the skill was real: shooting an ostrich's head off at a gallop, killing a panther as it sprang, and the competence implied by a claim of a thousand victories all require exceptional hand-eye coordination and nerve. That is a real gift, and the only one the record supports.

One further thing is worth granting. His self-deification was not merely lunacy: it was a coherent, empire-wide propaganda programme executed to the frontier, and the title he invented for himself, Dominus Noster, became the conventional style of Roman emperors a century later. In that narrow sense he ran ahead of the institution. Everything else runs the other way. He handed the state to Perennis and Cleander to sell; he debased the currency more sharply than anyone since Nero; he broke an eighty-four-year run of stability and prosperity and left his successors the Year of the Five Emperors. Cassius Dio, who knew him, offered the fairest verdict, and it is not flattering: Commodus was "not naturally wicked but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived," and it was "his great simplicity, together with his cowardice," that "made him the slave of his companions." That is a diagnosis of the opposite of genius.

Legacy

Marcia found a list of people Commodus intended to kill and read her own name on it, along with those of the praetorian prefect Quintus Aemilius Laetus and the chamberlain Eclectus. On 31 December 192 she poisoned his dinner; he vomited it back up, so they sent in his wrestling partner Narcissus to strangle him in the bath.

The Senate declared him a public enemy, pulled down his statues and restored the city's proper name. He was buried in the Mausoleum of Hadrian. In 195 Septimius Severus, wanting the legitimacy of Marcus Aurelius's bloodline, had him rehabilitated and deified. His death ended the Nerva–Antonine dynasty and, with it, the Pax Romana.

Achievements

• Worked as ruler