CHAPTER IX

THE ANTONINES

VII.

THE ACCESSION AND REIGN OF COMMODUS

Commodus, ‘the rising sun’, was not nineteen when he became sole ruler of the Roman world. Born when his father was Emperor, promoted to co-regent younger than any other prince, he assumed the cura rei publicae  at the age at which Alexander entered on his inheritance, soon to add to it a conquered world; at which Caesar’s adopted son began the conflict for his inheritance, to become Augustus and pater patriae . When Alexander, not yet thirty-three, lay on his deathbed, an epoch had been made in the history of the world; when the younger Caesar, not yet thirty-two, triumphed at Actium, his own strength had made sure his mastery of the Roman world; when Commodus, at a like age, gasped out his life in the clutch of the athlete, an opportunity of world-importance had been missed and what his predecessors had gathered, increased, guarded and sought to save had been lost.

Marcus Aurelius, whether yielding to Faustina or setting the dynastic principle above the old conception of the principate, had done everything to ensure the succession of his son born in the purple. On the collapse of Cassius’ revolt, he had secured for him the consulship, the tribunician power, the name Augustus and co-regency for nearly three years. At the last Commodus had been summoned to the Emperor’s camp, initiated into his plans, entrusted with the finishing of the war in the North, and presented to his friends as the next ruler. Ignorance of his character, hope in the good that was in him, loss of vital interest, trust that his counselors would be strong enough to lead him, or acquiescence in divinely guided destiny and resignation before the rise of a new power, any of these may explain his action. His friends, who could control the material force of the Empire if they could not create a legitimate claim to it—above all, Claudius Pompeianus—bowed before the will of the dead Emperor, and presented his son to the army in the camp. Thus first Marcus Aurelius, who made the doer of a deed alone answerable for its effects, then his friends and the army, stirred to enthusiasm by a speech of the young Emperor and by his donatives, bore all human responsibility for what was soon to be lamented, opposed and condemned.

The choice of the ‘best man’ was long since a shadow, but the Senate in Rome must soon have formally ratified what it could not hinder even if it wished. When the new ruler, as Hadrian had done, made a gesture of respect to Rome, it hastened to wish him a prosperous and speedy homecoming and to celebrate what may have been a trifling victory as due to the Virtus of the Emperor, who became imperator iv. But the Imperial coinage does not reveal that Commodus, despite the opposition of his father’s helper and his own brother-in-law, Claudius Pompeianus, presently fulfilled the Senate’s wish after his return by ending the war and making peace with the Marcomanni, the Quadi and the Buri. The strength of the enemy was exhausted, they “begged for peace”, final victory was certain. But he “longed for the pleasures of Rome”—though was it not Rome where the emperor was?— “and hated the fatigues of war”—so at least his critics declared, but no one firmly opposed his act.

Commodus made peace on the basis of the earlier treaties, demanding the surrender of deserters and prisoners, a partial disarmament, the entry into the service of Rome of 13,000 Quadi and a smaller contingent of Marcomanni, and annual contributions of corn. The tribes must renounce war against the Iazyges, Buri and Vandals, and assemble only once a month under Roman supervision. The armies of occupation were withdrawn, and the lands along the north bank of the Danube remained in the hands of neither side. Like terms were imposed on the Buri, and the north-west border of Dacia was made secure. Gradually mitigations of the terms were granted. After thirteen years of effort, in the full tide of victory, came this un-Roman renunciation of final triumph. It was a manifest denial of his father’s will, whether it sprang from a long-formed purpose, or from Commodus’ initiative at the moment or from the persuasions of the younger courtiers. Hadrian, too, had done the like in the despite of the old counselors of Trajan; experience had shown that then the defeated enemy had kept the peace for decades, and here too the result might well be the same: Commodus would have been justified if he thought so and counted on thus setting free resources that he could apply to reconstruction and the relief of need, as Hadrian had done. Rome accepted the renunciation of victory without demur and with high hopes.

In autumn 180 Commodus left the seat of war and hastened, everywhere acclaimed, to the capital, which greeted him as the fortunate and victorious bringer of peace, the chosen of the gods, the protected of Juppiter the Upholder. A largesse confirmed the good-will of the people; all was lulled in ‘security’. Marcus received the last honor of apotheosis. But in the Senate Cornmodus failed to strike the due note of restrained Imperial dignity. In the triumph, which he soon celebrated, as he passed in the high state of a triumphator, he turned again and again to kiss the body-servant who stood behind him upholding the golden wreath above his head. His words and acts seemed to aim at winning favor with the mob, and flouting Rome and all that there was held sacred, abandoning the modest dignity with which a princeps­should be content.

COMMODUS AND THE SENATE 

The lines of cleavage were soon seen. Commodus had no need of the Senate, which had repaid the indulgence of Marcus Aurelius with interested service and had sold the right to regard itself as the Assembly of the old nobility of Rome. There indeed the least real opposition lay. The Senate that never quite  understood Commodus, because it was dominated by fading ideas, remained as a whole servile, flattering and trembling, without strength for attack or defense, until the day came when it could vent its fury on the murdered ruler in frenzied excitement. Far more dangerous was the malice of forces that worked in darkness, above all of his sister Lucilla and her followers. Nor could he be at ease with the elder statesmen, who cramped his freedom with admonitory claims based on the force of their policy, their services and their experience. But so long as he kept contented the masses in the world’s capital, the Guard and the armies, his power was indestructible and his brightest visions could be made facts.

In the field Commodus had already rejected the counsels of his father’s old friends; in Rome he removed them from his entourage. The chief of them, Pompeianus, withdrew, embittered or ungraciously dismissed. But the Emperor did not break off all connections with this powerful group: in each of his remaining consulships he took a colleague from among them, and allowed two of them to reach a second term of office. That no higher promotion was vouchsafed to any of them during his reign is no reproach to Commodus, for the Imperial house had detached itself more and more definitely from the nobility since the time of Antoninus Pius. Thus towards the aristocracy the Emperor preserved appearances, and, further, the most eminent of the equites, the two Praetorian Prefects of Marcus Aurelius, Tarrutenius Paternus and Tigidius Perennis, retained their posts for some time.

The tradition hostile to Commodus declares that the city was outraged at his early introduction of new customs—drinking in public and dealing with the State treasures as though he was set on squandering an Empire. But as late as 181 the official propaganda of the coinage continued to extol the ruler whose ‘providence’ had brought peace, who cared for the poor and proved his generosity by a new largesse, and saved the people from anxiety and insecurity. The Senate, on the other hand, though it attributed all this to the favor of Juppiter the Upholder, now offered at the end of the first quinquennium its vows for the prosperous completion of the first decade of his tribunician power. Though the coinage, with its appeal to popular belief, stresses rather the harmony of the gods’ favor and the divine creative force of the sovereign, while the Senate emphasizes the divine providence and, in its rational way, the beneficent will of the optimus civis, their differing interpretations do not, as yet, mark a deep cleavage between Emperor and Senate. Commodus found more and more adherents in the Senate, who went to the provinces “as his confederates in crime” or “commended by him” and strengthened his government as his followers in offices of trust. There was nothing in this to deserve criticism, but those who had lost their power must have resented it as the beginning of the rule of favorites, as though that had hitherto been unknown at Rome. The natural result was that the opposition of forces became more keen and embittered.

The praise of the Emperor as a man of war appears also in the next year; and a success, perhaps on the Dacian border, was seized upon as the occasion for a fifth acclamation as imperator. But there was soon to be a clash of ideas. While hunting in the African desert, Hadrian had once killed a lion; now Commodus showed how he could bring one down from horseback in the Roman amphitheatre before the people, to whom, in this Imperial act, he displayed the Virtus Augusti. The manly strength in which the Emperor, unlike the cultivated world with its lip-service to ethical values, saw the basic virtue of a ruler, was thus displayed with the instinct of a beast and the fearless elegance of a toreador to the excitable masses, and the propaganda soon celebrated it in Rome and in the empire. The lion-slayer Hercules was made the mythical symbol of his rule and the protector of the Emperor, the last of the dynasty that worshipped Hercules Gaditanus. By such means it was his right to make himself felt and known to his people in new conceptions that meant more to them than to the anaemic intellectualism of the upper classes. But this “grim crudity of life” was made a catchword by his enemies and a pretext by his ambitious sister.

THE CONSPIRACY OF LUCILLA

Lucilla could not forget that she had once been Empress, nor reconcile herself to a retired if not too virtuous life in the country with her husband Pompeianus, now old and suffering with his eyes. With her cousin Quadratus she set on foot a conspiracy against Commodus. One Claudius Pompeianus Quintianus was entrusted with the attempt on his life, which he made with more bombast than resolution. He was executed, and with him the guilty members of the aristocracy, while Lucilla was exiled to Capreae, where the Emperor later had her put to death. That was the penalty of the folly that had raised a hand against the sacred life shielded by the providence of the gods. To celebrate the salus Augusti a new largesse bound the people to their sovereign in the name of public security. But the phrase of the would-be assassin—“The Senate sends thee this dagger”—was skilfully chosen as the occasion of an offensive by the Emperor thus impiously assailed. His action was far from that of the rulers who were so careful to shield the Senate: Hadrian had had to suffer the reproach of having executed four consulars for plotting against his life. To spare criminals or their accomplices now would have been to defeat justice. The killings began,—and in the next years and even till the close of his reign—as under Hadrian—more and more nobles fell before his anger. It was the sovereign’s right to preserve his inviolability against all, whoever and whatever they might be, who were in his eyes proved guilty or even suspect. Hercules, too, had crushed the powers of evil the world over and had so given men peace. Commodus showed his clemency in that he contented himself at first with the exile of the chief plotter and spared his own kin. For this he may have taken the name Pius, unless it was, rather, that the favor of the gods constantly proved his piety towards them.

Soon after this his chamberlain was secretly removed by the machinations of the Praetorian Prefects. Of these the famous Tarrutenius Paternus was caught in the intrigues of his colleague Tigidius Perennis and removed from office. He was promoted to the Senate with the rank of consular: until charges of conspiracy, high treason and the concealment of crimes brought him to his death. Perennis, with the Guard firmly in hand, was free to work his will on his rival’s followers, who were involved in his destruction. Commodus looked on. Physically strong and resolute, he lacked the cold calculation of greed for power, for he regarded his right as given by heaven, and gave free play to his instincts without care for convention or the tradition of his class. He became the instrument of his Praetorian Prefect’s ambition, which followed high purposes and advanced with steady step—to his own undoing.

The new régime was now openly revealed. Perennis made bold to urge his lord to follow his pleasures while he took the cares of government upon his shoulders. With this division of labor the Emperor, living in dreams rather than waking knowledge, was well content. In the palace he shared his pleasures with 300 mistresses and 300 boys of high or low degree, all of chosen beauty. Stories ran of the orgies that marked his revulsion from the old order of life, his abandonment to his senses and his imagination, and of the indolence which made him content himself with adding at most the words of greeting to his rescripts, and leaving to Perennis all the preparation of business. But after all, the work was done, and done in the name of the Emperor, so that its doing strengthened both the sovereign and his Prefect. There was even economy: no more largesse for the People, so long as Perennis was in power, no more solicitous provision for the youth of Italy. The money that had gone to this was now, so it was said, spent to satisfy the autocrat’s pleasures and his vizier’s greed. For now the Prefect was the omnipotent vizier of a Sultan. The last of the Spanish line, monarch by grace of the gods and his father, and the Italian who had long probed the weaknesses of his two masters, the one in revolt against the old order, the other intoxicated with power, did not hesitate to set up an absolutism which no one resisted. The veil in which Marcus Aurelius had carefully shrouded his rule had fallen. The time was ripe; and Rome would soon have learnt to endure the brutal violation of tradition, the more so as the Senate did not strive against it, had only the sovereign remained himself the brain and heart of the new order, the will that made the final decisions, whose words, decrees, proclamations and dispositions united the forces of tradition and of the divine power that worked in and through him and were sacred and immutable Law because they were efficient to ensure the general weal. But what if men realized that the Emperor spoke words that were not his own and yielded to the influence of another? His subjects were not to feel that the judgment of him that chose such subordinates was not enlightened by divine instinct nor that respect for the sacred institution of the Emperor’s position or the magical powers of the Emperor’s personality did not exorcize the ambition of his servants. Without the skill to understand his ministers, to promote without ceasing to control them, to spur them on to creative efforts that would serve the Emperor’s own glory, Commodus slipped from one false step to another. Intrigue followed intrigue; suspicion, jealousy, despotic anger struck down victim after victim and their blood was laid to the Emperor’s charge.

PERENNIS AND CLEANDER 

The first to fall was Perennis in 851. He was suspected, truly or not, of planning a coup d’état, to be supported by the rebellious army of Britain, and the generals of this army and of the Danube joined against him with his enemies in Rome even within the Palace. He was denounced to the Emperor who, rousing himself from his dreams, had him tried and outlawed by the Senate, and delivered him with his followers to the fury of a detachment of troops that was marching by the city. Then came the turn of the chamberlain Cleander, who had come to Rome as a Phrygian slave and had played a part in the overthrow of Perennis. For two years he avoided becoming his successor, so that his rivals might wear out their strength in transient tenures of the office that ended in their fall. At last he assumed the role of savior of the State and became Prefect, thus breaking through the cursus honorum of the equestrian order. With unheard-of caprice he sold magistracies, distinctions and governorships and reversed decisions at law, all for money, so it was said, but perhaps also to secure himself a following. On one occasion he named twenty-five consuls for one year; he promoted freedmen to the Senate, and he had senators and knights, even the Emperor’s brother-in-law whose admonitions made him unwelcome, murdered for alleged high treason. It was perhaps at this time that his consort Crispina was accused of adultery and banished to Capreae where, like Lucilla earlier, she was afterwards executed. Her place had already fallen to the concubine Marcia, whom Commodus had taken to himself from the household of Quadratus at his death in 182. Marcia now ranked before all his mistresses and enjoyed all the honors that had belonged to the Augusta and Empress. She had leanings towards Christianity, and was cognizant of the Emperor’s crimes; until, in 192, she joined the conspiracy that led to his death. For Cleander the ‘body-servant’ (a cubiculo) the wit of his enemies found the new title of ‘dagger-servant’ (a pugione), and it seemed as though a regime of murder and ambition was to be set up by the pitiless reversal of all values and social grades. But in AD 190 Commodus turned against him, and he perished in a popular rising created in Rome by the devices of the praefectus annonae which, when it had done its work, was charmed away by a largesse, which was announced as early as 187 but had clearly not been distributed.

In one thing only was the rule of the chamberlain Eclectus, an Egyptian, and of the Praetorian Prefect, Laetus , marked out from that of the other holders of these offices. They set on foot a far-reaching conspiracy against Commodus himself, in which were enlisted the generals on the Rhine and the Danube, though in this they served, in the first instance, the ends of another not of themselves. Informers still had their day: citizens old and young were sentenced to death, while the fortunes of the innocent went to fill the Treasury together with diverted inheritances and the property of temples, and the estates of the Emperor grew beyond all measure. At last, almost by chance, the pair discovered a proscription list which spelt danger to their partisans, and they dared all. On December 31, 192, Commodus was given poison with the help of his concubine and when it failed to take effect, he was strangled in his bath by the athlete kept to wrestle with him.

Commodus is not to be condemned for bringing in naked despotism, but because in his dream world he was too indifferent to exploit his opportunities in a world without illusions and to give overmastering strength to the common efforts of master and servants to bring to birth something great. That would have meant the achievement at one stroke of the new order in the Empire. For that he lacked the political gift. But even if he had gone down in the struggle and left the way open to the strong, the man of illusions might still have been a giant shadow. For granted that his vizier had been the true possessor of power and architect of achievement while his own responsibility was a fine fiction, he would have gained the glory from it all. But Commodus was no more than a manikin, who in this play lost all, even his own life. His servants, without faith or conscience, were even more pitiable than he. None of them conceived of the power of the idea which, for all their violence, they hardly did anything to make real, even if, like Perennis, they toiled and labored to maintain order in the Empire, or, like Laetus, set the stage for his overthrow to make room for a greater. None of the chamberlains or Praetorian Prefects made unselfishness their virtue, nor had they reverence for the Imperial throne: no man is a hero to his valet. Even the Prefects craned their necks too far. And all lost their heads.

FRONTIER PROBLEMS 

In surprising contrast to the struggles and scenes of death in Rome was the rarely broken peace maintained by the provinces. There were no losses of territory. A rising in Dacia seems to have been quickly suppressed (c. AD 184). The mutiny of the armies in Britain at the end of a severe but victorious war against Caledonian invaders from the North in the same year may have been due to failure to provide their pay, which may explain the rage which the soldiers vented on the ‘niggardly’ Perennis. But it continued at the instigation of senatorial opponents of the government and even led to attempts to proclaim a rival Emperor until finally it was suppressed in 186 by Pertinax. In Germany the provinces proved unruly, and the invasion of Imperial territory by free Germans and the investment of the Eighth Legion, perhaps in Strasbourg, produced a crisis which, for a moment, made the Emperor contemplate visiting the seat of war in person, until in 198 news of victory came and he was “held back by his Senate and People”. But more troops and more extensive and stronger frontier fortifications were needed and were supplied.

Shortly before this a deserter, Maternus, who had raised bands in Southern Gaul which spread insecurity throughout Gaul and Spain so that Commodus ordered a concentration of troops against him, took the opportunity to penetrate into Italy and plan an attack on the Emperor during the procession of the Magna Mater on March 27, 188. He dared hope to seize the throne and it was only at the last moment that the plot was discovered and frustrated. In the province of Africa there were disorders which the vigor of Pertinax crushed in AD 190. The strengthening of the frontiers on the Upper German and Raetian limes, in Mauretania, Numidia, on the Danube, in Britain and in the East, the repairs everywhere even of the border military roads attest the activity of the governors who in the Emperor’s name “cared for the security of their provincial people”. It is, no doubt, their vigor and determination to preserve the Imperial organization that in general prevented more revolts and kept these wars from ending in catastrophe. The propaganda of the central government, echoed by the coinage of Alexandria, can hardly have had so pacifying an effect, nor was there ever a time when the radiation of power from Rome seems to have been so slight. Alexandria, Carthage and a few cities in Asia Minor boasted of the peculiar care of the Emperor. The small tenants on the great estates enjoyed his protection. Dedications for the sovereign in the most diverse parts of the Empire are fewer than before. The restoration of a bridge in Dalmatia, or of a temple in the Fayum, and that not at the government’s expense, a building inscription of the Roman garrison in Inner Armenia, work on frontier forts and on roads, baths built by Cleander in Rome—all these compare ill enough with the achievements of earlier reigns. Commodus is indeed charged with having his name inscribed on the buildings of others, with failing to complete what his father had begun. Of his legislative activity hardly a trace remains save a few decisions at law, though for this the reversal of his Acta at his death may be most responsible. The fact that hardly any jurist, even after the restoration of his memory by Severus, refers to Commodus’ activity shows clearly enough that no attempt was made to grapple with the problems of the hard times of Marcus that awaited solution.

The passivity of the central government, which has its counter­part in the provincials’ indifference to the struggles at Rome, became the cause of their great advance towards equality in the Empire and towards the new mode of life. Everywhere armies and peoples united and the movement proceeded from both alike. As early as 184 the old deities of Dacia entered in the chief sanctuary of the Dacian army as equal powers beside the Roman gods, claiming equal devotion. The Magna Mater of Asia Minor, that had preserved the Roman Emperor on March 27, 188, the Alexandrian Sarapis, who so often had proved his power and loyalty to the Imperial house, and now appeared once more as protector of the corn fleets that fed the poor in Rome and in 191 shielded Commodus from sickness, gods whom Rome had long known, now became more than Commodus’ own protecting deities. With their whole train of gods and goddesses they and, like them, the Syrian Sun-god, the Juppiter of Doliche, Mithras, and Ma­Bellona from Cappadocia were received as equal citizens of the Roman Pantheon. Nor were the gods of Africa slow to find their place. In the victory of the provincial deities was reflected and foreshadowed the conflict for the victory of their provincial worshippers. Commodus was not long in his grave when the Guard in Rome, the last bulwark of Italian military tradition, was disbanded to make way for the ‘barbarian’ sons of the North and East, the motley soldateska, “wild of aspect, dreadful in speech, boorish in behavior”. Twenty years after his death the constitutio Antoniniana was passed which brought this striving to fruition when the provincials were made ‘Romans’. Like his father, Commodus would have saved the world the waste of much effort in this struggle, had he driven it through with a high hand.

VIII.

THE POSITION OF COMMODUS AND

ITS SIGNIFICANCE