CHAPTER IX

THE ANTONINES

VIII.

THE POSITION OF COMMODUS AND

ITS SIGNIFICANCE

The literary tradition, which measured all emperors by the ideal of Augustus, portrays Commodus in the darkest colors. Facts and gossip were intermingled, all that was hateful or ludicrous in his private life, all that was extravagant or negligent in his public acts were combined to brand him to posterity as a criminal whom the Senate first smiled at, then mocked at and finally condemned. Where the literary tradition offers only shadows or scandals or monstrous depravity, the coins describe events with growing enthusiasm. The picture given by the official propaganda of the Empire and Alexandrian coinage, shows more richness, unity and depth; much that, taken by itself, seems without motive or meaning becomes significant if placed in its original setting. The coins do not conceal the occasions for blame, but they persist in seeing in the Emperor the choice and protégé of the gods. Each new acclamation as imperator, the titles of honor ‘Pius’ (183), ‘Britannicus’ (184), ‘Felix’ ( 185), and the changes of the Imperial name are recorded, though the clear record leaves much that is still dark to us. The illusions, the moods, the hopes that kindled the plans and acts of the Emperor are set forth perhaps as the government wished and so with more clear purpose and reality than the partial caricature born of hatred. To supplement and often to interpret this with startling clearness, the Senate sounds an accompaniment, first forced or overloud from fear or interested officiousness, then on the Emperor's death breaking out in a wild confusion of insult.

Thus in 183 the gods of Rome and the Felicity of the Emperor were hailed by the People contented with his gifts of corn. The Senate attested his Hilaritas; his Salus was beyond danger even from the lions he overcame, Peace must now reign over the world entrusted to him by Juppiter, and the times were happy. The victory in Britain of the next year, no less than the Emperor’s earlier munificence, was made the occasion for celebrations. Rome has to thank its new Hercules that brought prosperity to men. Italy appears as the mistress of the world and the rejoicing over victory lasts till 185. Now at last we hear of the Felicitas Saeculi, that had seemed for two decades to be forgotten, the Golden Age of Saturn, the gift of Juppiter. The victorious might of the Emperor overcoming a panther posed men with the ques­tion, what divine power enabled him to strike down with a single shaft beast after beast, himself inviolate. Was not this proof enough of his Herculean strength and his divine sonship? Meanwhile another note is struck in the ‘fidelity of the armies’, the ‘concord of the soldiers’, suspiciously like an appeal to the mutinous troops in Britain. But whatever might befall, the first decennium of his tribunician power must end in a fortunate time.

The propaganda in 186 has the same story of these loyal armies, of the soldiers once more in concord. Perennis had at last fallen, the Senate could celebrate the Felicitas Publica. With a sixth largesse to the People the hope of the coming age of happi­ness is described as growing and as echoed by the provinces: “Under King Commodus the whole world is happy”. Then, as if ancient Rome had risen again, and the victory of the previous year which seemed to be the fulfillment of the vota decennalia was still celebrated, the nobilitas Augusti is suddenly officially proclaimed as though anyone had dared to doubt it and worshippers in the provinces named him ‘nobilissimus princeps’. Finally is heard the exuberant enthusiasm of ‘Juppiter summus exsuperantissimus’, and the Senate had already declared its glowing aspiration after eternal peace. With the next year the gates of Janus are closed and the lord of Time that links the past and the future rules an earth restored to equilibrium. The Golden Age of fancy had dawned, the happiness of the People had been achieved by the piety, the strength and nobility, the joy and gladness, the ‘providence’ and munificence of the Emperor. The title of ‘Father of the Senate’ was added to that of Pater Patriae, thus setting Commodus as the sole representative of the two sovereign powers of the ancient State or, perhaps, as himself the sovereign, endued with the patria potestas. Even if later the Senate was to exalt its own piety, now it is Commodus who is the ‘auctor pietatis’, the creator of felicity.

In all this may be detected the religious movement of the time. Commodus is the embodiment of piety viewed from the angle of Eastern religiosity and philosophical speculation. His Juppiter summus exsuperantissimus transcended the idea of the god of a State and became the centre of a universal system of divinities that restored to a divided world an elemental unity. To this system belonged the alien gods whose rites Commodus did not shrink from practicing, although their rites were ‘cruel’ according to Roman ideas and his participation in them was taken as proof of his ‘cruelty’. But, though old Rome might regard it as a betrayal, the raising of the gods of the provincials into the State pantheon of Rome was no more than the fulfillment of his whole conception, wherein lay the essential justification of his position as ruler in the world. In his position as devout mediator between the world of men and the world of gods he stood raised above the political ideas of the past, with its rational beliefs in freedom and equality. To himself Commodus may have seemed crowned with the magic that had attended the kings of old by divine grace. In his feats in the amphitheatre he may have been imitating the Egyptian, Assyrian or Persian kings, whose deeds he had seen pictured on temples and palaces when he was a boy with his father in Egypt and Syria. As he passionately embraced the orgiastic yet so animal religions of the East, he may have taken as his own the philosophic speculation that at this time came in with the beginnings of metaphysic and wild religious ferment. Intrepid and fanatical, at the mercy of every illusion, he abandoned himself to his ideas and passions; but what he did seemed the monstrous abuse of power only to those who clung to the old world. It was, in fact, a new type of the pure man, and the devout ruler, an invasion of an alien strength and an alien attitude, the first triumph of the oriental and `barbarian' alike, which found its instrument in this last of the Spanish line. As the first realization of humilitas before the Highest in the heathen world of Rome he stands in diametrical opposition to the political and ethical ideal of Greek and Roman humanitas. But this new ideal was logical and deeply rooted in the aspirations of the age, and therefore genuine.

In 188 the prayers that Fortune would attend on the Emperor appear more clearly than in the past three years, until the goddess was thanked that her happy intervention had succeeded in keeping him back in Rome to make offerings for victory in Germany. Omens and signs had been given to warn him, and as the Magna Mater helped to save him from Maternus, so did Juppiter with his thunderbolt aid him against the Germans. The abundant Empire coinage of the next year displays a host of legends that turn on the idea of eternal Rome, of eternal peace and security for the whole world provided by Juppiter juventus, Minerva victrix, Mars pacator, while Victory and Fortune are happy and Fortune attends on the Emperor. Over the whole Juppiter summus exsuperantissimus has sway. By the year 190, after the end of troubles in Africa, a seventh largesse to the People and the just sentence of death on Cleander, the Senate too had learnt to extol the Libertas Augusti and his fortunate Genius, and at the end of the third quinquennium of his tribunician power vows were made for his Vicennalia. In this year was established the African corn-fleet to secure, together with the Egyptian fleet, the food-supply of Rome and in connection with it was founded the colony of Carthage that was named after the Emperor.

In the last two years of his reign the Empire coinage shows an ever richer and more consequent variety. The name of Commodus seals the unity of the Praetorian cohorts, his creative power preserves for Rome the Golden Age. Palatine Apollo and Minerva Augusta appear, Hercules takes the name and shape of Commodus himself, now that he has achieved the last of his labors and won the apples of the Hesperides that give immortality. Commodus has become a god in Rome. Coins and medals display further Victory, the Sun-god, Sarapis, all giving help and aid to the labors of the new divinity. The hostile tradition records that he accepted statues in the garb of Hercules and received offerings as a god. So Commodus lived in his mythical-divine world of visions. A sudden change of the Emperor’s name to L. Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Pius Felix seems to inaugurate a new age under a new ruler. But the official propaganda has to tell of the ‘defender of the Salus Augusti’, of Juppiter Ultor. The Senate, following the Imperial coinage, adds a train of divinities, Juppiter Optimus Maximus, Mars, the Magna Mater, Sarapis, the Sol invictus of Syria to guard the Emperor, exalts the lasting felicity of Augustus, the Salus humani generis, and announces that “the vows for the weal of the Roman People have been paid”. Thus all beneficent powers in Heaven and on Earth, whatever their origin or station, stand by to guard the life of the Emperor from impious attack or the peril of the pestilence before which he had withdrawn to Laurentum, and to preserve Augustus, his Roman People and mankind from mortal needs, to secure the happiness of the world and its ruler, and to banish care. Finally, Commodus appears making offerings to Felicitas or by the side of Juppiter as ruler of the world, who can claim the adoration of his children.

HERCULES ROMANUS 

Belief, myth, crude reality were thus inextricably compounded together in the ecstasies of the Imperial devotee as rarely before. This great congregation of divine powers to preserve the sovereign and his beneficence would have been unthinkable in earlier times. Yet it all speaks the language of Rome, and it is still a bold venture to display himself to the People in his majesty as deified. But the ultimate climax has not yet been reached. In his last year, 192, Pietas joins the heavenly powers, the Libertas Augusti appears renewed and Commodus shows himself with Sarapis and Isis. Then there broke out a fire in Rome which destroyed the temple of Pax and parts of the Palace, even the temple of Vesta and some parts of the city. The order went out to found a new Rome, to be called by the name of the ‘Hercules Romanus, the (new) founder of Rome’. The colossal statue that Nero set up, which later was turned into a statue of Helios, now became a Hercules with the features of Commodus, the cult-statue of the city’s founder. He is to take the place of Romulus, who once vanished from the earth on the day on which Commodus assumed the toga virilis, and whom the Senate still held up to him as a monitor in 178 and 180. On its pedestal his life and deeds were inscribed for men to read. The day of the edict received his name, and from the style and titles of his latest period—Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius—were to be named the months of the year for all posterity. Thus he is represented as the lord of the world, of its space and of its time, of mankind and of its happiness that he has created. The old Rome is dead, a new Rome comes to birth. What no man had yet ventured is represented as achieved by a single decree. He has reached the climax of his revolutionary purpose and action. Two new congiaria, the eighth and ninth, are to win the People, and the propaganda for the Roman Hercules becomes ever more vigorous—and then comes the sudden end.

The treason of his ‘vizier’, his chamberlain, his concubine and his athlete unites as though symbolically the powers to which his breaking down of the old order gave play. The guardian of political power and the guardian of the Palace, the woman found worthy of the new deity but inclined to the god of the Christians, and the man whose office it was to steel the animal strength of the conqueror of beasts, these whom his grace had promoted, banded themselves together in their fear to destroy him. He fell, the martyr of the movement that bore him up. Rome, that he had overthrown, did not rise again despite the reproaches heaped on him and all the Senate’s exultation over the “victory of the Roman People”. The destroyer that had been swept away in its fall was to rise again as Divus Commodus when the victorious Septimius Severus, for whose ends he fell, whose good fortune it was that the athlete proved the stronger, had gained sole power. Neither fall or rise nor the expiation of timidity and treason stayed in its swift march to fulfillment what he had sought to create. Thus Commodus appears—truly the ‘rising sun’ that his father with the clear vision of the dying had seen in him. With a high hand he cast aside the intellectuality of the old world, its values, its spiritual and I religious gradations. He crushed the pride and dispelled the sovereignty of such humanitas. He made the Senate his subjects, took to himself all power, and handed it to his servant to use. He preserved the privileges of the orders and the right of the nobles to hold the magistracies, but he admitted to them ever more new forces of the subject and ‘peregrine’ world that once was Rome’s servant. He destroyed, once and for all, Rome's proud pre­eminence in the world and was himself the sole master of the Empire. Though he seemed flown with pride before his fall, he yet was humble before the highest God, the author of all being.

And from this conception of the power that dwelt in hidden supremacy, the world gained a significant direction towards a new spiritual unity and was buoyed up by the belief in the Felicity of the time, in the Golden Age. A princely prophet falls: but the Order he proclaimed abides.

The youth with his fair hair and burning eyes, whose head seemed to the people crowned with divine brilliance, stirred in the old and the moralists horror and loathing. But why judge him by our standards? A Spanish visionary, mystical, handsome, pliant, strong, now lively now indolent, now intrepid now a coward, with spirit now soaring, now sinking, a notable creature, he was in everything extreme, in obedience towards God, in power to take divinity on himself, in wild sensuality, in iron fearlessness, in animal passion. Unchecked by any laws of morality, without care whether fair boys or women serve his appetites, whether he shed the blood of strangers or of his own kin, breaking any fetters that could enchain him, he yet felt himself without guilt or stain, the source of all piety and the creator of all happiness. His life was lived beyond the world of reason, compounded of the potencies of the body, of instinct and of imagination. To the kaleidoscopic variations of his personality was added the effect of the cosmopolitan group that surrounded him, bringing to play upon him the forces that were now young, now more than old, from the far corners of the empire. Indeed Commodus became, as it were, their vessel, borne on high by their longings, prayed to by their enthusiasms, drained by their egoistic instincts, shattered by their timidly treasonable rage.

Did Commodus deserve the laughter and the scorn of the Senate as he let Rome sink to be a colony of his founding? Why did it flatter him, even outdo him in his mythical-divine attitudinizing, and then visit him with condemnation when the dreaded ‘Father of the Senate’ had been strangled? It was not worthy of the dreamer, for in its waking it was so cowardly, so studious of revenge, so lacking in vision. Or did it dream in its very wake­fulness? In the witches-sabbath that plagued Rome in these years the Emperor stands a strange figure. He had grown out of an intellectualism that was breaking down; he guided life by instinct from its heights to its depths, gave to the forms of the old world a content of passion and enthusiasm born of a new life and sought an Empire of happiness to be guided by men of devout obeisance to piety and the supernal. Rejected by the old, pioneer for the new, far removed from Hadrian, he was the ‘rising sun’ of a new world.