Commodus, Emperor of Rome

After the “five good emperors” (Nerva to Marcus Aurelius), the Roman Empire took a step backwards with its next incumbent, namely Commodus.

Commodus comes to power

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) began his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” with the reign of Commodus (180-192), as he regarded the rot as having set in with this thoroughly unworthy Emperor. The decline had another 300 years to go, so there were plenty of people and events to come that would play their part in the Empire’s eventual collapse, but the contrast with what had gone before was stark enough for Commodus’s reign to mark a real turning point.

Lucius Aurelius Commodus was born on 31^st August 161, his father being Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was renowned as the “Philosopher Emperor”. Commodus was given the best education his father could envisage for him, and the members of the Emperor’s circle would have had every confidence that the successor to Marcus Aurelius would continue to govern along the same lines, namely wisely and justly. However, if they did so, they were sorely mistaken.

Marcus Aurelius died suddenly, while on campaign, on 8^th March 180, so that Commodus became sole Emperor when a few months short of his 19^th birthday. It soon became clear that his careful training for the job, which had included being joint emperor with his father for the previous three years, had been a complete waste of time and that Commodus had none of the qualities of his father. He lacked Marcus’s intelligence and was lazy as well. He was happy to leave the business of government to his favourites and to spend his time enjoying himself.

A series of plots

Not surprisingly, he soon made many enemies, one of them being his own sister Lucilla, who was probably about twelve years older than Commodus. She had enjoyed a high status during her father’s reign but was now relegated to a very minor position at court, which she resented. A plot to assassinate Commodus, which involved other family members, failed and Lucilla was banished to Capri where she was later murdered on the Emperor’s orders.

One consequence of this incident, in which a man with a dagger had lunged at Commodus and been overpowered before he could strike, was that the praetorian prefect, Tigidius Perennis, was able to work himself into Commodus’s favour and become the effective power behind the throne. For the next five years Perennis made virtually all the decisions that kept the Empire stable, making sure that Commodus got all the credit.

However, Perennis made plenty of enemies of his own, and it was not difficult to persuade Commodus that Perennis was plotting against him. When Perennis fell, and was murdered, a former slave called Cleander took his place, to be followed in turn by a man called Eclectus, a chamberlain, who was, unknown to Commodus, in a long-standing romantic liaison with the Emperor’s mistress, Marcia. The government was now effectively in the hands of Commodus’s chamberlain and mistress, together with Laetus, the new praetorian prefect.

In 192, Marcia came across a document that showed that Commodus had plans to purge a number of people, including Eclectus, Laetus and herself. She therefore decided to succeed where Lucilla had failed and poisoned the Emperor’s food. However, the poison was not strong enough and Marcia needed to switch to plan B, which was to employ a professional wrestler named Narcissus to strangle Commodus with his bare hands. This ploy worked as intended, and Commodus died on 31^st December 192.

The gladiator emperor

Throughout Commodus’s undistinguished reign he had shown signs of becoming increasingly divorced from reality, and his behaviour had become bizarre in the extreme by the time of his death. He combined tyranny and cruelty with extreme vanity, such that he ordered Rome to be renamed “Colonia Commodiana”.

He took enormous pleasure in gladiatorial spectacle and trained as a gladiator himself, although during practices he sometimes killed his sparring partners. Modelling himself on Hercules when he appeared in the arena, he made sure that his opponents were only armed with wooden swords. His depravity reached extreme lengths, on one occasion involving the killing of dozens of disabled people who were dressed up as mythological monsters to be slain by Hercules. There can be little doubt that Commodus had turned into a homicidal sociopath, perhaps even worse than Caligula some 150 years before.

The aftermath

His death was widely welcomed in Rome, especially by the members of the Senate who feared for their futures. Orders were given for statues of Commodus to be torn down and for his name to be chiselled off public inscriptions. Needless to say, Colonia Commodiana became Rome once more.

Unfortunately, the assassins of Commodus had made no plans for what would happen next, and a short period of chaos was to follow, including the extraordinary event of the position of Emperor being offered by the Praetorian Guard to the highest bidder. The next Emperor of any substance, Septimius Severus, was to have a difficult job in undoing the damage that the reign of Commodus had caused.

© John Welford