Commodus: The Gladiator Emperor
Commodus succeeded his father Marcus Aurelius in 180 and ended the run of adoptive emperors that had produced eighty years of good government. The pattern before him had been accidental: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had no surviving sons and adopted their successors on merit. Marcus Aurelius had a son, and the son inherited. Commodus was eighteen, and his first act was to end the Marcomannic wars on the Danube by treaty rather than complete the annexation his father had planned, which was defensible strategy and was read as laziness by the senate. He then withdrew from government to a series of favourites — Perennis and then Cleander, who was lynched by a mob during a grain shortage — and to the arena. That is what he is remembered for. He fought as a gladiator in public, hundreds of times, against opponents who were unlikely to try very hard, killed animals in the amphitheatre with a bow, and eventually renamed the months, the legions and the city of Rome itself after himself, and had statues made of himself as Hercules with a club and a lion skin. A conspiracy involving his own sister failed early and produced a long sequence of executions of senators. He was strangled in his bath on the last day of 192 by a wrestler, at the instigation of his chamberlain, his mistress and the praetorian prefect. Five emperors followed in 193, and the empire never recovered the arrangement he broke. Cassius Dio, who sat in the senate through the reign, wrote that Roman history passed from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust. He meant it as a judgement on one man, and later readers have taken it as the epitaph of the whole second century.
- Year: 180 CE
- Category: Political
