Geta

Geta was murdered in his mother's arms by his brother, and then removed from the record of the empire. He was the younger son of Septimius Severus, raised alongside Caracalla in a rivalry their father encouraged and could not control, and made co-emperor in 209. Severus took both sons to Britain to campaign against the Caledonians, partly to give them something to do away from Rome, and died at York in February 211 advising them to enrich the soldiers and despise everyone else. They returned as joint emperors and divided the palace, using separate entrances and eating separately for fear of poison. The proposal to partition the empire between them - east to Geta, west to Caracalla - was reportedly refused by their mother Julia Domna on the ground that she could not be divided. In December 211 Caracalla arranged a reconciliation in her apartments and had centurions kill Geta there. He died in her arms and she was wounded in the hand. What followed was a damnatio memoriae carried out with unusual thoroughness: his name was chiselled from inscriptions across the empire, his face scraped from paintings, his coins melted, and speaking of him was made a capital offence. The erasure is legible as erasure, which is its own kind of record. Inscriptions across the empire carry a chiselled blank where a name was, papyri show his name scraped and rewritten, and the effort of removing him is now one of the better-documented acts of his brother's reign. Some twenty thousand of his supporters and household are said to have been killed. The Severan family portrait in Berlin still has a hole where his face was, which is the most eloquent surviving record of him.

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