The World

In 179, Marcus captured 40,000 Germans and celebrated with an equestrian statue and a column boasting of his victories, both of which still stand in Rome. But soon afterwards, at Vindobona (Vienna), he caught the plague. Knowing the symptoms well, he called in his courtiers, rebuked them for weeping, then summoned Commodus, telling his friends, ‘Here’s my son, whom you brought up and who’s just reached adolescence and stands in need of guides through the storms of life … You must be fathers to him in place of me alone … In this way you will provide yourselves and everyone else with an excellent emperor …’ The courtiers must have quaked at the prospect of Commodus. Marcus had won real affection and respect by learning war with the men. He was a student of deathbeds, those strange theatres of bodily disintegration and political transference. Marcus noticed Commodus ‘standing by his deathbed welcoming the evil happening to him’ and muttering, ‘We’ll breathe more easily now this schoolmaster is gone.’ When a tribune asked for the watchword, Marcus, now fifty-eight, retorted, ‘Go to the rising sun. I am already setting.’

SLAUGHTER OF EUNUCHS AND THE MEGALOMANIA OF EXSUPERATORIUS

Commodus was ‘most attractive to look at, because of his well-proportioned body and manly beauty, his hair natural, blond and curly. When he walked in sunlight, it shone like fire (some thought he sprinkled it with gold dust before going out) … and the first down was beginning to appear on his cheeks.’ If strangers admired him, those who knew him best hated him most: the first conspiracy was led by his own sister Lucilla, but the assassin, their cousin Quadratus, bungled the hit and was killed. Lucilla was murdered. A second plot gave Commodus the pretext to execute his father’s ministers and then his own wife. One of the plotters along with his sister was a Christian freedman’s daughter named Marcia, who had been the mistress of Quadratus. Somehow Marcia not only avoided denunciation but became the emperor’s mistress and adviser.

Yet Commodus possessed a cunning instinct for weakness and a gift for manipulation, bribing the army with money and peace and entertaining the people with thrilling spectacles. Revelling in his taboo-breaking antics, this vicious buffoon charged a million sesterces for his performances as a gladiator, traditionally the job of a murderous slave and therefore a way of projecting a popular touch. Commodus performed as a secutor, the elite gladiator who wore a full-face helmet with slits for the eyes, a loincloth, a leather belt, a thong on one arm, a greave on one leg, shield and sword, to fight the retiarius, a light gladiator who brandished trident and net. He always won, but when his opponents surrendered, he spared them. He killed a hundred lions, three elephants and a giraffe.

Practical jokes are always the resort of the witless; his were mirthless and cruel. Relishing his entourage of giants and dwarves, a wrestling hulk named Narcissus and a man with a penis larger than any animal except an elephant, Commodus’ practical jokes involved blinding and dissecting people. Spectators did not know whether to giggle at his absurdity or bite their lip in terror.

By 189, he was presenting himself as Jupiter and Hercules, sporting lionskin and a club, and adopting the extravagant agnomen Exsuperatorius (a delicious word meaning Supersuperlative). When he called himself Amazonius, he renamed Marcia Amazonia. She was an unlikely Christian but managed to protect the bishop of Rome, Victor, and free Christians from the mines. Unlike his predecessors, who regarded Christianity as a dangerous superstitio, Commodus saw it as just another eastern cult; perhaps Marcia encouraged his idea of himself as a reincarnated god. His misrule sparked more conspiracies that fed his paranoia. The plague returned with a vengeance; thousands were dying while Commodus’ killings became frenzied. His hitmen used infected needles dipped into pox sores so that the murdered would die of supposed natural causes – perhaps the first biological warfare. Now the emperor planned a reckoning with his enemies just as the slaughter of the eunuchs began in China.