The Book of Ancient Bastards (19 page)

No Bald Jokes!

(?-84 B.C.)

Under Domitian more than half our wretchedness consisted of watching and being watched, while our very sighs were scored against us, and the blanched faces of us all were revealed in deadly contrast to that one scowling blush behind which Domitian sheltered against all shame.
—Tactius, Agricola

Talk about your tough acts to follow. First, there was the no-nonsense military hero emperor, hard-headed and the favorite of his legions, founder of his dynasty (Vespasian, founder of the Flavians). Then there was his elder son, also a skilled military man, very popular, and trained by his illustrious father to succeed him in the toughest job in the ancient world, only to die young from a mysterious illness (Titus). Who in their right mind wants to be the guy who comes along next in this progression? It sure wasn’t Titus Flavius Domitianus, the Roman emperor better known as Domitian.

Even so, Domitian proved himself talented in many ways. He was good with money, and added to the empire’s infrastructure (roads, public buildings, frontier fortresses).

But he inherited a bankrupt treasury upon taking the throne in A.D. 81. He responded by condemning wealthy citizens on trumped-up charges and either executing or banishing them, then confiscating their property.

But more than that, Domitian just wasn’t a very happy guy. According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, who grew up during Domitian’s reign, the emperor “used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they had discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed.”

Over the years, this unease and suspicion of those around him metastasized into full-on paranoia. By A.D. 93, Domitian had begun his “reign of terror,” according to the Roman historian Tacitus, a senator during this time. Dozens of prominent citizens (many of them senators) wound up proscribed and dead.

The philosopher Pliny the Younger, who entered the senate late in Domitian’s reign, wrote of the experience in a letter to a friend, calling it “a time when seven of my friends had been put to death or banished . . . so that I stood amidst the flames of thunderbolts dropping all around me, and there were certain clear indications to make me suppose a like end was awaiting me.”

Domitian’s paranoia became, as with so many other tyrants, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The plot he had feared during his entire adult life came to pass in early A.D. 96.

The previous year Domitian had exiled his niece and executed her husband (for treason, of course). The niece’s steward, a fellow named Stephanus, stayed on in the emperor’s service and conspired with Domitian’s own chamberlain Parthenius and several others to do the despot in.

They caught the emperor preparing to take an afternoon nap without a weapon handy, and Stephanus stabbed him. The other conspirators rushed in, and Domitian was dead, aged fifty-years and having ruled for fifteen.

Balding Bastard

Another one of those balding emperors sensitive about his thinning hair, Domitian disguised his condition with wigs and laurel wreaths, and actually wrote a book about hair care.

The Emperor as Hercules

( A.D. 161–192)

More savage than Domitian, more foul than Nero. As he did unto others, let it be done unto him.
—Referendum of the Roman senate on the death of Commodus

With so many whack jobs populating the ranks of the emperors of Rome, an imperial bastard has to really excel to make the cut for this book. In the case of Aurelius Commodus Antoninus Augustus, we get a doozy: a guy who convinced himself that he was the reincarnation of the god Hercules, competed in the arena as a gladiator, renamed all the months in the calendar (and eventually the city of Rome) after himself, and died the victim of a plot spearheaded by his own mistress!

Never one to take responsibility when he could get someone else to do the hard work, on inheriting the imperial throne from his father Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 180, Commodus immediately began to delegate authority to a series of hand-picked subordinates.

Within two years, Commodus’s own sister led a conspiracy against him, and it very nearly resulted in his death. Badly spooked by this attempt, the emperor all but ceased appearing in public during the next couple of years, allowing persuasive subordinates to rule in his name (several of whom were, in their turn, assassinated). The end result was that the son of one of the empire’s most able rulers and its greatest philosopher became the figurehead of a vast police state.

And what a figurehead he was! Tall, handsome, muscular, and strong, Commodus seemed intent on proving himself in the gladiatorial games, where he fought several bouts a day with other gladiators and wild beasts.

Where Nero had fancied himself a master of all things stage-related, and had acted the part, Commodus took the “emperor-as-eccentric” act one step further and insisted that he was, in fact, the reincarnation of Hercules, the god of strength. In support of this notion, Commodus began to appear in public dressed in the traditional lion-skin mantle of Hercules. This wasn’t just megalomania. Commodus was probably trying to convince his subjects that, being a god, further attempts to murder him would be unsuccessful.

Over the last few years of his reign, he denounced and condemned to death scores of senators and their families, claiming that each was guilty of treason for plotting against him.

In the end, Commodus’s fear of political murder became, like that of Domitian before him, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Certain that they were in line for execution, several of Commodus’s key subordinates joined together with his own mistress, a Christian named Marcia (who feared persecution of both her family and her sect), and had him strangled in his own bath on the eve of one of his interminable gladiatorial contests. The bastard was only thirty-one years old.

Bastard’s Calendar

Late in his reign, Commodus was so far gone believing his own press that he actually had each of the months in the calendar renamed. After himself. Really. (The months became Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius, Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus, and Exsuperatorius.) As if that weren’t enough, when a great fire (yes, another one) devastated Rome in A.D 191 Commodus set himself up as a sort of “second founder” (after the legendary Romulus) and renamed the city “Colonia Commodiana,” or “Commodus City.”

The Man Who Bought the Roman Empire

( A.D. 133–193)

But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?
—Didius Julianus

Talk about someone born with all of the advantages: well-educated, brought up in the home of an emperor’s mother, wanting for nothing, well-married, rich beyond all imagining; successful in politics, a proven military leader—Didius Julianus had it all. Unfortunately, he was clueless. He ought to have known that if you’re going to purchase an imperial throne, you can never really count loyalty you paid for.

This is the tragedy of that ultimately foolish bastard, Didius Julianus.

A respected senator during the reign of Commodus, Julianus only escaped execution on a specious charge of treason because that emperor had already killed so many senators as supposed conspirators against his life. After Commodus was murdered and a seasoned army general and politician named Pertinax became emperor, Julianus thrived, rising further in the ranks of the senate, serving in various governmental posts, up to a point where Pertinax at one point publicly proclaimed him “my colleague and successor.”

Within months, Pertinax had been murdered by the Praetorian Guard, and his father-in-law Sulpicianus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, was vying for the imperial throne. Julianus won the support of the praetorians (see sidebar) and was proclaimed emperor on March 28, A.D. 193.

The problem for Julianus was that his power base consisted solely of the soldiers he’d bribed, and of not one other person. Within a few short months, several different generals commanding Roman armies out on the frontiers rebelled and had their troops proclaim them emperor, then set about fighting amongst themselves. It was a cycle that would play itself out time and again over the next two hundred years.

The eventual victor in this contest of strong men was Septimius Severus (who has earned his own chapter in this book). Once Severus had consolidated his power and marched on Rome, Julianus, in a panic (and unable to do anything to stop any of the generals who might have actually marched on the capital), offered to share the empire with Severus, naming him co-emperor. Severus responded by having the official carrying Julianus’s offer executed.

Julianus swiftly followed, sentenced to death by his beloved senate on June 1, A.D. 193. The Roman author Cassius Dio reports his tearful last words (see the chapter opener); a fitting, if ironic, epitaph for a bastard who ought to have known better.

Bastard Outside the Wall

After Pertinax was murdered, Julianus, encouraged by a number of his senate colleagues, hurried to the praetorian camp to try to win their acclaim as emperor. He was locked out of the camp while their commander, Sulpicianus, was making his own speech asking for their support for his own claim to the vacant imperial throne. Julianus was reduced to shouting his own bids of how much he would pay each praetorian in the auction of their services from outside the wall of their compound.

Once he’d outbid Sulpicianus, Julianus sealed the deal by pointing out to the praetorians that if Sulpicianus succeeded his murdered son-in-law as emperor, he might reasonably be expected to punish the murderers of the previous emperor; the praetorians themselves (never mind Julianus’s own ties to his predecessor Pertinax!).