by Simon Turney
There was only a moment’s pause, and the hulking wrestler nodded.
I stared, wide-eyed.
‘No!’
‘Marcia, it has to be done.’
Eclectus was holding me again now. I kicked him in the shin and tried to break free, but Laetus was there in front of me, shaking his head. ‘Him or us all, Marcia. You know that. You’re not in your right mind, but you’ll thank us later. You’ll understand then, when the panic and confusion are gone.’
‘No.’ I struggled still. I was strong, and managed to slip from the chamberlain’s grip, but there was still Laetus, and he was a soldier, hard and tough. Between them they held me.
‘Commodus!’ I wailed, hoping somehow to warn him. I could see nothing. ‘Commodus! Lucius! Marcus! Hercules!’ I was beside myself now, screaming and struggling.
Laetus and Eclectus held me tight, but dragged me forward, through the door and into the warm bath room. My heart sank and my stomach lurched. Commodus was in the water of the bath, with Narcissus struggling to hold him. They were a close match, physically, but Commodus was frail right now. Drunk on too much wine and weakened by the vomiting, he would not manage to hold off Narcissus for long.
‘Commodus,’ I bellowed, tears streaming down my face.
He looked at me then, distracted by my call, and suddenly, despite everything, he was my golden prince again. He was that lost little boy who had seen his family torn away by disease and disaster. The first emperor born to the purple. The god-emperor of Rome. The last Antonine. He was my Commodus, just in that one look, and I knew then that he would never have carried out that list. It had been a moment of rage and he would have changed his mind in the cold light of day. The consuls would still die, but not me.
Not me.
His one look at me sealed his doom, though. I had distracted him and now Narcissus gained the upper hand. He plunged beneath the surface with the emperor and for a moment they were gone, just a churning surface of warm water to show where they had been.
I felt hollow. Lost. I shook uncontrollably.
He burst free again for a moment, above the surface, spluttering and gasping for breath. His hand reached out desperately.
‘Em, help me!’
The great brute shape of Narcissus burst upwards then, a bent elbow slamming down onto the emperor’s neck and shoulder, snapping the collarbone like a dry stick. Commodus shrieked and disappeared once more, the great wrestler on him.
I threw up, my stomach contents joining those left behind by the emperor close to the pool. I realised suddenly that the slave girl was cowering in the corner in panic, staring at her emperor’s murder.
For that was what this was. Men may aggrandise and claim it as saving Rome. As an execution at best, an assassination at the worst. But there was nothing political or noble about this. This was a legitimate emperor being murdered by four conspirators for their own good, and nothing more.
I was sick again.
As I looked up, I saw Commodus for the last time. He emerged from the water, choking, wide-eyed, looking at me. Then he was gone again. I watched that golden hair vanish beneath the water, then the elbow, the forearm, and finally one desperate, pleading hand. And then just ripples.
Eclectus and Laetus let go of me and I fell to my knees weeping, wracked with horror, self-loathing and guilt. I watched Narcissus reappear with a splash and clamber from the bath at the far side, and I hated him then, almost as much as I hated these two, though nowhere near as much as I hated myself.
Commodus appeared then once more, bobbing to the surface, face down, arms and legs outspread as he floated, partially submerged.
I remembered bodies like that from so many years ago, washing up and down the street of the Forum Boarium.
Water.
It is the most unforgiving element, and it has plagued me all my life.
DIS MANIBUS – TO THE SPIRITS OF THE DEPARTED
Rome, the Palatine, ad 193
I rolled up the letter and slipped it into the scroll case, melting a little wax and sealing the lid with the imperial seal, a last reminder of who I might have been, and one that would see the letter delivered untouched no matter what. Lucius Eclectus, saviour of Rome and killer of emperors, was waiting for me. All he would get was my letter, but that was for the best.
The emperor Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus lived for thirty-one years and reigned for twelve of them. He lost his entire family and most of those he loved. And I played my part in his downfall, for my sins. I shall not attempt to be part of this new regime, for my heart died with the emperor. Eclectus has pledged to look after me – he and Laetus both. But I don’t really care. Let death come for me. The new emperor, that great general Pertinax who had saved Dacia, is said to be a good man who will carry the empire well.
I do not believe so. Rome had been ravaged by war and disease and conflagration. Commodus had rebuilt it. He had seen the plague off, repaired the city of its fire damage and put an end to war. He had begun a golden age, and while he may have taken it too far, we shall never know whether he could have saved Rome from a decline that I and others can already see coming. For the statues of Hercules are gone. The legions reverted to their old names. The months are back as they were, and corrupt old Rome is corrupt old Rome once more.
They say that Commodus was an enemy of the state. There is a move afoot in the senate to have him damned, and they say Pertinax will back it. My love’s name will be erased from the whole empire. His coins will be defaced. His statues will be smashed and melted down.
But there is discontent. The senate may want to erase all signs that my love lived and ruled, but the people adored their golden Hercules, and the army loved him, and neither will be content under any man who replaces him. Now a warmonger general sits on the throne. Peace will not hold for long. There will be more war. More death. More taxes to pay for it all.
They think they have saved Rome from Commodus, those fools in the senate, but what they have done is damn Rome. What we have done is damn Rome.
What I have done is damn Rome.
Our history now descends from an empire of gold to one of iron and rust.
The golden emperor is dead.
The golden age has gone, and shortly so will I when Praetorian blades seek me out. For I am a reminder the world cannot afford, I and those others who knew the real Commodus. I pray that my letter reaches Eclectus in time.
Lucius, my dearest man, I beg leave of you now. I have known you for so many years, and you, despite our closeness in many ways, both kind and cruel, have never really known me. That we might be together has only ever been a fiction based upon mutual survival, for you know that in my heart I only ever loved one man, and despite your goodness, it was never you.
Our world has collapsed through our own devices and the chaos to which we gave birth comes to consume us. You know my faith as I know yours. I must away to my confession with a priest and pursue some kind of absolution for all that I have done, and you must seek peace in your own way before they come for us. Please consider this tale my confession to you, and my explanation for how we come to this dreadful place.
I pray that my leaving you will save you the blade’s edge. You were the best of us, and you do not deserve what is coming.
Dearest heart, go peacefully into the next world and pray that I can still be saved.
Marcia
It began with a rush of water; terrifying and murderous. It also ended with a rush of water. A choking, deadly torrent, cloying and dreadful. In my life I witnessed a conflagration that tore through the dry kindling houses of Rome, destroying all we held dear and presaging an age of death and destruction. I endured a plague that made dry husks of strong men, ravaged the army more than any barbarian horde, and robbed Rome of the beating heart of its populace. But, for me, nothing matches those killing waves at both beginning and end.
I was a bad Christian, but I could have been a great empress.
HISTORICAL NOTE
When I came to write Caligula, the first book in this loosely connected series, I attempted to explode the myths surrounding that infamous emperor. What remained for Caligula was mostly tales told by his successors and surviving enemies and is therefore clearly biased, to say the least. In fact, when it comes to such tales as his incest and debauchery and gathering of seashells and the like, there is actually no archaeological or epigraphic evidence to clarify the situation, and so I set about to build an image of a realistic, if changeable, man rather than a monster.
Commodus has led me to face an entirely different challenge. That which is generally attributed to the ‘madness’ or ‘megalomania’ of Commodus has left us actual remains to confirm the truth. His identification with Hercules is clearly depicted on coins and statuary of the time. His changing the names of months, legions, etc., has left epigraphic evidence. Therefore what I needed to do with Commodus was not sweep aside the tales entirely (though some are still hard to credit and rather outlandish) but to analyse what the man clearly did do, and try to understand why he did it. And in doing so, I formed an impression that was the basis for this book.
Firstly, let us deal with ‘madness’. This is a dangerous subject, since it is all too easy to label anyone suffering with mental issues of any kind as ‘mad’, and in antiquity this is doubly true. So, looking at Commodus, I wondered first what ‘madness’ it was that led a golden prince to heights of seeming megalomania and periodic withdrawal from public life and relying upon his freedmen. Odd behaviour. And the first thing I discovered in my research is that megalomania is not an illness. It is a symptom. In fact, many of the terms used throughout history to describe sufferers of such problems are actually symptoms and not causes. The simple fact, you see, is that even in the modern world we are still largely ignorant of the mind and how it works. We still do not understand the causes of problems with it.
With Commodus, I researched mental illnesses and conditions to try and identify something that would explain what I saw in him. He was an intelligent man. His father said so, and Aurelius was no fool. He was loved, strong, careful and generally peaceful. He was tolerant of Christians and no lover of warfare. Yet he was given to sudden excesses, such as the almost delusional desire to fight as a gladiator, or the idea of changing the months to reflect his own names. Other times, he was withdrawn from public life, leaving men like Perennis and Cleander to administer the empire, allowing them the kind of power that no other emperor had since the time of Sejanus.
One illness seemed to fit. And the more I read about it, the more it explained Commodus. What used to be called ‘manic depression’, and is currently ‘bipolar disorder’ – and there is now a lobby to change to ‘multipolar disorder’ – seemed to fit. There are, of course, many types of this illness and it affects people to many different degrees, but the root fits. Periods – sometimes days, sometimes many months – of black depression, occasionally even plunging to the depths of suicidal thoughts. Something that makes sufferers withdraw from the world. And other times mania strikes, for some people lightly and just leading them to try new things, for others to the level of all-consuming delusion, leading them to believe they could fly or climb a cloud. Was this not what we were seeing reflected in Commodus’ somewhat erratic behaviour? And between these periodic ups and downs, times of stability that led a person to act completely normally. Often ups and downs are rare, and for most of their life a bipolar person is indistinguishable from anyone else. Once I saw this man as bipolar, it changed everything I read.
As I said above, the cause of mental illness is hard to determine, and bipolar is no exception. One of the suspected causes, though, is trauma. ‘But what trauma had Commodus ever suffered?’ thought I at the start of my journey. Born to the purple, groomed for power, no wars, no struggle for succession. Then I began to look. In reverse chronological order, from his most stable point, he had lost a close friend (some sources suggest lover), his sister had betrayed him, his father had passed on, his mother had died unexpectedly and, in unfortunate circumstances, his younger brother had died on the operating table, his uncle died, possibly of the plague, and his twin died of unknown causes, though some sort of illness is generally assumed. If the trauma of losing a loved one in bad circumstances might be a trigger for bipolar disorder, then Commodus was at risk even from early childhood.
Once I had my angle, I could start to relate it to the people and events in his life, and things began to fall into place. Commodus was no dangerous lunatic. In fact, Cassius Dio, who is generally disparaging, says of Commodus, ‘This man was not naturally wicked, but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived’ (wording taken from the 1927 Loeb edition). He was a man who spent his reign being encouraged and influenced continually by one character or another, from Perennis to Cleander to Marcia. What Commodus seems to have been was a young man who suffered repeated tragedy that left him, in my opinion, with an illness that manifested itself to the crude witnesses of the time as madness and megalomania.
Many of his deeds appear quite pragmatic and realistic when placed in context, and if they seem too outlandish, perhaps this is the effect of mania pushing a good idea into the stratosphere. I will come back to these. In the meantime, before I move on to the subject of my narrator and supporting cast, a word about sources.
We have three sources from the ancient world for Commodus. One is the above-mentioned Cassius Dio. His History is my second-best go-to source for research. Dio was a member of a distinguished Bithynian family, who likely knew Commodus personally, for he served in the senate during his reign. What must be remembered, when reading his work, is that Commodus and the senate were divided by something of a rift: the emperor’s reliance upon freedmen in spite of the nobles of Rome not popular with the senatorial class. At the time of Commodus’ death there can have been little love lost between them, and it surprises me that Dio, writing his account much later (it seems to have been finished around 230ad), even lowers himself to being as complimentary about Commodus as he was. He was looking back to events decades earlier in light of subsequent regimes, at a man who had been publicly damned.
Herodian, who is my favoured of the three accounts, wrote his history in the years leading up to 240ad. Similarly, he was witness to Commodus’ reign. He was young at the time of Commodus’ accession, perhaps ten years old, which means he was only maybe twenty-two when the emperor died. Again, his account was penned decades later through the influence of later regimes. We do not know much about Herodian. He may have been a senator, with the inherent bias that would bring. Or he may have been a freedman. If he was, then he was not one of any serious note, or his name would likely have appeared in texts somewhere. Herodian is not particularly forgiving of Commodus, though he does occasionally favour him with a sparse compliment. Also worth noting is the distinct possibility that Herodian was a citizen of Antioch, the city that had revolted under Cassius and suffered punishment by the Antonines. Bias comes from many directions.
The third source, and by far the least convincing, is the infamous Historia Augusta. Penned probably in the fourth or fifth centuries, this account is clearly written looking far back into history. Its author, or authors, repeatedly reference the now lost work of Marius Maximus. So what we are likely dealing with is a reworking of a previous biography. And the Historia Augusta can be rather outlandish from time to time; it feels a little as though it was written to shock or impress. As M.C. Bishop says in his book on Lucius Verus, ‘“fake news” (of which the Historia Augusta was a pioneer)’. Maximus himself was a contemporary of Commodus, so probably was a witness to much of what he wrote. But guess what? He was a senator and served in official positions under Commodus. So, once more we hit that same issue of bias.
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br /> Sometimes the sources are blatantly opposed to one another, too. On the death of Aurelius, and Commodus’ plans for northern peace, Cassius Dio tells us that he imposed his father’s terms on them, also demanding the return of captives and deserters and that they make an annual reparation in grain. Herodian tells us, conversely, that he ‘sold peace at a huge price’ and ‘gave them everything they demanded’. This is a prime example of just how untrustworthy primary sources can be. Sometimes the sources are clearly simply trying to shock and poke fun, with precious little grounding in reality. Thus we have the Historia Augusta telling us of Commodus having ‘a conspicuous growth on his groin that the people of Rome could see the swelling through his silken robes’. I chose for fairly obvious reasons not to make my emperor a ‘hunchgroin’.
There are other lesser works that touch on Commodus, but nothing on a biographical scale beyond these three main texts. Quite simply, there is not one entirely trustworthy biographical source on Commodus, yet they are all we have. I have generally built this tale upon events that are either attested in inscription or numismatics, or evidenced by archaeology in some other way, or I have taken stories from the sources where they either agree across the board or at least do not blatantly contradict each other. I shall regale you with some examples here of material I discarded from the Historia Augusta and some reasons why.
The Historia Augusta notes in the days post-177 that Commodus had a brothel of beauties in the palace, pretended to be a market trader, driving chariots and living with gladiators. Since the latter are seen in other accounts at the end of his reign, it seems likely that this is just filler slotted in the wrong place deliberately to shock. The Historia Augusta also tells a different tale of the end of Cleander to our other sources, making its credibility strained.
