by Simon Turney
In fact, the HA goes as far as to claim that Commodus worshipped Isis, shaved his head and carried around a statue of Anubis with which he bashed people on the head. Quite apart from the fact that this is not mentioned in any other source, every image that survives from his reign shows him with thick curled hair and a curly beard.
But my favourite from the Historia Augusta is, ‘For example, he put a starling on the head of one man who, as he noticed, had a few white hairs, resembling worms, among the black, and caused his head to fester through the continual pecking of the bird’s beak – the bird, of course, imagining that it was pursuing worms’ (1921 Loeb edition). Quite apart from the almost cartoon bizarreness of this image, I cannot picture anyone managing to make a starling stay on someone’s head, let alone the bird be stupid enough to mistake worms and hair. Since this is some of the quality we’re looking at in that great source, I hope you can forgive me for skipping some of its material.
One scene I did keep from the Historia Augusta, and which is almost certainly as much bilge as the previous paragraph, is the episode in the bathhouse of Centum Cellae, though I have twisted the original account and made it much the fault of Quadratus rather than the emperor himself. Simply, I was looking for a way to introduce Saoterus, who appears about this time and about whose background we know nothing.
Characters, then. I had much trouble with Caligula in selecting a narrator who could tell the emperor’s tale, who had been there throughout his life as a witness, and who outlived him to tell of the end. There was no such issue with Commodus. The answer almost leapt off the page. Marcia was the daughter of one of Verus’ freedwoman, therefore she would have been present in court life from an early age. She was the mistress of one of Commodus’ cousins, then of the man himself. She had enough influence with him to be instrumental in the death of Cleander and to have the emperor free the Sardinian Christians. Indeed, the Loeb (1921) translation of the Historia Augusta tells us directly ‘the city of Rome should be renamed Colonia Commodiana. This mad idea, it is said, was inspired in him while listening to the blandishments of Marcia.’ Best of all, not only did she outlive him, but she was intimately involved in his death. The opportunity for great sorrow and pathos here was almost too much. She has to have been an interesting, strong, conflicted character. And just as Cleander rose from nothing to become the second most powerful man in Rome, so Marcia, a pleb, was at one point empress in all but name.
Add to this the fact that she appears to have been a Christian, and she becomes truly fascinating. Christianity is still in its relatively early days at this time. It is surviving as an outlandish cult among the traditional gods of Rome. Previous emperors, even good ones, had been cruel to the Christian faith, and it is worth noting that not only was Commodus not cruel, but he seems to have actively been lenient with them. That this could be anything other than Marcia’s influence, especially given the Sardinia scene, is too hard to credit.
I should note here that, in Commodus’ speech after his father’s death I refer to Heaven. Given the nature of this book, with both Christian and pagan viewpoints, this coming from a pagan I thought needed some clarification, since there will be purist readers who will point out that Heaven is a Judaic invention and not part of Roman theology, whose equivalent would be Elysium. I have used the term Heaven as a nebulous term for the good afterlife based on translations of ancient text and for the readers’ familiarity. Herodian refers to Heaven in both his explanation of Apotheosis and in his version of that very same Commodian speech. While this is partially down to the translator, I see no reason not to promulgate that term.
Marcia is not noted as having been the one behind Bruttia Crispina’s fall, and she may well not have had anything to do with the lack of an heir. That is my own creation. However, to give it some credence, you must note that Bruttia had to have been an obstacle, since the moment she was out of the way Marcia was Commodus’. And there is some suggestion that rather than being infertile, Bruttia miscarried more than once. I simply built on this and linked them together.
Our sources do not note with whom Bruttia was accused of adultery, and the story of Julius Alexander in the sources is a little different. I took only the bones of it. In the source, Alexander kills a lion back in his home of Emesa and Commodus is so jealous that he sends killers to Syria, where Alexander only falls because he stops to help his companion. But even the most jealous of men would surely think twice before sending assassins over half the empire to kill a man for being better at hunting. It did not fit for me, so I brought Alexander close, where we could see his action and, though Commodus feels jealousy over the lion, it is over Bruttia that he sends killers after the man.
I have had Marcia feel deep affection and then love for Commodus from youth, and this being reciprocated. Again, this is my creation, though there is no reason this could not be the case and, in fact, it is certainly more credible than some of the things one comes across in the sources. So I had my emperor and my protagonist together in their youth in the palace. Everything fell into place with a line from Herodian (Echols, 1961): ‘As a slave in the imperial household, Cleander grew up with Commodus’. There we had it. We had a villain, too, from the start. Because regardless of how any source treats Commodus, they are universally damning of Cleander. Even Perennis, who gets a bad knock from the Historia Augusta and Herodian, gets from Cassius Dio (Loeb, 1927): ‘he never strove in the least for either fame or wealth, but lived a most incorruptible and temperate life’. But not Cleander. He was a villain, and about this there can be little doubt.
Cleander, of course, comes off as the main villain, and not Commodus. And, to some smaller extent, Perennis does too. The simple fact is that the sources blame Commodus for the death of many, many, many people. They even name quite a lot of them. And yet the sources also generally claim that Commodus liked to live the life of a hedonist, leaving the true running of the state to his equestrian prefects and freedmen. This strikes me as self-contradictory. If you claim that Cleander ran Rome for Commodus, then those men who died in droves almost certainly did so at the behest of the chamberlain. Cleander is easy to villainise. And in making him Marcia’s nemesis from the very start, it makes her part in his downfall that bit more realistic and credible. And the fact that his parting words (and those of Bruttia Crispina, her other enemy) essentially sour Commodus towards her at the end seems to fit.
I have, in the course of the first part of the book, also perhaps restored the reputation of Lucius Verus, to whom history has not been universally kind. I had the good fortune, after finishing the manuscript, to acquire a copy of M.C. Bishop’s new work, Lucius Verus and the Roman Defence of the East (2018), which not only supported my portrayal but in fact provided me with whole new angles to add to the plot during the editing phase. Therefore, I am tremendously grateful to Mike Bishop and his excellent book, and if you have any interest in Verus, I heartily recommend reading it. Incidentally, Bishop does not necessarily accept the plague as being responsible for Verus’ death, favouring perhaps a stroke as the culprit. The truth of the matter will almost certainly never be known, but I have gone with the plague, largely because it was simply the biggest killer in the world for these decades and it seems to me unlikely that none of the main cast or extended imperial family fell foul of it at all when so many thousand were carted off each day.
My apologies to Statius Priscus, who happened to be the man whose task it was to oversee the Tiber in the year of the great flood. Perhaps he was effective and useful. Certainly, he had quite an illustrious career, including war with Verus in the east and the governorship of Britain. I deliberately made a pointless patsy of him during the flood. Mea Culpa. Incidentally, as an aside, I was astounded to discover how often and how severely the Tiber sometimes flooded. A series of maps I came across indicated that during the worst times, much of the beating heart of ancient Rome – the fora and Subura and Campus Martius – would have been underwater.
Other characters are largely glossed over in this work. Men like Salvius Julianus who appear in the sources numerous times, but only ever in fairly unlikely tales that are generally peripheral, and even with the best will in the world would have added nothing by their inclusion. Such, for instance, is the fate of Motilenus, a Praetorian prefect who somehow appears in 190 with no other reference made to him throughout history other than that he is suddenly there and then isn’t because of poisoned figs. A spurious story at best. The Commodus the sources attempt to tell us thought nothing of executing officers and nobility by the swathe sits rather at odds with the same Commodus we are told poisons a prefect he doesn’t like with figs. Such is the world of trying to piece together the truth from the tabloid headlines of the day. The emperor’s sister, Fadilla, is noted in Herodian as being the one to draw Commodus’ attention to Cleander’s treachery on the Palatine. Dio has this revelation at a suburban villa, and Marcia being the one. I went with this for clear reasons and thus was Fadilla largely rendered pointless despite being the emperor’s eldest surviving sister and having a speaking part in sources. Herodes Atticus’ history with the emperor and the brothers Quintilii is fairly fascinating and would make a good scene, but there is little chance of it having happened in front of Commodus, let alone Marcia, and so it has been omitted entirely.
I promised at the start of this note to come back to the more manic side of Commodus, and so here we are. While I have explained his general withdrawal from public life at times as the ‘down’ of his bipolar, I have made the more glittering and exciting ideas of his an aspect of his occasional mania. This is because, while on the surface the actions of the emperor in his last years might seem megalomaniacal, when one looks at them in the light of bipolar and with a more critical eye, they become a lot more explicable.
It seems crazy to think of changing so many names and identifying with a demigod. But as I’ve noted time and again in the story, each of these moves has many, many precedents. Nothing he did in that year or two of supposed megalomania was new or outlandish in itself. Each change was something that had been done before. The reason, I think, for the fact that it seems insane is that these many changes all happened at the same time, rather than as occasional individual shifts. It is this sudden move of a grand plan that makes it so noticeable. Again, I have alluded to this in the text, having Marcia trying to slow the process. This is indicative of exactly what I came across in my research into bipolar. With strong bouts of mania, it is not uncommon for a sufferer to grasp an exciting idea and then run with it so far and so fast that they make a good notion entirely unworkable. That is what it seems to me happens here.
The simple fact is that the changes themselves seem to have been quite acceptable at the time. An altar found at Dura Europos set up by one Aelius Tittianus labels his unit as ‘II Ulpia Commodiana’. In his list of the emperor’s titles, he includes ‘the Roman Hercules’. He uses the date the kalends of Pius – one of Commodus’ new month names. If even a minor officer in a distant frontier garrison was clearly comfortable with these new names then that is fairly indicative of a general trend. This altar, which is the only prime piece of epigraphic evidence for this, is the subject of an excellent article called ‘Commodus the God-Emperor and the Army’ by M. P. Speidel in the JRA, 1993. And it is this one piece of evidence that suggests to me there is nothing insane or megalomaniacal about Commodus’ new world.
On that same subject, isn’t it interesting how the idea of Commodus changing the name of Rome to Colonia Commodiana is considered the height of megalomania and madness, while we accept Constantine renaming Byzantium after himself as a glorious and clever move? The damnation of an emperor casts a shadow over everything he achieved in his life, whether good or bad. The damning of Commodus, in particular, was so brutal that even a panel on his father’s triumphal arch (below) was reworked to remove the son who was at the reins of the chariot, leaving his father alone in the vehicle with no driver.
I suspect there will be readers who view the Colosseum scene towards the end of this tale as ridiculously overdone and fanciful. Yes, it is. It is also lifted from primary sources and simply retold. In fact, my version of Commodus’ exploits in the arena is a shortened version of the ones in the sources, and very much toned down! I have him killing four beasts with javelins, including a bear, and numerous other predators with a bow. Just as an example of how staid my version is by comparison, I will give you examples from the sources of what they say happened:
Cassius Dio: ‘On the first day he killed a hundred bears all by himself.’
Herodian: ‘when a hundred lions appeared in one group as if from beneath the earth, he killed the entire hundred with exactly one hundred javelins.’
Historia Augusta: ‘he once transfixed an elephant with a pole, pierced a gazelle’s horn with a spear, and on a thousand occasions dispatched a mighty beast with a single blow.’
Now contemplate the relative realism of my account! And bear in mind (pun intended) that Commodus’ prowess as a hunter is about the only thing that all three sources agree upon.
I will make one last admission. I am also the author of a series of Roman military thrillers by the title of Praetorian. These books also take place during Commodus’ reign and in fact intersect at some points with this narrative. I have kept the two separate enough that I’ve not actually introduced their protagonist, the guardsman Rufinus, into this story. I did nod towards him briefly when Marcia was building her net of allies and included Rufinus, the prefect of the Misenum Fleet. I have endeavoured to make the two stories correlate rather than contradict, such that reading Praetorian will give you a different angle on the same events. Rufinus, for instance, is one of the Praetorians at the theatre when Perennis is first denounced. He is at Lucilla’s villa, and the attempt on Commodus’ life in the Colosseum. He is also one of the men engineering the downfall of Cleander. The only part where the two accounts truly diverge is at the start, at the death of Marcus Aurelius in Vindobona. This account follows a more recognised direction than that one. Still, I hope that perhaps if you’ve enjoyed this and are in the mood for a little rollicking action, Praetorian might prove interesting further reading.
As a last note, any mistakes in this book are either deliberate or my own, or both. Hopefully, you leave with a new view of Commodus not quite so informed by the portrayals of Christopher Plummer and Joaquin Phoenix.
Am I not merciful?
Simon Turney
February 2018
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Commodus would still, even after two years, be little more than a disjointed pile of scribblings were it not for several people whose influence have turned it into the novel it is today. People who deserve more than just acknowledgement, really.
First as always comes my superb agent Sallyanne Sweeney at MMB Creative, who remains my rock in the literary world, supporting and helping me grow. Without her, and the other amazing men and women at MMB (Zaria, Adrienn, Ivan, Max and Samar in particular) I would not be able to share works such as this with you.
Thanks must go to my amazing editor Craig Lye at Orion, who took the rough first draft of Commodus and went to work like a cosmetic surgeon, cutting and stitching the coarse text and turning it into a thing of beauty. Until I met Craig, I had not appreciated the value and ability of a really good editor. Others at Orion are also deserving of note for their help in this project, including Amber Bates and Jennifer McMenemy.
I must thank all those in the writing and historical community who have supported me in the production of this novel, or whose comments and work have, in fact, helped shape it. One of the prime candidates for this is Mike (M.C.) Bishop, one of the leading authorities on the Roman military and author of many works including a biography of Lucius Verus that helped form the story. In addition to the above mentioned book, I would thank and laud the following: Dans le Rome des Césars by Chaillet, Saunders & Owen’s Bipolar Disorder: The ulti
mate guide as well as Fiona Cooper at BipolarUK, who steered me to that book, Speidel’s Commodus the God-Emperor and the Army, the Empire series by Anthony Riches, which covers the same era and people and does so in such style that I had to be careful not to emulate him, and Ridley Scott for making Commodus known to the world in the form of Joaquin Phoenix. Additionally, I have called upon the minds of the members of several online fora, including the excellent Facebook groups ‘Friends who like the Romans’ and ‘Roman Army Talk’. A shout-out is also clearly due to some of my oldest friends and fellow authors in the business whose encouragement makes a vast difference, particularly Gordon Doherty, Prue Batten, Christian Cameron, Kate Quinn and Stephanie Dray.
Finally, there is my wonderful wife Tracey, without whom I would long since have been living like a blubbering hobo, my children Callie and Marcus who keep trying to read the racier parts of the manuscript until I shoo them away, my parents Tony and Jenny and my in-laws, Ken and Sheila, all of whom have been there with love and support throughout.
Thank you. Commodus is only a novel because of you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A born and bred Yorkshireman with a love of country, history and architecture, Simon spends most of his rare free time travelling around ancient sites, writing, researching the ancient world and reading voraciously.
Following an arcane and eclectic career path that wound through everything from sheep to Microsoft networks and from paint to car sales, Simon wrote Marius’ Mules. Now, with in excess of twenty novels under his belt, Simon writes full time. He lives with his wife and children and a menagerie of animals in rural North Yorkshire.
COPYRIGHT
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Orion Books,
