The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  From that point onward, there was no stopping the guy. As noted, Nero fancied himself quite the artist (reportedly saying, “What an artist dies with me!” on his deathbed). He acted on the stage, wrote and performed his own plays (a move that scandalized an ever-more-disenchanted Roman populace), and gave concerts wherein he played the lyre and sang. And heaven help you if you tried to leave one of these concerts early: several men who did were cut down by the Praetorian Guard for leaving the emperor’s presence without permission. Pregnant women were reported to have gone into labor and given birth during Nero’s performances!

  Nero even competed in the Olympic Games, where (surprise, surprise) he won every single event in which he participated.

  By A.D. 68, the most important of the emperor’s supporters, the army, had had enough. Several legions rose in revolt, with one of them proclaiming their general (Galba) emperor. Historians maintain that had Nero actually gone out and conquered some new province or fought an invading enemy with his legions, his eccentricities might have been overlooked. As it was, he cut his own throat in order to avoid capture by Galba’s soldiers.

  Bastard.

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  SERVIUS SULPICIUS GALBA

  How Being Too Cheap to Pay Off Your Promised Bribes Can Be a Bad Idea

  (3 B.C.– A.D. 68)

  [Galba] seemed too great to be a subject so long as he remained a subject, and by general consent, he would have been a capable ruler, had he not ruled.

  —Tacitus, The Histories

  Servius Sulpicius Galba was born in 3 B.C. to a wealthy northern Italian family. Over the course of his life, he held a variety of military and government positions, earning a reputation for bravery and competency as both a military commander and as a civil servant. He was also cheap, short-sighted, inflexible, and a terrible judge of character. Unfortunately, these less-than-sterling character traits did not reveal themselves until after Galba became emperor. By that time, it was far too late for him to save himself from a violent end.

  When Galba was governor of a province in Spain, a complicated series of events resulted in the Praetorian Guard deposing Nero (causing Nero’s suicide) and in Galba’s allies in Rome (many of them senators) seizing an opportunity.

  They bribed the praetorians to accept Galba as emperor.

  Once installed as emperor, Galba set about establishing and stabilizing his regime by trying to balance the imperial budget. For the previous thirteen years, Nero had spent lavishly on foolish projects, showering his favorites with largesse, and allowing his imperial freedmen (ex-slaves working as civil servants) to embezzle large sums of money. The predictable result was that Galba found himself saddled with a crushing debt.

  Most of the measures Galba took did not go over well with the citizens (government takeaways rarely do). For example, the new emperor decreed that every cash giveaway Nero had made (and there were thousands on record) would need to be repaid to the tune of 90 percent. The grumbling began.

  At the best of times, put forward by the most virtuous and honest of governments, this sort of decision would have been unpopular. But the government that implemented it was neither of these things. Once Galba assumed the imperial purple, all of those unscrupulous folks who had helped him expected to get a little piece of the action. They were not disappointed. Galba’s civil servants were, if anything, greedier and more open about their plundering the empire’s taxes reserves than Nero’s had been. One of Galba’s boyfriends (see sidebar) named Icelus is reputed to have pocketed more in a few months than Nero’s gang had managed to steal over the course of his entire reign!

  When Galba tried to welsh on his deal with the praetorians and not pay them the cash bounty they had been promised, it was the last straw. Legions on the Rhine frontier mutinied. There was panic on the streets of Rome. When Galba went to the Forum to face down his opponents, he was thrown from his litter and stabbed to death.

  Gay Bastard

  Although ancient history is rife with stories of “great men” who had both female and male lovers, Galba was, according to that Mr. Blackwell of ancient Rome, Suetonius, unique among Rome’s early emperors in preferring men to women: “In sexual matters he was more inclined to males, and then none but the hard bodied and those past their prime.”

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  MARCUS SALVIUS OTHO

  The Emperor as Scheming Pretty Boy

  ( A.D. 32–69)

  When civil war in the balance lay, and mincing Otho might have won the day, bloodshed too costly did he spare the land, and pierced his heart with an unfaltering hand.

  —Martial, Epigrams

  One of Nero’s closest friends and confidants during the early years of his reign was a fashion-plate dilettante named Marcus Salvius Otho (the two men were rumored to have been lovers). Vain, shallow, and frivolous, Otho only survived Nero’s fall because he and the emperor argued over a woman (?!?). By A.D. 68, Otho found himself posted as governor of a frontier province in what is now Portugal, far from Rome and from the bloodbath that followed Nero’s death.

  An early supporter of Galba’s coup, Otho expected to be selected as the elderly new emperor’s heir apparent. The fly in the ointment for the ambitious young man was the fact that Otho’s family were commoners, without the distinguished pedigree that Galba was seeking in a successor (in hopes of shoring up his regime while it was still in its infancy and thus vulnerable), so he was passed over for a rival whom Galba adopted as both his son and heir.

  But Galba had recently committed an inexcusable blunder: he had stiffed Rome’s city police force (and the emperor’s personal bodyguard), the Praetorian Guard, out of the large cash bribe they’d been offered to pave the way for his march on Rome.

  Seeing his chance, the wealthy Otho slipped into the praetorian camp and offered them a bribe of his own. Unlike Galba, he made good on his promise. The praetorians declared Otho emperor, and Galba was murdered in the Forum during the resulting riots.

  As this was happening, one of the legions on the Rhine frontier mutinied and declared its general (a fat nobody named Vitellius) emperor. Vitellius’s legion marched on Rome. Otho sent his troops out to face them at the Po River in northern Italy. Vitellius’s forces won the resulting battle (the Battle of Bedriacum), routing Otho’s army and sending them reeling back to their master in Rome.

  At this point, Otho either lost his nerve or developed a conscience. When news of the disaster reached him, the emperor sent his family word that they ought to do whatever it took to save themselves. The Roman historian Cassius Dio records a pretty speech (likely fabricated) that Otho made to his troops, deploring the possibility of civil war and determining to sacrifice himself rather than Roman soldiers to fight each other in his name.

  Then he went to bed, only to rise the next morning and commit suicide by stabbing himself to death.

  Foppish Bastard

  Otho was notorious for going to great lengths where his appearance was concerned. As the gossipy Roman historian Suetonius tells us: “He had the hair of his body plucked out, and because of the thinness of his locks wore a wig. . . . Moreover, they say that he used to shave every day and smear his face with moist bread . . . so as never to have a beard.”

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  AULUS VITELLIUS

  The Fat Bastard Who Tried

  to Sell His Throne

  ( A.D. 12–69)

  Seldom has the support of the army been gained by any man through honorable means to the degree that [Vitellius] won it through worthlessness.

  —Tacitus, The Histories

  Historians refer to the twelve months after the death of the emperor Nero as the “Year of four emperors,” because in the civil war that followed, several different claimants came forward to take the imperial throne.

  The third of these emperors was arguably the least ambitious of the bunch, a notorious glutton and decades-long hanger-on at the imperial court who managed to flatter his way into a variety of lucrative political jobs serving under three different emperors. T
his was Aulus Vitellius, who had the misfortune to command a legion whose discipline crumbled away shortly after his greatest victory, largely because of his own bad decisions.

  It can truthfully be said of Vitellius that it wasn’t his idea to become emperor. His troops started the whole thing by refusing to swear allegiance to the new emperor Galba and proclaiming Vitellius emperor. Two of his subordinates, the generals Fabius Valens and Aulus Caecina Alienus, sealed the deal by leading his advance guard into Italy.

  It was Valens and Caecina who defeated the troops of the new emperor Otho at the Battle of Bedriacum. All Vitellius had to do was follow along as they made their way to Rome. Once there, Vitellius got himself proclaimed emperor by the senate, but the tide had already turned. Several legions along the northern and eastern frontiers declared for the general Vespasian, and he in his turn marched on Rome.

  Before Vespasian got to Italy, Vitellius, like Otho before him, lost his nerve. He approached Vespasian’s older brother, Flavius Sabinus, one of the consuls for that year, who was barricaded along with a number of other of Vespasian’s supporters on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, and made a deal to surrender the throne to Vespasian, all in the name of peace (and a huge bribe). But the deal fell through because Vitellius’s Praetorian Guard wouldn’t allow him to follow through with his resignation, instead pushing him to turn on Sabinus, which he promptly did, ordering the temple where Sabinus and his followers had taken refuge burned down around their ears.

  The move sealed Vitellius’s fate. When Vespasian’s soldiers came looking for him not long afterward, he was hiding in his gatekeeper’s quarters.

  By that point it didn’t matter that none of it, from proclaiming himself emperor to betraying and killing the well-respected brother of one of his rivals, had been his idea. Vitellius paid the ultimate penalty: as Suetonius tells us, he was bound and dragged through the streets of Rome to the Gemonian Steps, where criminals were executed. There he was tortured and beheaded, with his headless body tossed into the Tiber.

  Fat, Gimpy Bastard With a Gin Blossom Nose

  Vitellius had a very distinctive appearance. According to the Roman biographer Suetonius, “He was in fact abnormally tall, with a face usually flushed from hard drinking, a huge belly, and one thigh crippled from being struck once upon a time by a four-horse chariot, when he was in attendance on Gaius as he was driving.”

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  DOMITIAN

  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.

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  COMMODUS

  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 h
is 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.”

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  DIDIUS JULIANUS

  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.”