The Book of Ancient Bastards

by Thornton, Brian

  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!).

  55

  SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS

  The Emperor Who Gave Us the Word “Severe”

  ( A.D. 145–211)

  There were many things Severus did that were not to our liking, and he was blamed for making the city turbulent through the presence of so many troops and for burdening the State by his excessive expenditures of money, and most of all, for placing his hope of safety in the strength of his army rather than in the good will of his associates in the government.

  —Cassius Dio, The Roman History

  We get any number of words from the Latin, such as the names of most of the months (“July” for Julius Caesar and “August” for Augustus). Imagine what the guy whose name gave us the modern word “severe” must have been like.

  Ladies and gentlemen, meet Lucius Septimius Severus, the man who finished the work of earlier ambitious demagogues by turning Rome into the de facto military dictatorship it remained for the last two centuries of its existence.

  Severus was that luckiest of men: born in the provinces to an undistinguished family, he rose through the ranks of the empire’s civil service because of his family connections. His good luck followed him throughout the next two decades, where he served without merit or particular distinction in a variety of provincial government posts.

  In A.D. 191, Severus got particularly lucky: he was appointed governor of Upper Pannonia, which post also carried with it command of the legions defending the Danube frontier against the barbarian tribes to the north.

  Two years later, during the tumultuous aftermath of the murder of the emperor Commodus, Severus’s troops rose up and proclaimed him emperor. He accepted their proclamation and marched on Rome at the head of his troops, sweeping aside all opposition and entering the city several weeks later.

  In order to strengthen his grip on power, the emperor swept aside the largely ornamental senate and expanded the size of the army by hundreds of thousands of men. He used his new legions not just for external but for internal security. He expanded the frontiers in the east and in Britain and crushed the insurrections of two rival generals during the first years of his reign.

  It was under Severus that Roman persecution of Christians began in earnest. Where other emperors had executed early church leaders, Severus forbade any resident of the empire from converting to either Judaism or Christianity on pain of death. Thousands were killed and their property confiscated by the state.

  Severus died in A.D. 211 after a long illness, leaving a smoothly running military dictatorship to his sons Caracalla and Geta. This bastard’s political philosophy can best be summed up by the final advice he gave them: “Agree with each other, give money to the soldiers, and scorn all other men.” As we shall see in the next chapter, his sons had a bit of trouble following their ruthless father’s advice.

  African Bastard

  A Roman citizen from a family that had emigrated a couple of generations earlier, Septimius Severus was born in North Africa, the first Roman emperor not born in Europe. He went to Rome as a young man because two of his cousins were highly placed among the empire’s civil servants (both of them serving as consul while Severus was still a child), and these family connections promised him advancement in lucrative government jobs.

  56

  CARACALLA

  Don’t Drop Your Guard Along

  with Your Trousers

  ( A.D. 188–217)

  His mode of life was evil and he was more brutal even than his cruel father. He was gluttonous in his use of food and addicted to wine, hated by his household and detested in every camp save the praetorian guard; and between him and his brother there was no resemblance whatever.

  —The Historia Augusta

  Calling someone “more brutal even than his cruel father” is saying something when that cruel father was the ruthless Roman emperor Septimius Severus. But in this case it’s hardly an exaggeration: the brutal bastard being referred to set up his father-in-law on a charge of treason, eventually executed his wife, and stabbed his own brother to death in the presence of his mother!

  While it’s true that contemporary and subsequent historians have demonized Caracalla throughout the centuries (his brother Geta was better at spin-

  doctoring than he was), and he likely wasn’t as bad as he’s been made out to be, several of the more atrocious misdeeds laid at his feet are probably true.

  For starters, Caracalla did set up his father-in-law, who was his father’s trusted subordinate, the Praetorian Guard commander Gaius Fulvius Plautianus. He got several centurions to approach old Severus and inform him that Plautianus had attempted to recruit them into a plot to assassinate Severus. Within hours, Plautianus was dead, and his daughter (Caracalla’s wife), as the child of a traitor, was sent into exile. Once he was emperor in his own right, Caracalla had her killed.

  On his deathbed, Severus had said that Geta and Caracalla ought to share power, and he advised them to trust each other, pay off the army, and not care what anyone else thought. Turns out they were able to accomplish two of those three things.

  When it came to trusting each other, though, that was just never going to happen. They loathed each other. Each tried to have the other poisoned within months of their taking the throne in A.D. 211. In their final confrontation, in their mother’s chambers, Caracalla stabbed Geta, who died clinging to her.

  This was hardly the end of Caracalla’s bloody deeds. While he was in Alexandria, he ordered thousands of civilians slaughtered for reasons that remain unclear.

  When he invaded the Parthian empire a couple of years later, Caracalla ran out of luck. Some of his personal guardsmen hatched a plot to kill him, which culminated in his being stabbed to death when he stopped by the side of the road to answer the call of nature. When the other members of his retinue turned their backs out of respect for the office, one of their number stepped forward and stabbed Caracalla to death in mid-bowel movement.

  Bastard Fashion Statement

  Like Caligula before him, Caracalla derived his nickname from an item of clothing he customarily wore: a caracallus, which was originally a short, tight-fighting cloak with a hood. Caracalla adapted this, making it much longer, and wearing it everywhere he went on campaign with his armies. The soldiers coined his nickname, and as a result he is better known today as Caracalla rather than by his ruling name of Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Pius.

  57

  ELAGABALUS

  The Emperor and His Big Stone God

  ( A.D. 203–222)

  I will not describe the
barbaric chants which [Elagabalus], together with his mother and grandmother, chanted to [Elagabal], or the secret sacrifices that he offered to him, slaying boys and using charms, in fact actually shutting up alive in the god’s temple a lion, a monkey and a snake, and throwing in among them human genitals, and practicing other unholy rites.

  —Dio Cassius, The Roman History

  Who was the strangest bastard ever to don the imperial purple of ancient Rome? How about a gay, cross-dressing religious fanatic who wore more makeup than most strippers, and allegedly worked as a hooker out of his rooms in the imperial palace?

  Ladies and gentlemen, meet Varius Avitus Bassianus, better known by the nickname Elagabalus. He ruled the empire under the very Roman-sounding name of “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus” from A.D. 218 to 222.

  Born and raised in Syria, the kid was all of fourteen when his mother and grandmother used his blood connection to several previous emperors to engineer a claim to the throne. Within months, he was on his way to Rome. And he literally brought his god with him.

  Elagabalus and his followers worshipped a craggy, two-ton phallic-shaped meteorite as the actual physical incarnation of his god (“Elagabal,” or “El-Gabal,” from which he derived his nickname).

  The new emperor’s religious views were only part of the problem, though. Much more important was his penchant for continually thumbing his nose at Rome’s traditions—for example, by taking as his husband a slave-charioteer named Hierocles. He would even go so far as to have his lover catch him “cheating” and beat him: a foreign slave beating a sitting emperor! It couldn’t last.

  It all finally came to a head in March of A.D. 222, when Elagabalus flew into a rage during a meeting with the commanders of the Praetorian Guard (his personal bodyguard), denouncing them as disloyal: not a very bright thing to do while still standing in the middle of their camp.

  They chased him down and killed him in one of the camp latrines. His last words were, “Leave my mother alone!” If those actually were his final wishes, they were ignored. His mother was killed right alongside him. Their bodies were beheaded, dragged through the streets of Rome, and wound up in the Tiber River, the sort of burial that contemporary Roman law reserved for criminals.

  Later historians whipped up many improbable tales about this teenaged demagogue, but the truth as we can divine it about Elagabalus is far more interesting.

  Bastard on Parade

  [Elagabalus] placed the sun god in a chariot adorned with gold and jewels and brought him out from the city to the suburbs. A six-horse chariot carried the divinity, the horses huge and flawlessly white, with expensive gold fittings and rich ornaments. No one held the reins, and no one rode with the chariot; the vehicle was escorted as if the god himself were the charioteer. Elagabalus ran backward in front of the chariot, facing the god and holding the horses’ reins. He made the whole journey in this reverse fashion, looking up into the face of his god.

  —Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus Aurelius

  58

  CARINUS

  How Screwing Your Employees’ Wives Can Cost Ya!

  (CA. a.d. 250–285)

  [Carinus] put to death very many innocent men on false charges, seduced the wives of nobles, and even ruined those of his school fellows who had taunted him at school, even with trivial banter.

  —The Historia Augusta

  While many Roman emperors had trouble keeping their pants on, Carinus is one of the few whose proclivities actually cost him his life.

  That Carinus was a man of ability is beyond doubt. After he became his father’s junior co-emperor in A.D. 283, he fought a series of battles first against the Germans on the Rhine frontier, then against the Scots in northern Britain, beating them so soundly that the words “Britannicus Maximus” were added to his imperial title.

  When Carinus’s father and then his younger brother died under suspicious circumstances while fighting the Parthians on the empire’s eastern frontier in A.D. 285, Carinus led his army east to confront Diocletian, the general whom his father’s legions had proclaimed emperor in their place.

  Along the way, Carinus put down the revolt of a pretender to the throne in northern Italy, again showing considerable strategic ability. The two armies finally met in battle in the Balkans on the River Margus. Carinus had more troops and had the superior strategic position; it seemed as if his winning streak would continue.

  That’s when several of Carinus’s own staff officers took matters into their own hands.

  Apparently the emperor had developed a taste for bedding the wives of his subordinates, and wasn’t shy about it, having seduced or raped several of them over the previous several months.

  Seeing their opportunity and driven by a mixture of anger, fear of what Carinus might do next to them or their families, and a thirst for revenge, these same officers turned on their emperor, cutting him down at his moment of greatest triumph.

  With Carinus dead and the fortunate-beyond-all-reason Diocletian inclined to be merciful, the entire army ceased fighting and went over to the other side. Because Diocletian won the day, his propagandists got to tell the story, and Carinus went from being a boss who couldn’t keep his hands (and other things) off of the “help” to the cartoonish bastard portrayed in The Historia Augusta.

  Bastard Propaganda

  That scandal sheet of ancient sources, The Historia Augusta, claims of Carinus that “it would be too long to tell more, even if I should desire to do so, about his excesses.” This after laying out a smorgasbord of sins on Carinus’s part: that he married and divorced no less than nine wives in succession (outdoing fellow bastard Henry VIII of England), some of them while still pregnant with his offspring; that he possessed a voracious bisexual appetite; that basically he screwed everything with a pulse that came within reach; and of course that “he defiled himself by unwonted vices and inordinate depravity,” and that “he set aside all the best among his friends and retained or picked out all the vilest.” The reality is that he only had one wife of record, and he likely wasn’t as bad as painted in this source.

  59

  DIOCLETIAN

  The Best Place to Be Standing When Lightning Strikes Your Boss

  ( A.D. 245–311)

  Diocletian was an author of crimes and a deviser of evil; he ruined everything and could not even keep his hands from God. In his greed and anxiety he turned the world upside down.

  —Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum (“On the Deaths of the Persecutors”)

  The son of a former slave, Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocles was a career soldier who worked his way up through the ranks—first as Roman provincial governor, then as commander of emperor’s cavalry bodyguards, and finally as emperor.

  Diocletian brought nearly a century of warfare to an end, and reorganized the empire so that it was ruled by two senior emperors (augusti) and two junior emperors (caesars), stabilizing it for the first time in decades. When he retired (another rarity for Roman emperors in any era) in A.D. 305, Diocletian was universally hailed as the restorer of the Roman Empire.

  Just how did Diocletian make the leap from chief bodyguard of an emperor to emperor himself? Simple: he made a deal with an equally ambitious army officer willing to help with the planning and the heavy lifting.

  This officer was none other than the praetorian prefect (commander of the Praetorian Guard) Arrius Aper, perfectly placed to take out the emperor Carus and his son Numerian. Carus and Numerian were fighting in Parthia (in modern-day Iran). One day just a few months into the campaign, Carus was found dead as a stone in his tent the morning after a fierce thunderstorm. Aper let it out that the emperor had died from being struck by lightning.

  Really.

  Numerian was immediately hailed as emperor and continued the war against Parthia, with inconclusive results. In the spring of A.D. 284, Numerian began to make his way back to Rome. The journey took months. Numerian eventually began to stick to his litter with the blinds pulled, because, as
Aper explained to those around him, the young emperor was suffering from an infection of the eyes.

  Persecuting Bastard

  Diocletian and his caesar Galerius carried out an escalating series of persecutions of the Christian sect during his twenty years of rule. Among these acts were the burning of Christian churches, the dismissal of any army officer proven to be a Christian, and the jailing of leading Christians, insisting that they could be released as soon as they sacrificed to Rome’s ancient state deities. Those Christians who refused to do this were tortured and killed.

  As the army neared the city of Nicomedia in modern-day Turkey, the stench of decaying corpse emanating from the emperor’s litter proved too powerful to ignore. Several soldiers opened the litter and found Numerian dead. No one was sure how long he’d been rotting away.

  Aper claimed he’d died of natural causes, and immediately called for Numerian’s troops to proclaim him his successor. Standing in competition was none other than Diocles. In a meeting held in front of the entire army, a vote was taken during which the soldiers loudly proclaimed the popular Diocles (who equally quickly adopted the more grand sounding name of “Diocletian” as his ruling name) as emperor.

  Diocletian’s first act was to disavow any complicity in the death of his predecessor. His second was to draw his sword there on the platform where he had just been acclaimed moments before, turn, and kill his rival (and co-conspirator) on the spot, claiming that Aper was the guilty one!

  While the depth of Diocletian’s involvement in this double plot on the imperial house of Carus is unknown, it’s pretty clear that he was involved at some point, and in the end, profited the most from it.