Was Commodus One of Rome's Worst Emperors?

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. So, would like to buy Asia-Ratherne or so, at least 70% have a phone. I'm Dr. Joy, and this is Therapy for Black Girls. We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kids' brain, the group chat, and their friendships, and what you can do about it. Your child is not doing this on purpose. That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for living. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

1:01podcast. Hey, it's Bobby Beones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast, lots to say with me, Bobby Beones, and Matt Castle. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? Just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Beones and Matt Castle on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all, this is your main man, Memphis Bleak right here, hosted our rock solid podcast. In each week, we bring in your exclusive looks inside music, everything happening inside the culture. Some of the best conversations were the biggest names in the game. You had a little bit more pressure to be good. They didn't care if you was a girl, like you wasn't getting the points. If you not trash, you better be, not just good, you better be great. Listen to rock solid on Black Effect Podcasts Network, our heart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

2:05or wherever you string podcasts. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, Chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adriatic Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about mid-life women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause, even if it's natural why should we suffer through it. Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. It's the name, Commodus, sounds familiar. It may be from the film Gladiator, released in the year 2000 from director Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe. The movie's villainous emperor, played with slimy panache by Joaquin Phoenix, is based on a real-life Roman emperor named Commodus.

3:06He lived from the years 161 to 192 CE, and a historian a few decades later called him a greater curse to the Romans than any pestilence or any crime. There are lurid stories about Commodus's unquenchable appetite for sex and violence, that he had 600 concubines, mostly young women and boys, and that he slaughtered scores of men and wild animals in gladiatorial bloodbaths, and that he rubbed his skin and hair with the blood of his victims. But these tales should be taken with a large grain of salt. A four-the-art goal the subset is based on has stuff works spoke with Barry Strauss, a classicist and military historian at Cornell University, and author of nine books on ancient history. He explained, the ancient sources are full of malicious gossip about all the emperors, though the sources were written either by senators or by people who made their living being paid by senators. Marcus Aurelius was the most kind to the senate, so he got good press.

4:08Commodus was just the opposite. He killed a lot of senators, so of course they trashed him. Yes, Marcus Aurelius was an exception. He was Commodus's father and predecessor as emperor. A Marcus was a morally upright and beloved emperor who ruled Rome through a devastating plague epidemic and endless frontier wars against invading Germanic tribes. He also penned meditations, a philosophical memoir that remains a classic of stoic philosophy. Marcus was the only surviving son of Marcus Aurelius with Faustina the Younger, the daughter of Marcus's predecessor. Commodus was handpicked to succeed his father's emperor, a partially too shore up the line of succession and prevent rebellion. When Commodus was just 11 years old, he joined his father at the frontering campments where Marcus was leading Roman troops to battle, and at 15 his father named him co-emperor. This was all highly unusual.

5:08The empireship didn't often pass to a biological son, and this was the first time in the history of the empire that a child had been raised with the office in mind. So what was Commodus like at that point? Some of the few clues that we have to go by are from the aforementioned historian Cassius Dio. He was a senator who wrote an extensive history of Rome during the first couple decades of the 200 CE, and he was no fan of Commodus, so he may have exaggerated or invented some of his faults. He describes young Commodus as a clueless coward who fell in with the wrong crowd. Here's a word from Dio, translated by Ernest Carey in the early 1900s. A quote, Commodus was not naturally wicked, but on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived, his great simplicity, however, together with his cowardice, made him the slave of his companions. And it was through them that he at first out of ignorance missed the better life, and

6:12then was led on into lustful and cruel habits, which soon became second nature. Whatever the case, Owen Marcus Aurelius died, probably from the plague, but reportedly at his son's hand, Commodus was crowned sole emperor at age 18 in 180 CE. Unlike his father, who fought tirelessly against the Germanic tribes, Commodus immediately struck peace accords and made a beeline for Rome. Dio wrote, for he hated all exertion, and craved the comfortable life of the city. Back in Rome, Commodus systematically killed all of his perceived enemies in the Senate, as well as anyone else who appeared to have the wealth and renown to overthrow him, again, according to Dio. Dio wrote, I should render my narrative very tedious, where I'd to give a detailed report of all the persons put to death by Commodus. This created something of a power vacuum, and a number of friends and sick offense are said to have come into high offices at this time, some of whom used their newfound power

7:16to line their own pockets. An official bust of Commodus carved in Rome around that time, circa 180 CE, depicts the young emperor in relatively straightforward military dress, notably not styled as either a senator or a religious figure. But Dio reported that Commodus wasn't really into the daily grind of governing. He left the work of conducting military affairs and standing as the head of the state to a series of military leaders who came into his favor and often fell out of it hard. Commodus busied himself with preferred activities like horse and chariot racing. Of course, gladiatorial contests were big entertainment in ancient Rome, and Commodus, like other emperors, knew how to stage a spectacle. But Commodus went a step further. He dressed up like a gladiator and fought in the contests himself. Others were supposed to be above the base of islands of the gladiatorial ring, but Commodus

8:16apparently fancied himself the people's champion and a skillful fighter. Strauss said it was kind of scandalous. According to Dio, Commodus slaughtered animals, both domestic and wild. The wilder ones, like bears, tigers, and elephants, from a safe distance with spears and javelins. As for fighting people, Commodus didn't fight to the death in public. It had compete with a wooden sword against other athletes and gladiators, collecting a handsome son from the gladiatorial fund every day. Because, of course, he always won. Insert Dio's eye roll here. But we know that the Colosseum, which had been inaugurated a century before in ADCE, was home to amazing spectacles. Orchestra's played music during the fights and other displays. The entire floor of the amphitheater was built to top a series of tunnels, trap doors, and machinery underground so that animals, props, or people could appear like magic.

9:17Commodus probably popped into the arena via this network. There may have been elaborate costumes and stunt doubles involved. Dio wrote that the senators were compelled to attend all of these spectacles, and even to cheer on Commodus was scripted chance, including this mouthful. Thou art Lord and Thou art First of all men most fortunate. Victor Thou art and Victor Thou shalt be from everlasting Amazonian Thou art Victor. Commodus certainly didn't suffer from a lack of confidence. He called himself the Roman Hercules, and even dressed the part with a full lion skin and club. A later bust portrait of Commodus, a carved near the end of his life around late 191 or 192 CE, portrays him in this ghetto. The lion's skin tied at his neck by its paws. It's fearsome upper jaw crowning his curly hair. He holds Hercules' club in one hand and the mythic golden apples of the disparities in the other.

10:19Far from the simple base of his earlier bust, this one sits on symbols of divinity. He's held up by two kneeling Amazons, two tritons, two cornucopias, and a shield bearing symbols of the god Jupiter, Hercules' father. He wasn't the first emperor to cultivate an association with the gods, but he took it further than most. A later biography of Commodus, written at least a century after his rule in the collection Historia Agusta, claims that he wore gold dust in his hair to dazzle his onlookers, though that may be sheer hearsay. What's more sure is that Commodus renamed things after himself, and not small things either. After a fire raged through Rome in 191, he refounded it as, in translation, Commodus City. He also renamed the months of the year after 12 of his names, including Amazoneus and Hercules. And outside of the Coliseum, he refreshed a grand statue of

11:23Emperor Nero, another interesting leader, with his own likeness, and had a bronze statue of a lion placed at its feet. When Commodus set messages to the senate, Dio wrote, they began with his full 12 names and several other titles, including the pacifier of the whole earth, the invincible, and the Roman Hercules. Strauss questions the veracity of Cassius Dio's reports, but points out that Commodus certainly wasn't the only Roman emperor to have megalomaniacal tendencies, act like a tyrant. It's the sheer level of Commodus' eccentricity that stands out. A man like Commodus makes a lot of enemies, and during his 12-year solo reign, he survived numerous assassination attempts, including one plotted by a number of senators with his oldest sister, whom he exiled and later executed. But fate finally caught up to Commodus, on New Year's Eve in the year 192. Two of his highest officials, along with his favored and politically powerful

12:27mistress, Marcia, tried to poison him, and when that failed, they sent his wrestling partner to strangle him in his bath. The reign of Commodus is sometimes pegged as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. Though, of course, there are a lot of complex reasons that an empire falls, the subject is still argued today. His death was followed by a bloody and protracted civil war. As Strauss said, Commodus didn't do that on purpose, it happened because he was a failure, but out of the chaos that was his reign, not everything that happened was bad. Some modern researchers posit that there was some method to Commodus' breathlessly reported madness. His early peace treaty with longtime enemies may have been just what was needed by an exhausted empire. Given his privileged upbringing, the Senate might have been against him no matter what his behavior. Even his divine posturing may have been a way to exert control in uncertain times,

13:30more than a reflection of Megalomania. The long civil war ended with the establishment of the Sivirin dynasty, a run of emperors hailing from North Africa, Syria, and other corners of the Roman Empire. Although the Senate had condemned Commodus' memory following his assassination, the first Sivirin Empire, Septimius Siviris, claimed a familial relation to Marcus Aurelius, and thus restored Commodus' name. And that's how, although he deservedly or undeservedly went down in history as one of Rome's worst emperors, and Commodus was formally made an imperial deity. Today's episode is based on the article The True History of Commodus, the mad emperor of Ancient Rome on Howstuffworks.com, written by Dave Ruse. Brainstuff is production of I Heart Podcasts in partnership with Howstuffworks.com and is produced by Tyler Klein. The four more shows from my heart podcasts visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

14:33or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. So, would like to buy Asia Rather and her soul at least 70% have a phone. I'm Dr. Joy, and this is The Arpe for Black Girls. We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kids brain, the group chat, and their friendships, and what you can do about it. Your child is not doing this on purpose. That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for living. Listen to The Arpe for Black Girls on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image, discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright, and this is Big Lives.

15:38Listen to Big Lives on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Bobby Beones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday. On our podcast, lots to say with me, Bobby Beones, and Matt Castle. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to lots to say with Bobby Beones and Matt Castle on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? This your main man Memphis bleek right here, hosted our rock solid podcast. In each week, we bring in your exclusive looks inside music, everything happening inside the culture. Some of the best conversations with the biggest names in the game. You had a little bit more pressure to be good. They didn't care if you was a girl. Like, you wasn't getting the points. If you not trash, you better be. Not just good. You better be great.

16:41Listen to rock solid on Black Effect Podcasts Network, our heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you string podcasts. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health and Gynecology at the Adriah Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause, even if it's natural why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.