Dr. Alex Imrie
speaker
219 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Alex Imrie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The actual act of the murder is lost, but using interpolations from other sources, we get the sense that Caracalla just launches himself at Geta in a frenzy and stabs him dozens of times in the chamber there right in front of Julia Domna. So he does it personally.
He kills his brother right there. So says Herodian. Oh, wow. Now, Cassius Dio gives us a slightly different telling. Cassius Dio does tell us that he basically delegates the task. Cassius Dio tells us that when the meeting is underway, Caracalla gives a signal. And at that point, 10 centurions, presumably picked from within the Praetorian Guard, burst into the room.
And this is an even more harrowing scene, I think, if it can be, than Caracalla murdering Geta by hand. Because in Daioh's telling, at the sight of the centurions bursting in, armed and dangerous, obviously, Geta runs to Julia Domna and clings to her and pleads for his life. And nobody pays attention.
The centurions launch themselves at Geta whilst he is in his mother's arms and assassinate him right there. And Daioh tells us that Julia, in trying to shield Geta, also received a wound to her arm in the midst of this. So...
taking pause for a minute because I mean it's always entertaining to talk about these wild emperors and their murderous tendencies but I try and get my students to think about this moment in time just for a second if there's any historical reality to it it is absolutely heinous and it is highly traumatic
We have Caracalla either murdering or ordering the murder of his brother and co-emperor in their mother's arms in the Imperial Palace. This is an unprecedented act of political murder. And in the aftermath, Caracalla immediately runs from the chamber and petitions the Praetorian Guard for their support. He claims that he was the target of a plot
Which, you know, looking aside from the literary agendas of the sources, may well be true. But the act of murder itself is pinned wholly on Caracalla at this point.
Well, you're right. I mean, after murdering Geta, this whole family line about the family being lovey-dovey and unified can no longer hold water. Caracalla engages in the practice that we give the modern label, damnatio memoriae. It's not just a condemnation of the memory, it is an abolition or a destruction of the memory. Now, this is well seen in modern times.
For example, in Stalinist Russia, you have the idea of the vanishing commissars, people just disappearing out photographs. In antiquity, it usually involved defacement, destruction of statuary, inscription which recorded their names. Any kind of public presentation of that condemned figure was eligible for destruction or vandalism.
And Caracalla is renowned to have engaged in the most violent, the most extensive, the most virulent example of damnatio memoriae during the Roman imperial period. Our literary sources tell us that not even the coinage which bears Geta's devices was spared from Caracalla's wrath. He attacks statues.
There's a scene where, I think it's Dio tells us, Caracalla literally with a sword himself hacks at statues bearing Geta's likeness and image. We have evidence from our coinage that survives that it has been brought back in, counter-stamped. Bits of Geta's face have been chiseled off the coins. His inscription around Rome is completely wiped out.
There's a really good example of this on the Arch of the Silversmiths in modern central Rome, where you can see on the actual arch, the inscription has been chiseled out, and there's a very very conspicuous gap on the family portraits where Geta would have been. And that's kind of the point. It's not an erasure to make everybody forget, so to speak.
It's a deliberate act designed to make people remember that this person is condemned and is damned for eternity. So Yeah, it's a very, very extreme reaction. But it's also a component in Caracalla's new rationale for his regime. He can't claim to be one of the family indivisible anymore. He has to change the narrative.
And as part of that, Geta is condemned as somebody who plotted against him, somebody who looked to overthrow him. And so the act of damnatio memoria, extreme as it is, is politically consistent.
And that was one of many. That is probably one of my favourite images from the Severan era as well. It's actually my laptop's desktop background. This is the so-called Berlin Tondo, and it's a relatively small artifact.
It was made in Egypt, but you're right, it has a beautiful family group, or what would have been a beautiful family grouping, except for the smudged-out face, conspicuously smudged-out face of Geta in the bottom left field. But we still have the neck and shoulders. It's just a conspicuous rubbing out of the face. And I think I'm right. I've said this before, I think, in other places.
I think I'm right that chemical analysis has showed that dung or feces might even have been used to erase the face of Geta on that image. So it's a double insult. It's a double condemnation. If they can denigrate as well as erase, they choose to do so. And as a final marker of Caracalla's wrath, He doesn't deify Geta.
Geta doesn't initially get made a god in the way that some previous Roman emperors have been made. Instead, Caracalla seems to keep offering sacrifices to the manes or to the departed spirits of Geta. Now, you might think that sounds like a relatively nice move, but what it does is it basically locks Geta's soul in the underworld and stops him from becoming a god in his own right.
So even then, it's petty and it's cruel.
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