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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Appearances
This is the end of the era that really commences with Nerva and Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius is regarded to be the final good emperor in that set of five that cover the second century. Now, Marcus Aurelius is not the... just the kind of sagely Richard Harris type character that we see in Gladiator 1.
And it's only in some later Latin sources that we have this question of Marcus Aurelius maybe regretting having to hand over the empire to Commodus, which is, again, what we see with the Richard Harris version. The history, the reality is, though, that there doesn't seem to be this moment where Marcus Aurelius says that he's going to restore the Republic.
I mean, that was never really a reality at this point in the empire. What happens is Marcus Aurelius hands over the reins of power, or brings in, rather, his son Commodus to share imperial rule with him. He brings Commodus in in the mid-170s, following a bit of a fright for his own regime, which is where one of his provincial governors, the governor of Egypt, Ovidius Cassius, rises in revolt.
Now, there's a lot of convoluted literary tragedy that's sort of injected into that tale, but ultimately the reality is Marcus Aurelius has been frightened that his regime isn't tremendously safe, and so he brings Commodus in as the official future of the dynasty. He'd been made a Caesar as a young boy, that heir apparent.
He was made a co-emperor alongside Marcus Aurelius, really for the last decade pretty much. of Marcus Aurelius's reign. Now when Marcus Aurelius dies, Commodus is the last man standing. He is the only emperor. There is no shared principate like we've seen in the earlier phase of Marcus Aurelius's rule. And we appear to have a fairly stable first couple of years of Commodus's reign.
There is a question of whether there's a bit of internal plotting going on and from the outset Commodus it seems is faced with a bit of unpopularity within the senatorial order especially. This is something that's reflected in
gladiator one where we have i think it's derrick jacobi give us the voice of the senate who are none too impressed with the the rather showy flashy wannabe gladiator that is the emperor commodus and we have this sense that commodus is kind of just going from one small crisis to another across the 180s And this culminates around the year 191, where we have a great fire in Rome as well.
So nothing seems to be going tremendously well for Commodus, and he is assassinated at the very close of the year 192. So when Caracalla and Geta are born in the late 180s, they're in an empire that is, I think, in the midst of what will become painful change. It's a painful transitional process. Now, They couldn't have predicted that, obviously, at this point.
When Caracal and Geta are born, their father doesn't even seem to be anywhere close to the imperial throne. He is just one of many regional governors. He is the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, so a section of Gaul, modern-day France, the headquarters or the capital of which is in modern Lyon.
So it's a fairly cosmopolitan city by Roman standards in the Latin West, and they're probably brought up as relatively well-to-do aristocratic children, in the first couple of years. Now, they moved to Rome before the fatal event.
Absolutely. So brought up in not just Latin, but trained in Greek as well, Greek being pretty much the lingua franca at this point rather than Latin. and given all sorts of insights into the cultural capital that one will need as a well-to-do Roman. So they'll be trained in oratory and rhetoric. They'll be given education about history and philosophy.
It's a fairly rounded or multifaceted education for a young up-and-coming Roman child at that point. And they'll have been drilled into with stories of great heroes like Alexander the Great, who will become much lauded by Caracalla in particular later.
It's interesting in as much as, from what we can establish in the sources, it doesn't seem like the children follow their father through his later Because Severus, their father, will become governor of Upper Pannonia, so a very militarized region on the Danube frontier.
And he will be in that position in the year 192-193 when Commodus is murdered and we have a variety of crises affecting the empire within a very short order. The children, it seems, are in the city of Rome, from what we can establish. This just reflects the fact that they're not tremendously important characters, maybe in their own right, being so young at this point.
But they are housed in the capital. Now, we can tell that because when civil war begins and Severus starts to march on Rome, eventually, the boys have to be ushered out of the capital in secret, it seems. So there's a suggestion there that they were just living a fairly...
regular life as far as Roman aristocratic children can, but had to be ushered out of the city at a point where there may have been danger to their lives owing to their father's attempt to take the imperial throne.
100%. I mean, when 193 starts, even then, there's no real sense that Severus is even in consideration, as it were, for becoming an emperor. We have the throne handed to the aged, very experienced senator and multifaceted governor, Helvius Pertinax. And in many ways, he seems the ideal candidate for the throne. He has a wealth of senatorial and military and gubernatorial experience.
He seems to be the man to kind of take hold of the reins again and restore a little bit of stability to the Roman state after the arguably wilder eccentricities of Commodus' final years with all the games and all the wannabe Hercules-type vibes that were coming out of Commodus' regime then. That regime of Pertinax, however, crashes within two or three months.
It's only, I think, 86 days before he is assassinated by his Praetorian Guard. It's at that point that we have the infamous episode, the auction of the empire, as Cassius Dio calls it, where we have a couple of senators bidding to receive the good graces of the Praetorian Guard. Now that's in Rome.
The winner of that is one Didius Julianus, who is apparently very wealthy, but doesn't seem to be terribly well equipped to actually rule an empire now that he's got it. Maybe a bit of buyer's remorse comes in quite quickly. Now it's at that point that we see Severus raising his standard. His legions in Pannonia, the acclaim him emperor.
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