When the officer of the guard asked the dying Marcus for the watchword of the day he answered: “Go to the rising sun; my sun is setting.” The rising sun was then nineteen, a robust and dashing youth without inhibitions, morals, or fear. One would have expected of him, rather than of Marcus the ailing saint, a policy of war to victory or death; instead, he offered the enemy immediate peace. They were to withdraw from the vicinity of the Danube, to surrender most of their arms, return all Roman prisoners and deserters, pay Rome an annual tribute of corn, and persuade 13,000 of their soldiers to enlist in the Roman legions.66 All Rome condemned him except the people; his generals fumed at allowing the trapped prey to escape and fight again another day. During the reign of Commodus, however, no trouble came from the Danubian tribes.
The young prince, though no coward, had seen enough of war; he needed peace to enjoy Rome. Back in the capital, he snubbed the Senate and loaded the plebs with unprecedented gifts—725 denarii to each citizen. Finding no field in politics for his exuberant strength, he hunted beasts on the imperial estates and developed such skill with sword and bow that he decided to perform publicly. For a time he left the palace and lived in the gladiators’ school; he drove chariots in the races, and fought in the arena against animals and men.67 Presumably the men who opposed him took care to let him win; but he thought nothing of fighting, unaided and before breakfast, a hippopotamus, an elephant, and a tiger, which made no distinctions for royalty.68 He was so perfect a bowman that with a hundred arrows he killed a hundred tigers in one exhibition. He would let a panther leap upon some condemned criminal and then slay the animal with one arrow, leaving the man unhurt to die again.69 He had his exploits recorded in the Acta Diurna and insisted on being paid, out of the Treasury, for each of his thousand combats as a gladiator.
The historians upon whom we must here depend wrote, like Tacitus, from the viewpoint and traditions of the offended aristocracy; we cannot tell how much of the marvels they relate are history, how much are revenge. We are assured that Commodus drank and gambled, wasted the public funds, kept a harem of 300 women and 300 boys, and liked to vary his sex occasionally, at least by using a woman’s garb, even at the public games. Tales of unbelievable cruelty are transmitted to us: Commodus ordered a votary of Bellona to amputate an arm in proof of piety; forced some women devotees of Isis to beat their breasts with pine cones till they died; killed men indiscriminately with his club of Hercules; gathered cripples together and slew them one by one with arrows. . . .70 One of his mistresses, Marcia, was apparently a Christian; for her sake, we are told, he pardoned some Christians who had been condemned to the Sardinian mines. Her devotion to him suggests that in this man, described as more bestial than any beast, there was some lovable element unrecorded by history.
Like his predecessors, he was aroused to the wildest ferocity by fear of assassination. His aunt Lucilla formed a conspiracy to kill him; he discovered it, had her executed, and on proof or suspicion of participation put so many men of rank to death that soon hardly any survived who had been prominent in Marcus’ reign. Delators, who had almost disappeared for a century, returned to activity and favor, and a new terror raged in Rome. Appointing Perennis as praetorian prefect, Commodus yielded the reins of government to him, and (the tradition says) abandoned himself to sexual dissipation. Perennis ruled efficiently but mercilessly; he organized his own terror and had all his opponents slain. The Emperor, suspecting that Perennis planned to replace him, surrendered this second Sejanus to the Senate, which reenacted its role of glowing revenge. Cleander, a former slave, succeeded Perennis (185) and surpassed him in corruption and cruelty; any office might be had for a proper bribe, any decision of any court could be reversed. Under his orders senators and knights were put to death for treason or criticism. In 190 a mob besieged the villa where Commodus was staying and demanded Cleander’s death. The Emperor accommodated them. Cleander’s successor, Laetus, after holding power for three years, judged that his time had come. One day he chanced upon a proscription list that contained the names of his supporters and friends, and of Marcia. On the last day of 192 Marcia gave Commodus a cup of poison; and when it worked too slowly the athlete whom he had kept to wrestle with strangled him in his bath. He was a youth of thirty-one.
When Marcus died Rome had reached the apex of her curve and was already touched with decay. Her boundaries had been extended beyond the Danube, into Scotland and the Sahara, into the Caucasus and Russia, and to the gates of Parthia. She had accomplished for that confusion of peoples and faiths a unity not of language and culture, but at least of economy and law. She had woven it into a majestic commonwealth, within which the exchange of goods moved in unprecedented plenty and freedom; and for two centuries she had guarded the great realm from barbarian inroads and had given it security and peace. All the white man’s world looked to her as the center of the universe, the omnipotent and eternal city. Never had there been such wealth, such splendor, or such power.
Nevertheless, amid the prosperity that made Rome brilliant in this second century, all the seeds were germinating of the crisis that would ruin Italy in the third. Marcus had contributed heavily to the debacle by naming Commodus his heir and by wars that centralized ever more authority in the hands of the Emperor. Commodus kept in peace the prerogatives assumed by Aurelius in war. Private and local independence, initiative, and pride withered as the power and functions of the state increased; and the wealth of nations was drained away by ever-rising taxation to support a self-multiplying bureaucracy and the endless offensives of defense. The mineral wealth of Italy was diminishing,71 pestilence and famine had taken bitter toll, the system of tillage by slaves was failing, governmental expenditures and doles had exhausted the Treasury and debased the currency. Italian industry was losing its markets in the provinces through provincial competition, and no economic statesmanship appeared to make up for a languishing foreign trade by a wider distribution of buying power at home. Meanwhile the provinces had recovered from the exactions of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, and Antony; their ancient skills had revived, their industries were flourishing, their new wealth was financing science, philosophy, and art. Their sons replenished the legions, their generals led them; soon their armies would hold Italy at their mercy and make their generals emperors. The process of conquest was finished and was to be reversed; henceforth the conquered would absorb the conquerors.
As if conscious of these omens and problems, the mind of Rome, at the close of the Antonine age, sank into a cultural and spiritual fatigue. The practical disfranchisement of first the assemblies and then the Senate had removed the mental stimulus that comes from free political activity and a widespread sense of liberty and power. Since the prince had almost all authority, the citizens left him almost all responsibility. More and more of them, even in the aristocracy, retired into their families and their private affairs; citizens became atoms, and society began to fall to pieces internally precisely when unity seemed most complete. Disillusionment with democracy was followed by disillusionment with monarchy. The “Golden Thoughts” of Aurelius were often leaden thoughts, weighted down with the suspicion that Rome’s problems could not be solved, that the multiplying barbarians could not long be held back by a sterile and pacific breed. Stoicism, which had begun by preaching strength, was ending by preaching resignation. Almost all the philosophers had made their peace with religion. For 400 years Stoicism had been to the upper classes a substitute for religion; now the substitute was put aside, and the ruling orders turned back from the books of the philosophers to the altars of the gods. And yet paganism, too, was dying. Like Italy, it was flushed only with governmental aid and was nearing exhaustion. It had conquered philosophy; but already its temple precincts heard reverently the names of invading deities. The age was heavy with the resurrection of the provinces and the incredible victory of Christ.
I It was probably written in 98, before Trajan’s campaign against the Dacians.
II Eight adorn the Arch of Constantine; three are in the Museo de’ Conservatori.