Everything Gladiator got wrong about Commodus

Can't believe they didn't include the ostrich

Ridley Scott famously told historians to fuck off after they criticised Napoleon but it’s not surprising he was so pressed when another historically inaccurate clunker was hot on Napoleon’s heels - Gladiator II. I’d been very excited about that film, especially because I loved the first Gladiator (for all its faults), but the sequel was predictably disappointing. The most jarring thing for me was how both films handled their emperors - Commodus in the first, and Caracalla and Geta in the second. As always, the real story is juicier than the fiction.

Let’s start with Commodus.

The portrayal of Commodus in Gladiator is a mixed bag. He didn’t die in the arena but he did like to cosplay as a gladiator. He didn’t have a creepy interest in his sister but they did have a…difficult relationship. And after reading the Roman sources on his life, my big takeaway is that he sounded like an absolute tit. So I guess that much was accurate in the film too.

Some of the awful - and sometimes bizarre - things he’s supposed to have done include ordering his servant to be chucked into an oven for the crime of running a cold bath, keeping a harem of women in sexual slavery, serving up two hunchbacks covered in mustard just for the lols, pushing his praetorian prefect into a swimming pool, eating in the baths, and putting a bird on a man’s head because the poor guy’s white hairs reminded Commodus of worms.

While most of that weirdly specific stuff probably isn’t true, Commodus was still kind of a wanker. However, it can be argued that his worst behaviour was perhaps the result of some pretty extreme circumstances.

Not like father, like son

It didn't help that Commodus's dad was a famously tough act to follow. Marcus Aurelius was considered the GOAT even in his own lifetime, thanks to his competent leadership and his rare ability to resist the corrupting pull of absolute power. He was also the latest in a series of “good” emperors (imaginatively named the Five Good Emperors), which probably made Commodus's flaws look even worse by comparison. Cassius Dio, who was a senator during Commodus’s reign, described the transition as being “from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust”.

(It should be noted that although Cassius Dio is one of the main sources for Commodus’s reign, he absolutely hated the guy so is definitely biased).

Commodus was also the first emperor born ‘in the purple’, meaning he entered the world while his father already sat on the imperial throne. One reason for the long period of stability during the rule of the Five Good Emperors was because most of them didn’t have their own sons to inherit the laurel wreath. Instead, they managed the succession by choosing the most capable man around them and officially adopting him. It was therefore a huge deal for Marcus Aurelius to name Commodus as his heir. No pressure, eh?!

Marcus Aurelius died OF NATURAL CAUSES (ahem) when Commodus was just 18. The early part of his rule was around 3.6 roentgens - not great, not terrible. Cassius Dio actually makes a point of stating that Commodus wasn’t really too awful at first, he was just a lazy, stupid dick who was easily led astray by his friends. This was backed up by Commodus’s initial actions, which included immediately making peace with the various tribes his predecessors had spent decades warring with, appointing his favourites to do all the administrative grunt work, and kicking back to enjoy the perks of being emperor.

The betrayal which changed everything

Commodus might have carried on being useless but generally harmless for the rest of his reign. But then something happened to derail everything. His own sister tried to kill him.

It’s not clear why Lucilla wanted her brother dead. Some sources claim she was jealous of Commodus’s wife, others claim she never got over the fact that her husband, Lucius Verus, hadn’t been named as Marcus Aurelius’s successor. That ended up being a non-issue anyway since Lucius Verus died before his father-in-law while serving as co-emperor alongside him. As an emperor's wife, Lucilla had signifcant power and status, so it's possible she resented being sidelined once Commodus took the throne. But let’s be real. Even for the notoriously dysfunctional Romans, it takes something pretty big to pull a Corleone on your own sibling.

There are some (and not just Gladiator’s screenwriters) who believe Lucilla knew her brother would be a disaster for Rome and that’s what really drove her assassination attempt, especially as it appears to have had senatorial backing. She's said to have talked two of her lovers into stabbing Commodus at the theatre. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the assassin fucked it at the last minute by literally announcing what he was about to do in a very “the Lannisters send their regards” kind of way.

Commodus had the two would-be assassins executed immediately and exiled Lucilla to Capri. If she thought she’d got off lightly, she was wrong because Commodus eventually sent someone to kill her too. Most people agree this was what triggered his slide into madness, as he spiralled into an all-consuming paranoia. Which, to be honest, is kind of understandable given the circumstances.

Clout-chasing to the death

Then there was all the chaos surrounding Commodus’s favourites, who effectively ran the empire in his place and screwed over everyone around them with grim predictability. The first was Saoterus, a former slave whose meteoric rise horrified Rome's political establishment. Why Commodus trusted him over more ‘suitable’ candidates isn't entirely clear. Some sources inevitably suggest it was a sex thing, which is not improbable, but perhaps Commodus just wanted to stick it to the establishment because he seemed like that sort of guy.

Either way, Saoterus was assassinated in the same year that Lucilla tried to kill Commodus, which really did wonders for the emperor's peace of mind.

One of the men behind Saoterus's murder, Perennis, promptly threw one of his co-conspirators under the bus by grassing him up and used this to manoeuvre himself into the role of praetorian prefect. Like clockwork, he was then stitched up in turn by Cleander, another of the men involved in Saoterus's killing and another of Commodus's favourites. Cleander managed to convince the increasingly paranoid Commodus that Perennis was secretly plotting to overthrow him. Commodus wasted no time in having him executed, while Cleander wasted no time in stepping into his shoes as the emperor's new chief ring kisser.

To say that Cleander was somewhat corrupt would be like saying the guys at Enron made a few accounting errors. He was basically the Roman equivalent of a FIFA official - if he could use his position to make a ton of money on the side then that was exactly what he was going to do. Political offices became commodities. Governorships, military commands. and prestigious jobs were all up for sale, and Commodus was so detached from ruling that Cleander could pretty much do whatever the fuck he liked.

Naturally, he made the classic mistake of not learning anything from the fate of his predecessors, perhaps making that fundamental error of believing that - unlike those other chumps - he was untouchable. And this may have been the case had Rome not been rocked by a crisis. The city relied heavily on imported grain to keep its enormous population fed, so when supplies started running low the city became understandably twitchy. The official responsible for the grain supply did what politicians have always done and blamed somebody else: Cleander. Before long, an angry mob was marching through the streets demanding Cleander's head. Cleander ran to daddy (that’s Commodus, in case you couldn’t guess) and begged for protection. Unfortunately, like the grain, protection was not on the menu and Commodus had him executed.

Extreme makeover: the insane edition

It was around this point that Commodus decided to come out of semi-retirement. This was not a good thing. Years spent shagging prostitutes and working on his - by all accounts - smoking hot bod left him completely ill-equipped for rule, and multiple assassination plots had fried his brain. His way of coping was to go full Targaryen. The Roman people weren’t just going to have an emperor. They were getting a god.

Commodus rebranded himself from plain old ‘Commodus, son of Marcus’ to Commodus Hercules Amazonias Augustus Exsuperatorius (I’m actually not sure what the correct order is because he gave himself a LOT of new names, all equally self-aggrandising). Nothing was safe from his divine makeover, not the months of the year, which were all renamed after him, not even Rome itself, which he declared was now an entirely new city called…you guessed it…Colonia Commodiana. He even replaced the head of the Colossus of Nero with his own likeness and added the following incredible inscription: “the only left-handed fighter to conquer twelve times one thousand men”. He loved being left-handed.

All this was bad enough as far as the Senate were concerned but then there was the gladiator obsession. Gladiatorial spectacles were nothing new in Rome but the emperor himself getting down and dirty in the arena? That was a step too far. Rome's upper classes thought it was beneath the dignity of an emperor but Commodus couldn’t have given less of a shit. He was incredibly proud of his physical prowess. He trained hard and was a skilled fighter - after all, no self-respecting god would look anything other than jacked. And like any gym bro worth his protein shake, Commodus knew none of it counted unless people could actually see it. Looking buff while murdering a bunch of animals and prisoners in front of an audience was, in his mind, the best way to display his godlike aura.

This goes some way to explaining his fixation with Hercules and why he modelled himself on the manliest of all mythological heroes. The Hercules thing also explains his enthusiasm for killing animals as part of his arena routine. No creature was safe: he once decapitated an ostrich and then waved its severed head at the assembled Senators in a vaguely threatening manner. Cassius Dio wrote that they found the whole thing more funny than anything and had to chew on laurel leaves to hide their laughter.

Kill or be killed (or get someone else to do it)

If people had wanted Commodus dead before he started acting like an unhinged WWE fighter, there was definitely a target on his back now. Brandishing ostrich heads and bloodied swords, presenting himself as both the living embodiment of Rome and an all-powerful god who loved oiling up and throwing down was a surefire way to piss everyone off. But the person who succeeded in removing Commodus where so many others had failed was actually his mistress, Marcia. She discovered that he was going to dump her in the classiest way possible - by having her murdered. After finding her name on a ‘kill list’ along with two prominent politicians, she rather sensibly decided to get in there first.

She initially tried to poison him but he vomited it up. Marcia and the two other dudes were then somehow able to convince Commodus’s personal trainer of all people to strangle him in the bath. Perhaps Commodus had cancelled at the last minute one too many times.

Commodus’s death brought about the end of a dynasty but not an end to the chaos. The empire erupted into civil war as five men vied for the top job. The last emperor standing was Septimius Severus, whose sons, Caracalla and Geta, would eventually inherit both the empire and its spectacularly dysfunctional family dynamics.

The next article will explore the lives of Caracalla and Geta, as well as their powerhouse mother, Julia Domna. Stay tuned!