Quills: Doing the Nasty

Tags

18th Century Europe, 18th Century France, Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard, Charenton Asylum, Early Modern Europe, Geoffrey Rush, Joaquin Phoenix, Justine, Kate Winslet, Marquis de Sade, Medical Stuff, Michael Caine, Quills, Stephen Moyer, The Enlightenment, The French Revolution

When Quills (2000, dir. Philip Kaufman, based on the play of the same name by Doug Wright) came out, it was received quite well by critics, who praised Geoffrey Rush’s performance as the Marquis de Sade, and it earned Rush his second Academy Award nomination. But it wasn’t so popular with historians, who pointed out its many historical inaccuracies. In particular, Neil Schaeffer, author of The Marquis de Sade: A Life, published a scathing critique of the film as being both inaccurate and simplistic in its depiction of the notorious pornographer. So the movie, like De Sade himself, was quite controversial. Sounds like fun!

 

De Sade’s Life

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a minor French noble born in the mid-18^th century and the poster boy for everything wrong with the 18^th century aristocracy. By the time he was 23, he had begun sexually assaulting prostitutes and employees of both sexes egregiously enough that the police began paying serious attention to him, no small accomplishment at a time when the aristocracy enjoyed substantial legal prerogatives. When he was 28, he hired a woman to be his housekeeper, but then tied her up, and repeatedly tortured her with knives and hot wax. Four years later, in 1772, he and his man-servant were convicted of sodomy and poisoning and fled to Italy to avoid a death sentence.

During all this, his mother-in-law had obtained a lettre de cachet, essentially an extra-judicial order of imprisonment. In 1777, he was lured back to Paris and arrested under the lettre and imprisoned, although he managed to get the death sentence overturned.

The Marquis de Sade

By 1789, when the French Revolution was brewing, he was being incarcerated in the notorious Bastille prison, and nearly triggered the Storming of the Bastille two weeks early when he shouted out a window that the prisoners were being murdered. Just days before the Storming liberated the inmates of the Bastille, de Sade was transferred to the Charenton asylum. But a year later, he was released when the National Assembly invalidated all lettres de cachet. At this point his long-suffering wife divorced him.

He managed to get himself elected to the National Convention and spent several years as a politician before getting on Maximilien Robespierre’s bad side and being arrested. But before he could be executed, Robespierre fell from power and he was released.

He had already begun producing the pornographic works he is famous for during his first imprisonment. In 1801, Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author of the anonymous paired pornographic novels, Justine and Juliette, and eventually the works were traced to de Sade and he was arrested and imprisoned once again. In 1803, his family arranged for him to be declared insane, and he was sent back to the Charenton Asylum, where he remained until his death from natural causes in 1814.

 

The director of Charenton was the Abbé de Coulmier, a Catholic priest known for his liberal attitudes toward the inmates in his charge. Coulmier rejected many of the harsh treatments that were popular at the time, such as the physical restraint of patients and the practice of dunking patients head-first in water. Instead, Coulmier favored therapies such as self-expression, diets, and purges. In particular, he believed that allowing patients to express themselves in writing, theater, and music was helpful.

Because of this, Coulmier allowed de Sade to stage popular French plays, using the inmates as actors, for the viewing pleasure of the Parisian public. But in 1809, police orders required de Sade to be put in solitary confinement and forbidden to write. This confinement turns out to have been not so solitary after all, because in 1810, he began a relationship with Madeleine LeClerc, the 14-year-old daughter of an employee at Charenton. He died in his sleep 4 years later.

The chapel at Charenten

 

De Sade’s Writings

Although de Sade is today mostly remembered as a pornographer and as the man who gave his name to ‘sadism’, he was more complex than that. Not all of his work was obscene; he wrote both political treatises and conventional plays, and he deserves to be ranked as a figure of the Enlightenment. And even his pornographic work is highly intellectual. His paired novels Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and Juliette, or The Rewards of Vice tell the stories of two sisters raised in a convent. But whereas Justine strives to remain virtuous, Juliette comes to believe that morality, virtue, and religion are meaningless. Justine experiences a series of personal disasters, including becoming the unwilling sex-slave of a group of monks. Every good deed she does results in a further sexual assault, humiliation, or other catastrophe, and finally she is struck by lightning and dies, after which her corpse is sexually assaulted. But Juliette willingly engages in the most perverse behaviors possible, indulging in orgies and repeatedly murdering people. Her various accomplices commit rape, murder, incest, and cannibalism. She is ultimately rewarded with an audience with the pope, and the novel ends with another long orgy.

Despite the repulsive content, de Sade has a point to make. Several in fact. Like many 18^th century intellectuals, he rejects conventional religion, and aggressively satirizes it; the clergy in his stories are often the most debauched characters. Given that the clergy enjoyed legal prerogatives as extensive as the nobility’s at this time, including immunity from taxation and most law courts and a strangle-hold on public religious life and education, de Sade’s attacks are remarkably bold and in favor of the separation of Church and State. Some have seen de Sade as challenging God to prove His existence by punishing de Sade’s blasphemies.

 

These two novels demonstrate the idea that virtue and vice are not neatly rewarded and condemned in real life, and the novels represent an effort to build an essentially atheistic moral paradigm celebrating the pursuit of pleasure as the only meaning in life. Nature consistently triumphs over the forces of civilization and restraint. (At least, that’s all assuming you read them seriously, and not as satire, as some scholars do.)

And de Sade’s slow corruption of Juliette, who gradually moves from simple sexual pleasures to full-blown sexual sadism of the most extreme sort, can be read as a challenge to the reader. How far are you willing to take your sexual fantasies? Will you at some point put the book down because you feel it is no longer titillating but rather disgusting, or will you allow the novel to corrupt you as it corrupts Juliette? These books may be deeply disturbing, but they’re also far more thought-provoking than most modern porn.

Nor was de Sade the only author in this period to intermingle pornography with philosophical musings. As the great intellectual historian Robert Darnton has pointed out, philosophical pornography was an extremely popular (if illegal) genre in 18^th century France. Quite a few authors used obscene stories as a way to attack the French clergy and the French political system. De Sade’s novels are the most extreme, but he’s by no means the only author of the day to tell stories of priests fornicating in the confessional and monks debauching nuns during the Eucharist. He’s just the one we still remember.

 

So What Does Quills Make of All This?

The movie opens in 1794 with de Sade apparently writing a story about a woman who is guillotined during the French Revolution and then jumps to ‘years later’ with de Sade in the Charenton asylum. Instead of being sent there for having written Justine, he has written the novel and had it smuggled out of prison by Madeleine (Kate Winslet). Napoleon orders a stop to his publishing, and dispatches Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to Charenton to force Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) to crack down on de Sade’s privileges. Whereas Coulmier is gentle and believes in art therapy, Royer-Collard is old school and favors water-boarding patients. He also has a child bride Simone (Amelia Warner), whom he rather sadistically has sex with on their wedding night.

Geoffrey Rush as de Sade

 

Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard is a real person. In 1806, he was appointed chief physician at Charenton, where he became convinced that de Sade was sane and ought to be in a conventional prison. But his function here is to be the catalyst for everything going wrong at the asylum. Prior to his arrival, de Sade and Coulmier are friends, with de Sade seeking to express his disturbed thoughts on paper.

But Royer-Collard’s attempts to restrain de Sade trigger a contest of wills between the two men, with Coulmier caught in the middle. Royer-Collard’s harsh treatment of his young wife becomes gossip that reaches de Sade’s ears, so de Sade stages a play that is a thinly-veiled sex farce of the marriage. Simone, who sees the first part of the play, becomes interested in de Sade’s writings and secretly tracks down a copy of Justine. Corrupted by it, she runs off with a young architect, played by Stephen Moyer.

Furious at this, Royer-Collard leans on Coulmier, forcing him to gradually restrict de Sade’s privileges. When he takes away de Sade’s writing implements, de Sade figures out how to write with red wine on his bed sheets. When the bed is taken away, he writes in blood on his own clothes. Coulmier states the whole point of the film when he says to de Sade, “The more I forbid, the more you’re provoked.” De Sade points out that Coulmier finds it arousing to have so much power over him.

Joaquin Phoenix as Coulmier

 

Finally, naked and with nothing in his cell, he arranges to dictate a story to Madeleine through a chain of inmates, like an obscene game of Telephone. But one of the aroused inmates intentionally lights a fire, and in the confusion, another inmate rapes and murders Madeleine. Coulmier, who has fallen deeply in lust with the woman thanks to de Sade’s corrosive influence, apparently has sex with her corpse, and then has de Sade’s tongue cut out after water-boarding him. Chained in a cell, de Sade continues writing, using his own feces as ink. He dies in Coulmier’s arms, rejecting the crucifix the priest offers him.

The movie ends with Coulmier now imprisoned in de Sade’s old room, begging a visitor for paper and quill so he can write. He finally understands de Sade’s compulsion to write.

Hopefully from this summary, it should be clear that the film starts off somewhat shaky on the facts, since de Sade didn’t write Justine in prison, because that’s what he was imprisoned for. But it rattles along in the right general historical direction until, in the last hour, the train jumps the track and goes veering off into Crazyland at full speed, bearing its passengers to a world of hurt none of them bought a ticket for.

De Sade is somewhere between a full-blown lunatic with a sexual fixation and a martyr for the cause of free speech. The film can’t quite decide what’s really motivating him. On the one hand, his erotic writing appears to be a symptom of some mental illness; he is literally incapable of not writing, despite the increasing misery it’s causing him. And by the end of the film, he’s infected both Coulmier and arguably Madeleine with his madness.

Coulmier, about to do the literal nasty with Madeleine’s corpse

 

But on the other hand, he’s engaging in a willful defiance of Royer-Collard’s efforts to silence him. The two men fall into a chess match; each action by Royer-Collard to stop de Sade from writing elicits a response from de Sade in which he seeks to demonstrate the doctor’s ultimate impotence to control him. It is Royer-Collard’s efforts to still de Sade’s pen that triggers the next round of outrageous writing, and the marquis’ writings that trigger the next crack-down.

De Sade’s ideas corrupt everyone around him, driving them to lust, in the case of Coulmier, Simone, and the architect, or madness, in the case of the inmates who participate in his telephone game of dictation. Madeleine craves more stories from de Sade and is ultimately killed by the process of dictation, as is de Sade himself. The only character not corrupted by de Sade is Royer-Collard, who is already more of a sadist than de Sade. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea if your martyr for freedom of the press is a man whose writings literally corrupt and destroy those who read them.

Michael Caine as Royer-Collard

 

From a historical standpoint, the problem with Quills is that it too readily accepts the idea of de Sade as a charming madman and barely entertains the possibility that perhaps de Sade was actually trying to actually say something. And it soft-pedals the more literally sadistic elements of his writings. From the snippets of his stories that we hear, de Sade likes to talk about penises and vaginas a lot, and he readily mocks Christianity, but there’s only faint hints that he was also writing about rape, murder, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, and a host of other disturbing things.

So for me at least, Quills doesn’t really work. It fails to grapple effectively with what the historical de Sade was trying to say, and it fails to offer a coherent message about who this man was and why he wrote such outrageous things. In a way, watching the movie feels a bit like reading Justine; instead of sympathizing with any of the characters or being turned on by its decadence, I just wanted to take a shower and put the whole experience behind me.

 

Want to Know More?

Quills is available on Amazon.

If you’d like to learn more about the Marquis de Sade, start with Neil Shaeffer’s The Marquis de Sade: A Life. If you want to sample de Sade’s writings, both Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford World’s Classics)
and Juliette are readily available. But be warned: they are pretty much as hard-core as pornography gets, and they’re not for the easily offended or disgusted.

Gladiator: Just How Bad an Emperor was Commodus?

Tags

Ancient Rome, Commodus, Connie Nielsen, Gladiator, Gladiatorial Combat, Joaquin Phoenix, Ridley Scott

Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) depicts Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) as being a Bad Emperor. In the film he murders his father, usurps the throne, and tries to execute the much more virtuous Maximus (Russell Crowe) out of jealousy. When he returns to Rome, he demonstrates a general disinterest in ruling, preferring to spend his time and energies throwing a massive series of gladiatorial games that are scheduled to last for 150 days. He lusts after his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), menaces Lucilla’s young son who innocently idolizes the gladiator that Maximus has become, and ultimately fights Maximus in the arena after giving Maximus a mortal wound just before the fight. That’s some pretty serious Bad Emperor shit.

The reality was probably worse, but in assessing Commodus’ reign, we have to deal with problems in the sources. None of the sources for this period of Roman history are entirely reliable. Herodian and Dio Cassius both make numerous errors; Herodian has been accused to being quite credulous, while Dio’s history survives only in substantial fragments. The anonymous Historia Augusta is filled with fabricated documents and large portions of it have been dismissed as fiction. Commodus’ legal edicts were all overturned after his death and thus have not survived. Dio is probably our best source for Commodus’ reign, because he was a senator and personally knew Commodus, but Commodus had very poor relationships with the Senate and the traditional Roman elite, and so Dio is quite hostile to the man. Thus we always have to allow room for the possibility that Dio is inventing or exaggerating what he saw as the emperor’s bad traits.

Despite these problems, the surviving evidence does point to Commodus being a pretty crappy ruler. He was a good-looking man, assuming the portrait busts are accurate. The Historia Augusta claims that he suffered from a large hernia in his groin that was visible through his loose robes and was the subject of many humorous poems. It also offers numerous salacious stories about his debauched behavior, but these were standard things to include in stories of Bad Emperors, so they may be fictitious. Gladiator’s Commodus looks pale and sickly, which is wrong; he seems to have been quite robust, given that his hobbies included hunting animals, fighting gladiators, and wrestling. If Ridley Scott wanted him to look creepy, they should have put glitter in his hair, since Dio tells us that he liked powdering his hair with gold dust. Instead, he gets a rather fey neckerchief.

Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus

Dio says that he was quite lazy, and more than happy to turn over the governance of the Empire to an unpopular and supposedly immoral Greek named Saoterus. But here we have to be careful. The Roman senate no longer ruled the Empire, but they were traditionally the class that supplied the high officials. Dio, as a senator, would naturally have resented Commodus’ preference for a non-senator, and thus may well have exaggerated just how disinterested in governing Commodus was.

Commodus’ preference for Saoterus quickly spawned a plot against the Emperor. In 182 or 183, after two or three years of Commodus’ reign, his sister Lucilla hatched a plan to murder her brother. Lucilla was not the imperiled widow with a young son that the movie presents her to be; she was the widow of Marcus’ Aurelius’ adopted brother Lucius Verus and, during Commodus’ reign, the wife of an important senator who was deeply devoted to Commodus. Since she disliked her husband and her brother, she hatched a plot with a different senator, Quadratus, who was probably a grand-nephew of Marcus Aurelius. Since Commodus was sleeping with Quadratus’ wife and Quadratus was sleeping with Lucilla, we can imagine that Quadratus had rather complex feelings about the whole situation.

Connie Nielsen as Lucilla

Quadratus arranged for another senator, Quintianus, to stab Commodus to death as he was passing through a tunnel into an amphitheater. But, rather foolishly, when Quintianus confronted Commodus and brandished a dagger, he made the mistake of going on at some length about how the Senate wanted the emperor dead. This gave Commodus’ body-guards a chance to intervene and save the emperor. So it turns out that Syndrome from the Incredibles was right; monologuing is a bad idea.

This failed plot poisoned the rest of Commodus’ reign, because it made him deeply suspicious of the Senate. From this point on, the emperor relied on personal favorites whom he felt he could trust more than the senators, which must have alienated the senators even more.

The film’s claim that Commodus sought to win the support of the Roman crowd through the use of lavish spectacles is basically accurate. Like many previous emperors, Commodus relied heavily on congiaria, massive gifts of food, wine, oil, and money to the general population. Over the course of his reign, he made 8 congiaria, about one every 18 months.

He also loved gladiatorial games, going so far as to participate in them personally, and he enjoyed killing captive animals as a show of his personal prowess. Dio and other senators were witness to a number of these. Dio emphasizes that Commodus was not particularly good in combat, being more likely to cut off a gladiator’s ear or nose than to actually kill one, but Dio’s claims of the emperor’s incompetence are probably exaggerated. Dio also particularly records an incident in which Commodus personally beheaded an ostrich and waved its head around; according to Dio, the senators were laughing so hard at the ridiculous scene that Dio had to improvise a cover for their laughter, because otherwise Commodus would have executed them all. Again, we have only Dio’s claim that this was so. Commodus also reportedly fought and killed a large number of men who had already lost limbs in battle. When he appeared in the arena, he did so for pay, forcing the city to pay him a hefty sum for the privilege of watching him fight.

Over the course of his reign, Commodus is reported to have executed a large number of people. He executed Quadratus and Quintianus (quite reasonably, really, given that they had tried to kill him); Lucilla he exiled and later had executed. When a second conspiracy took the life of Saoterus, he executed the senators behind that plot, but Perennis, another of his trusted inner circle, took advantage of the situation to implicate several personal enemies, who were also executed. He later became convinced that his wife was guilty of adultery, and had her executed. When a philosopher denounced Perennis, the philosopher was executed, but a year later, when a group of soldiers denounced Perennis as plotting to replace the emperor, Commodus listened and executed Perennis and a number of other men. Finally, there is a story that he executed a couple of men on the grounds that they were the sort of men who might have become discontented with the emperor and thus might have started to plot against him.

If this bust is accurate, they should have gotten Seth Rogen to play Commodus

However, the large number of executions were probably driven in part by the enormous expense that Commodus’ games and congiaria required. Such spectacles were extremely costly, and the funds for them had to come from somewhere. Confiscating the estates of the men he executed was a good way to pay for these expenses, and thus accusations of treachery may in some cases have been excuses to seize the property of wealthy men.

Eventually, in 192, after another round of gladiatorial games in which Commodus publicly hunted hundreds of animals and fought dozens of men, another conspiracy was planned. A group of senators schemed to replace him. First they bribed his mistress to poison him (although claims of poisoning are always suspicious in an era when food poisoning and undiagnosed illness was so common), but he vomited up the poisoned meat. Then they bribed his wrestling partner Narcissus to strangle him while he was taking a bath. Commodus was caught unawares and died.

So while Gladiator gets some things wrong, particularly the length of Commodus’ reign (which seems to be less than half a year in the film) and how he died, overall the picture that it offers of Commodus is probably broadly accurate.

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

If you want to know about Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, an easy starting point is Michael Grant’s The Antonines: The Roman Empire in Transition. For Commodus, there’s the recent The Emperor Commodus: Gladiator, Hercules or a Tyrant?

Gladiator: Why Did Commodus Become Emperor?

Tags

Commodus, Gladiator, Joaquin Phoenix, Marcus Aurelius, Richard Harris, Ridley Scott, Roman Empire, Russell Crowe

The first section of Gladiator (2000, dir. Ridley Scott) deals with the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (d. 180AD). Marcus (Richard Harris) is an old man who is tired of being emperor and wants to designate the successful general Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) to be his successor. But when he tells his biological son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) about this, Commodus responds by complaining that his father never really loved him and never appreciated his virtues, and then by smothering the old man with his chest. I’m not sure that’s actually possible, but let’s go with it. Because somehow there are absolutely no servants hanging around in the emperor’s palace-tent to see what Commodus has done, Commodus successfully claims the throne, since he is, after all, Marcus’s son. Then he proceeds to spend the rest of the film being a Bad Emperor, as Sellars and Yateman would say.

This is pretty lurid stuff, and, in case you were wondering, completely made up. Marcus formally named Commodus his co-emperor in 177 AD, which is a pretty clear statement that Commodus was his intended successor. Marcus did not die on campaign in the middle of nowhere as in the film; he actually died at Vindobona (modern Vienna). And Maximus is a fictional character, so Marcus couldn’t have wanted him to succeed to the throne. So the film’s claims are pretty clearly false.

However, unlike a lot of historical films that make things up, Gladiator is actually doing something interesting here. It’s exploring the minor historical puzzle of why Marcus Aurelius allowed his son to succeed him.

“The Five Good Emperors”

Probably the biggest flaw in the Roman Imperial system is that there was no formally-established mechanism for arranging the succession to the imperial office. The reason for this has to do with the odd way that the imperial office was established. When Augustus took power in Rome after the end of the civil wars of the Late Republic, he was acutely aware that his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, had been too blatant about his desire for power; Caesar’s naked ambition unnerved many of his closest associates and led to his assassination. Augustus wanted to live longer in power than his adoptive father, and he realized that Romans of his generation were too deeply attached to the notion of the Republic to allow one man to monopolize all the political power. So instead of seeking to become king the way Caesar had (since the Romans hated the idea of kings), Augustus sought to disguise his power grab with a claim that he wasn’t actually the guy running everything. He allowed the Senate to debate issues and ‘advise’ him, and he permitted prominent men to hold the top offices as long as they didn’t challenge his control. So while Augustus was absolutely in control of Rome, he chose to pretend that he wasn’t in control. Instead of calling himself rex (“king”), he preferred more Republican-sounded titles like princeps (“first citizen”) and imperator (“commander”). These are the root words for the modern English words ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’, but neither of them has the implications of royalty in classical Latin that they have today.

But this created a problem for Augustus, one that he never quite solved. If he’s denying that he holds complete power, how can he pass that power on to a successor? The best he was able to do was associate his chosen successor with him in public office and let the man inherit his vast wealth. As a result, the next several emperors, while all related to Augustus, succeed him almost at random. His dynasty died out with Nero in 68 AD. After a civil war, the Flavian dynasty tried direct biological succession. Vespasian was succeeded by both of his sons in turn. The second son, Domitian, was stabbed to death as part of conspiracy in 96 AD.

When news of Domitian’s death reached the Senate, it immediately named a successor to prevent a repeat of the civil war at the end of Nero’s reign. The man the Senate chose, Marcus Cocceius Nerva (known simply to history as Nerva) was a relatively obscure old senator with no children. But Nerva lacked the support of the military, and less than a year later he was taken hostage by his own palace guard, who demanded that he name a successor. Nerva chose Marcus Ulpius Traianus (“Trajan”) and then essentially abdicated.

Nerva

In doing this, Nerva blundered into a surprisingly effective system of succession. Trajan was a middle-aged man, a successful and popular general as well as a senator who had a good deal of experience in Roman government, having served as a governor and as a consul. But Trajan had no children, and as a result, after he became emperor, he adopted a distant cousin of his, Publius Aelius Hadrianus (“Hadrian”) as his son. At the time of the adoption, Hadrian was already middle-aged and, like Trajan, a successful general and administrator. Hadrian being childless as well, he eventually chose to adopt Titus Aurelius Fulvius Boionius Arrius Antoninus (known as “Antoninus Pius”; don’t you just love these names?) as his son and successor. Antoninus’ two sons had already died, although he had a daughter Faustina. He chose to adopt his wife’s cousin, Marcus Aurelius, and marry him to Faustina (which is sort of creepy to our way of thinking, but marrying adoptive siblings was relatively acceptable to Romans).

These five emperors, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, are technically called the Antonine dynasty, but they’re often called the Five Good Emperors. This system of succession by adoption meant that rather than relying on the accidents of birth, the emperors could select a man they considered a competent successor and give him experience administering the Empire alongside the emperor.

Marcus Aurelius

However, it’s not clear how intentional this system was. Did the emperors consciously view this as a superior system to simple inheritance, or was it just the result of the fact that for four generations, the emperors had no surviving sons and thus had to adopt a successor? We don’t really know.

Regardless, this system came to an end in 177, when Marcus Aurelius chose to designate Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus Augustus, or Commodus, the only survivor of his fourteen children, as his heir.

Why Did Marcus Aurelius Choose Commodus as His Heir?

It has generally been agreed that Commodus made a poor emperor. He was disinterested in the responsibilities of government and tended to hand authority over to a series of favorites. When this proved unpopular and provoked conspiracies to remove him, he became increasingly dictatorial. On one occasion, he executed two men who were not involved in any plots on the pretext that their wealth meant that they were liable to become dissatisfied with him. He showed signs of megalomania, associating himself with the god Hercules, who was the son of Jupiter, the highest deity in the Roman pantheon. He spent lavishly on entertainment and fought in the gladiatorial arena on numerous occasions, something that Romans regarded as deeply scandalous (perhaps comparable to the reaction people might have if Barack Obama started a second career as a WWE wrestler). He has also been accused of cowardice, a somewhat odd charge for a man who enjoyed fighting as a gladiator.

Commodus dressed as Hercules

All of this stands in odd tension with his father’s life. In addition to being a very conscientious emperor, Marcus Aurelius was one of the last great Stoic philosophers. Like all Stoics, he placed a very high value of duty and virtue and advocated for self-control of the emotions and passions. His Meditations is a treatise on self-improvement that calls for self-analysis. So it is odd that such a man would have been willing to break with nearly a century of practice and allow his biological son to inherit the throne when Commodus seems rather clearly to have been a poor candidate for the imperial office.

Several factors were probably at play. Although Marcus Aurelius advocated for emotional self-control, that doesn’t mean that he was capable of being emotionally objective about his own children. Perhaps he simply couldn’t see Commodus’ character flaws, or perhaps he saw them but simply couldn’t bring himself to disinherit Commodus. Maybe he thought that Commodus would rise to the occasion and find the duties of the imperial office a goad for improving his character. Marcus provided Commodus with excellent tutors, so he may simply have felt that Commodus was better prepared than he actually was. The two men were co-emperors for three years, so Commodus certainly had time to learn the skills it took to be emperor.

Another factor is that most of the negative evaluation of Commodus is based on things he did as emperor. His gladiatorial excesses, his dictatorial response to opposition, and his lavish spending on entertainment were all developments of his time as emperor and as such were traits that Marcus couldn’t easily have predicted. Only Commodus’ disinterest in the day-to-day affairs of state is something that his father could have observed. It is only in retrospect that Commodus’ personal failings are obvious, so perhaps Commodus appeared to be a good successor. Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

A third issue is that, although the imperial office was about 200 years old, Commodus was, in fact, the first son born to a sitting emperor; he was the first emperor “born in the purple”. So there was no direct precedent for what to do with such a child. The system of adopting successors was born out of expediency; for close to a century, no emperor had had a surviving son to consider for the succession. Marcus way well have felt that his unique situation justified allowing him to succeed.

Gladiator’s answer to this small historical puzzle is a novel one. Marcus didn’t want Commodus to succeed him, but never got the chance to announce the fact since Commodus killed him. As I already noted, that’s almost certainly false. There’s no evidence for it, and the fact that Commodus was co-emperor for three years before his father’s death is fairly strong evidence that Marcus wanted his son to succeed him. But at least Gladiator is trying to be intelligent about its historical inventions, which I as an historian have to cheer for.

Update: I was just looking at Michael Grant’s The Antonines, which has a section on Commodus, and Grant offers a couple of points relevant to this post. First, he points out that, had Marcus Aurelius attempted to appoint someone other than his son, he would inevitably have had to draw from a small number of prominent Romans, which would inevitably have been contested by the other prominent Romans; in other words, attempting to designate anyone other than his son would probably have triggered a civil war after his death.

His other interesting point is that we don’t actually know much about Marcus Aurelius’ death. While it is commonly thought that it happened at Vindobona, no source actually tells us exactly where or how he died. Dio Cassius, one of the best sources for Marcus’ reign, says that he was quite sick for much of the German campaign, but also says that he heard a story that Marcus’ doctor hastened his death in order to please Commodus. So while Gladiator’s scenario of Commodus personally killing his father is still false, it’s not quite as improbable as I had assumed.

Want to Know More?

Gladiatoris available at Amazon.

If you want to know about Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, an easy starting point is Michael Grant’s The Antonines: The Roman Empire in Transition.Anthony Birley’s biography of Marcus Aurelius: A Biography is sound, although it’s quite academic. For Commodus, there’s the recent The Emperor Commodus: Gladiator, Hercules or a Tyrant?