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The "Five Good Emperors"

Commodus (180-192)

Marcus Aurelius did have a son and he chose him to be his heir. Born Lucius Aurelius, he took the name Commodus when he became emperor. Almost from the beginning, Commodus showed a singular inability to choose his companions wisely. One high officer after another was either found to be conspiring for the throne or at least was accused of so doing. One after another, they met violent deaths.

It soon appeared that Commodus was seriously unbalanced. He not only attacked senators almost at random, looting their possessions to finance his own extravagance, he even claimed Rome itself as his own colony. He fancied himself another Hercules, going so far as to have coins struck with himself adorned with a lion cloak and insisted that people at court address him as Hercules. He was a good swordsman, but went typically overboard by entering himself in gladiatorial contests.

By the beginning of the 190s, everyone had had enough. As the emperor was preoccupied with absurdities, various factions around him schemed and competed for position. One leader was the city prefect, Pertinax. It was he who benefited from the assassination on 31 December 192, the day before Commodus was to lead the new year festivities by marching through the city clad as a gladiator.

We don’t  really know if Pertinax engineered the murder, but he certainly knew what to do when a senator offered him the post. He went immediately to the camp of the Praetorian Guard and offered the men a handsome bonus, whereupon they proclaimed him emperor. He at once set himself to trying to recover imperial finances, which had been ruined by Commodus (and, it must be admitted, by Marcus Aurelius).

He went too quickly. And he neglected to pay the Guards their full share. On 28 March the Guards stormed the palace. Pertinax delivered a long speech to them, scolding them severely, which was not the right choice to make. One of their number hurled a spear into his chest and killed him.

Next came one of the more notorious incidents in the history of the Empire. A senator, Didius Julianus, decided he would make a good emperor, and went to the Praetorian camp to make an offer. Also interested, though, was Titus Flavius Sulpicianus, father-in-law to Pertinax. There followed a dishearteningly comical series of transactions in which both Titus Flavius and Didius Julianus bid against each other for the support of the Praetorian Guard. In essence, the Empire was being auctioned to the highest bidder.

Giving money to the troops had a long history in Rome. But these donatives were voluntary, even if they came to be regular and expected. What was new here was the open, auction-like atmosphere, with the Guard complacently waiting to hear the right price. It wasn’t the bidding itself that boded ill, it was the inordinate influence of the Praetorian Guard, which chose not to look beyond its own interests.

In the end, Julianus won, though in truth he lost. The “auction” outraged the Roman people and he was at once assailed with complaints. Worse, the troops in the field had their own opinions about who should be emperor, and even as Julianus took his expensive prize he had to face the prospect of the advance of two armies of veteran soldiers, each with their own imperial claimant.