The Ancients - Caracalla: The Common Enemy of Mankind?

Episode Date: October 17, 2021

Often up there in the upper echelons of most articles listing Rome's worst emperors, it's fair to say that history has not been kind to Caracalla. Whether it was contemporary sources depicting him as a deranged Heracles and Alexander the Great loving megalomaniac or the 18th century historian Edward Gibbon labelling him 'the common enemy of mankind,' for centuries he has been an epitome of infamy.To talk through what we know about this figure, and whether he deserves this reputation, Tristan was joined by Edinburgh University's Dr Alex Imrie, an expert on the Severan Dynasty and the author of The Antonine Constitution: An Edict for the Caracallan Empire.Alex's Twitter: @AlexImrie23Tristan's Twitter/Instagram: @ancientstristanThe first of a new miniseries about the Severans.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, it seems, according to the sources, that we're talking today about an absolute nutter, a terrible, terrible, terrible person who is consistently ranked among the worst emperors of ancient Rome. They're all pretty bad. It's the fact that this guy is ranked among the worst emperors of ancient Rome.

They're all pretty bad, so the fact that this guy is ranked among the worst really does say something. And this was the figure of Caracalla, who ruled in the early 3rd century AD during the Severan dynasty. Now to talk all about Caracalla and what we know about his reign and why he has this terrible reputation and whether it is deserved, I was delighted to get on the show Dr Alex Imrie from the University of Edinburgh. Alex, absolute legend, brilliant speaker. It was wonderful to get him on the podcast. You're going to absolutely love this one. So without further ado, to talk all about Caracalla, here's Alex. Alex, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Thank you for inviting. It's a pleasure to join a fantastic lineup. I've been listening to a great number of episodes over the last couple of weeks to bring myself up to speed. Oh, that's very good to hear. And you've

been working closely with another of our ancients contributors very recently, Matilda Brown, all on the Severan dynasty. We're not going to be focusing as much on Suemias and Mermaea and Aelagabalus today. We're going a bit further back in ancient history to talk about Caracalla. And Alex, Caracalla, it's fair to say,

history has not been kind to this Roman emperor. No, whether it is the contemporary sources claiming that he has all the vices of the three races that he embodies and none of the virtues thereof, or whether it's Edward Gibbon calling him the common enemy of mankind, it's fair to say that he is an archetypal bad quote-unquote emperor. He's still an interesting character to study. I think that his badness or his bad reputation is incredibly well-deserved in many ways. But I think that he is undoubtedly the victim of a massively hostile source tradition as well. And this is something that when we study Caracalla, we have to unpick.

Sorry, just quickly, what did Edward Gibbon call him? The common enemy of mankind. He pulled no punches on that. I think that might well be the title of this podcast right there and then. So good to get that done straight away. Question mark at the end. And let's keep on our ancient sources just a little bit longer so we know who these figures are, our main literary sources. Who are our main literary sources for Caracalla? So the main literary sources for Caracalla are threefold. First and foremost, we have the contemporary author and senator during the Severan era, Cassius Dio. He is certainly, for most people, the go-to source for most of your history about

the Caracallan regime and the rise thereof. The next source that's near contemporaneous is the author Herodian. We know less about Herodian though. He's a little bit more enigmatic. He might be an equestrian. He writes just a little bit later than Dio and his testimony can be just as juicy, just as fruitful and a perfect area to mine information, but he often clashes or varies, diverts from the Dionian narrative, and so part of the historiographical problem is trying to decide which one we want to lean on more in that sense. The final big source, and certainly it's not an exhaustive list, there are more that talk about Caracalla, is the Historia Augusta, the infamous late late fourth early fifth set of ancient biographies which

mentions caracalla in a number of lives but namely the lives of well he has a life he has a biography in that series but also his father septimius severus and his ill-fated brother geta also get lives get us much shorter than the other two, it has to be said. Much shorter, as we're going to find out in this podcast. And let's really kind of feel like, let's focus on the history of Augusta for a bit as we now talk about the background of Caracalla, as this feels like a source which does tell stories

about that area of Caracalla's life. Because Alex, first of all, I mean, what do we know about Caracalla's background? Well, Caracalla's background is, it's an interesting topic interesting topic because on one hand, we think we know a fair amount. But if we start to break it down and look for, you know, factoids and individual tidbits, we don't know a tremendous amount. We know that he was born in 188, April 4th, according to the sources in Gaul, during his father's period as the legate in Gallia Lugdunensis. Beyond that his earliest childhood years we don't know terribly much about we can gather if we look at comparing the Historia Augusta and Herodian that he probably doesn't

follow his father around when Septimius Severus has his various other military and governatorial roles. And we get this because Herodian at least says that Caracalla and Geta are in Rome at the point when Septimius Severus raises his standard against the emperor Darius Julianus. And so Caracalla and Geta have to be kind of ferried out of Rome on the quiet so that they're not taken hostage. Caracalla, however, really comes into his own. We start finding out a lot more about him when he becomes an incredibly important facet of Septimius Severus's claim to power and his push for a dynasty. He is made the heir apparent. He's named Caesar in 195, which triggers a civil war between Septimius Severus and his previously named heir apparent,

the governor of Britain, Claudius Albinus. Severan victory in that civil war ensures Caracalla's claim is unchallenged thereafter. Now in early 198, in the aftermath of a campaign against Parthia run by Severus, Caracalla is named as co-emperor, so he's co-Augustus. And it's thought, although it's not quite clear when the declaration is made, but it's thought that this declaration and accession to the rank of Augustus is timed to coincide with the centenary of Trajan's dies imperii, so that imperial accession date. So Severus is well aware of the propagandistic value in having a hereditary successor at this point and he's pulling out all the stops to make him really the perfect successor in the public propagandistic mindset. So from that point he

becomes a fairly prominent character for obvious reasons in the story of the regime and the sources really pick up on Caracalla from that point but as a very young child we actually know relatively little about him. Given that some of his family his father is of African descent do you think he could have spent some of his time in Roman North Africa? It's an interesting theory and it would really depend I think on who else was traveling to Roman Africa I think that Severus and some of the Severus's family members in Rome at that point were probably quite happy enough for him to stay there but it's not utterly inconceivable I personally think though Caracalla and Geta the brothers were probably just reared in the city as young members of an upper-class family at that point. Certainly a lot

is made later of the visit to Egypt in particular that Severus and Caracalla make as part of an imperial entourage. There's a whole debate of whether they'd get as far west as Lepkus and the Severan family home in Tripolitania. The evidence is a little bit scant, so we don't really know. But the pomp, the ceremony, the big deal that's made of the Severn family reaching North Africa in the form of Egypt would suggest to me that prior to that point, Caracalla has probably been raised in a Western European context. We're talking about the increased importance of Caracalla as he emerges onto his teenage years, because Alex, it seems like he seems to play a prominent role in the downfall of a Praetorian prefect. Yes, Plotianus. This is one of my absolute

favourite topics in all of Severan history. So I suppose we really have to start a little bit even prior to Caracalla's involvement and say who is Plotianus. So Plotianus is potentially a kinsman of Septimius Severus, related distantly through Severus's mother, Fulvia Pia. So the two men are old cronies, essentially, by the time Severus comes to power. And it's no surprise, really, that Plotianus is made Praetorian prefect. And in the best style of somebody like Sejanus, within a couple of years, Plotianus is made Praetorian prefect and in the best style of somebody like Sejanus within a couple of years Plotianus is the sole prefect and is absolutely one of the most powerful men in the Roman imperial state. Now it seems that Severus and Plotianus have this idea to bring

themselves and their families even closer together by engineering a marriage between Caracalla and Plotianus's daughter Plotilla. And this helps everybody involved really. It cements Plotianus's place and his family line's place within the imperial regime. It is a great idea in terms of how Caracalla is being used and marketed as the future of the Severan dynasty because from marriage there's an assumption that there will be children forthcoming. Everything seems to be going fine. The pair are married as teenagers, though, about 14 years old in the year 202,

which is time to coincide with Severus' decanalia, so his 10-year celebration of power. The marriage, very quickly, however, is obviously a failure. According to Dio and the other sources, the couple refuse to interact with each other at all. Plotilla doesn't want anything to do with Caracalla. The pair refuse to dine with each other, let alone sleep with each other. And every time they have an argument, Plotilla apparently goes off to her dad, Plotianus, and complains. So it doesn't take very long for a real tension to form

between father-in-law and son-in-law. This is also against the backdrop of a slightly odd clash between Plotianus and Caracalla's mother Julia Domna. So we shouldn't just view this as the in-laws not getting along. This is part of a wider intrafamilial kind of contest going on for power within the imperial household. This comes to a head in about 204 when Plotianus seems to be at the zenith of his power and Severus has up till that point been cat and mouse, a little bit upset when Plotianus seems to get too much adulation from the people but not inclined to get rid of him totally. Now depending on who you read there's either a genuine coup d'etat attempted by Plotianus or Caracalla gets so fed up with the marital arrangement

and wants rid of his meddling father-in-law that he concocts a plot to frame Plotianus in a coup d'etat. Now the best source for this is actually Cassius Dio who revels in this idea of the teenage Caracalla forging a letter implicating Plotianus and showing it to his dad. Now Severus is sort of unsure how to react to this and Dio marks this as proof positive, this letter, this shows that Caracalla has to be behind the downfall of the Praetorian because Plotianus as a seasoned paramilitary officer would never be so stupid as to commit his plan for a coup to writing. Anyway this coup genuine or fabricated comes to a crashing end when Plotianus reports to the palace potentially in the mistaken thoughts that Severus and Caracalla have been murdered only to find the pair of them alive and he's subject to an interrogation. Severus, it seems, across all the sources,

wants to kind of forgive and understand what his old comrade was up to. Caracalla, after three years of painful marriage to Plotianus' daughter, is absolutely not inclined towards any kind of clemency. First of all, he makes an attempt on the prefect's life, according to Dio and Herodian. Severus stays his hand. So Caracalla apparently just orders another praetorian in the room to stab Plotianus to death. And his body is thrown out of the palace window

onto the street and is left there for degradation thereafter. And so this is a warning shot, I think, about what happens if you cross Caracalla, at least in the literary presentation of the period. Honestly, of all periods in Roman history, there seem to be, in the Severan periods, so many horrific ends, bloody, gruesomely described ends, sometimes in Rome, sometimes on the frontiers. And as you've just said there, this is just another example of that bloody dynasty. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Severan era as a whole only lasts about, what, 40 years thereabouts. And it is exceptionally violent, even by Roman standards. You know, you have old guard members of the dynasty who are subject to violent ends. Five men hold the title of Augustus in the Severan family line,

four of them die violent deaths. It's not a time that emperors die in bed, or many other people for that matter. No, or people sometimes closely associated with the emperor. And is it also, I mean, during this time when Caracalla, in his teenage years, before the death of his father, before he's emperor. You mentioned earlier how Caracalla goes with his father to Alexandria, of course, where the tomb of Alexander the Great is. Is it around this time that we see his adulation, his love, his obsession with Alexander starting to take root? I would say they would have to be around this point, if not slightly earlier even. We have to think about Alexander the Great as being this absolutely titanic figure, not just in the history of the ancient world,

but in the educational context of an elite Roman man's upbringing, especially when we consider that Caracalla is educated in the sort of flourishing environment of the second sophistic movement. So it's all primed there to have Alexander as this big figure in Caracalla's mindset. So absolutely, I think this is where it begins in terms of adulation. I think there's also a note that Caracalla, by that point even in his mid-teens, probably realises the sheer power that the Alexander mythos still possesses. Because early on in Septimius Severus's rise to power he had to fight a challenge from the governor of Syria Piscinius Niger who you may know was named the new Alexander

by his own men and followers. Now Severus after flattening Niger and arriving in Alexandria takes an extraordinary measure of closing the tomb of Alexander and apparently removing some of the artefacts from therein. So Severus realises that Alexander is not just this legendary king from days gone past. Alexander is a figure with real political potency and the evocation of Alexander, even then in the early 3rd century, is an active political ideology and it's something that can benefit a contemporary ruler and I don't think this would have been lost on Caracalla even from an early stage seeing how his father interacts with the figure the body of the conqueror and

then being raised in an educational context where Alexander is a constant feature and we talk about it later how this Alexander mania manifests in Caracalla's soul regime. But I think that this is probably where it starts. Do we have any idea if Caracalla's mother, Julia Domna, whether she has any influence over Caracalla's education during these earlier years? We don't have any direct evidence, has to be said this is again one of these areas where we we have to make educated speculation based on the what we know of educational context around that same period. Julia Domna and Caracalla's relationship is

fairly complicated to reconstruct from our sources for multiple reasons partly the Historia Augusta is to blame and this this might be something that I come back to again andly the Historia Augusta is to blame, and this might be something that I come back to again and again, the Historia Augusta being a slightly problematic source for this particular ruler. But the relationship between Julia Domna and Caracalla is complicated by the Historia Augusta's presentation and querying whether Julia is even Caracalla's biological mother. So to your question, we can't say, I think, whether Julia Domna was personally involved or not. I would suggest it's not utterly inconceivable again, because we know that she was a patron of literary circles and artistic circles.

But I would suggest that it's probably just courtiers and advisors close to Septimius Severus who are overseeing this on a day-to-day basis. Okay we'll come back to Julia Domna later but of course all this mention of Alexander the Great this military figure was he also raised as a military man too? Well that's a funny point because when we look at Caracalla's later reign and self-presentation we would be forgiven for thinking oh well he must have been raised basically in the camp. He was start to finish a soldier and he was at his absolutely most comfortable in a military environment. That doesn't seem to have been the case in his upbringing, though. And certainly I think it's the history of Augusta tells us that he was actually a relatively mild

child, a mild mannered child, didn't like seeing his friends being punished, wouldn't speak to his dad for a few days after one of his best friends was given corporal punishment, shied away even from bloodshed in the arena. And yet the military side of things seems to be what defines Caracalla later on. Now, interestingly, I think part of this has to do with just an accident of time. I think had Caracalla been just that little bit older when Severus was rising to power, he would have potentially played a more active role in Severus's own campaigning in the civil wars and certainly in Severus's campaigns against the Parthian Empire.

As it happens though, Severus achieves those great victories and takes on all those military titles just before Caracalla is quite old enough to be included in the victory one way or another. And so what we find is that one explanation for the eventual Severan invasion of northern Britain in 208 through to 211 is that Severus is tired of his sons bickering with each other and warring with each other and he wants to give them something of a lesson, an austere military life that might

jar them back to their senses i would go one further than this though and we'll talk about the relationship between caracalla and guetta obviously in a minute i think that if we look at the campaign in northern britain from 208 i think it's specifically designed to some extent to give caracalla that kind of military bona fides that a young emperor really requires and to that point is lacking. Now we can make little allusions about how the coinage depicts him because there seems to be a very uneven and unpredictable numismatic outpouring of reverse types that attach him to the Parthian victory in 198 somehow, but it's not terribly consistent. The source that I always go to is the inscription on the Arch of Severus

in the Roman Forum. We have Severus with his absolute wealth of military titles and imperatorial acclamations. Caracalla doesn't have them. So on one of the most visible, unmissable declarations of sovereign military power and authority. Caracalla doesn't have those military titles. He needs them. And I think that maybe it's an interesting sort of

counterfactual exploration. Is this lack of military kudos in his youth one of the driving factors that makes him almost the wannabe super soldier later on in his life? And so what role does Caracalla therefore play in Severus's campaigns in northern Britain? So Caracalla in northern Britain is effectively a field commander on par with Severus himself, as befits the rank of a co-Augustus, a co-emperor. According to the sources, they're in fairly close agreement. Severus rides hard for Britain in 208 following some kind of mention of unrest on the northern frontier from the governor there and he wants to take full advantage of this for one reason or another and i think that as i've said there are multiple potential explanations for this so he

races across with caracalla and his younger son geta in tow and they levy their forces and from the earliest phase you have Caracalla either travelling with Severus personally or alternatively commanding one of the two battle groups that seem to go through southern Scotland, through Fife, up towards Angus and Aberdeenshire.

So from an early stage of that campaign, he is taking an active military role. And certainly when Severus, by that point, ageing, infirm, ravaged with gout it seems, he's so debilitated that Severus cannot take part in the second campaigning season into 210 CE and so Caracalla apparently at that point assumes full military command of the expeditionary force in Britain during that campaign. Now that's quite an interesting and slightly problematic point because Cassius Dio claims at that point that Severus orders a genocidal campaign. So it's potentially

interesting, although potentially not surprising, that we should find Caracalla named as the commander-in-chief of that said campaign. It kind of does fit into his legacy, doesn't it, very much so. I mean, you mentioned there, we've talked already about Caracalla's father, Septimius Severus, a bit about Caracalla's mother, but also his brother Geta. I mean, you mentioned there, we've talked already about Caracalla's father, Septimius Severus, a bit about Caracalla's mother, but also his brother Geta. I mean, what's this complicated relationship with his young bro up to this point, Alex? Yes, as an older brother myself, I try not to identify too much with Caracalla's struggle, but I have in some quiet moments questioned why I focus so much in on this point and this topic. Now, when I have taught courses on the Severan era previously, the lesson that I use for Goethe is always entitled conspicuous by his absence, because he is in many ways just utterly invisible in some of the surviving literary reconstructions of the period. Now this is very odd because Geta

is only 11 months younger than Caracalla and yet from the beginning he seems to have been treated very much as the spare, the heir and the spare. So when Caracalla is named Caesar in 195 Geta gets nothing and when Caracalla is named Co-Augustus in 198 Geta is finally raised to the rank of Caesar. Geta has to wait for over a decade before he is named co-Augustus though and the reasons for that acclamation are debated as well. So what we have here is a pair of brothers who are remarkably close in age who are constitutionally imbalanced thanks to the way that their father has promoted them and based on what our sources say although we have to you know realize that these sources are the product of hindsight and anti-caracallan bias in some cases the brothers just absolutely were chalk and cheese

they just did not get along whichever side one supported at the races at the circus the other would be sure to choose another color and they really couldn't agree whether the sky was blue they just absolutely got on each other's wrong sides at every single point now interestingly there have been some scholars in the past few years who have sought to see a faction trying to coalesce around geta in the prelude to Plotianus' failed coup, trying to bring in this slightly estranged, slightly hard-done-by son to overthrow dad and older brother, who he just apparently didn't get on terribly well with. But the evidence for that is a little bit shaky. What we have in Britain, though, is the two brothers made co-emperors. Apparently, I think Severus thought

he was future-proofing his dynasty by making a short-lived tripartite principate. So he knew he was on the way out. He knew that it would be back to a dual principate relatively quickly. And I think he was obviously styling this on the Antonines, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus. That regime was a stable success.

But I think what we have here and trying to look at it from Caracalla's mindset which is difficult because he's a murderous villain in so many ways. Caracalla has been raised as the heir apparent and as the co-ruler. He has had very little reason up to that point to suspect that his brother Geta would be given any share of imperial power unless he said so after Severus died. He also looks at Severus's father. His father had a brother. His brother didn't get anything when Severus came to power so there was no precedent there I think that Caracalla saw that Geta would be promoted and yet suddenly

in the course of the campaign the whole dynamic of the imperial household has changed because Geta becomes a fully ranked up augustus and now when severus dies that means that the two brothers antagonistic from childhood on personal level as much as anything else are now forced to share imperial power and that's a recipe for disaster We'll be right back. everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push, find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're gonna be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast, from the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11. We reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world.

I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists and experts from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force. And there wouldn't have been a Waterloo. It would have been as simple as that. Revolutionary technologies. At the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries disregarded these communities' health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place

in trillion dollar wars or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. so let's set the scene and then let's delve into the story severus dies early to 11 a.d in york or ce straight away these two brothers named co-emperors. But Alex, what happens next?

It really picks up pace at that point. If Geta has been waiting for a decade to become co-Augustus, he's fully into that cyclone now. In the aftermath of Severus's death, Geta is nominally in charge of the imperial administration, the civil side of things, while Caracalla is the military commander. So the pair of them essentially, Caracalla retreats from the field firstly

and joins Geta and Julia Domna in Ibarakam in York. And there the imperial family concludes a very hasty peace settlement with the northern tribes. Just finish this irritation, this sideshow of a Britishish campaign and get back to rome now bear in mind a lot of the imperial court's apparatus is with the pair already in the provinces so the pair are already angling to secure favor of particular courtiers or particular officials as the court is winding its way back to rome Cacca and Geta have been raised by Severus

as essentially indivisible boys. This is Severus's big propaganda train that the family is hunky-dory, everybody's having a big old Severan family loving. The pair were told, according to Dio, on Severus's deathbed to love one another, be harmonious with one another, enrich the troops and scorn everybody else. Severus's lessonbed to love one another, be harmonious with one another, enrich the troops and scorn everybody else.

Severus's lesson falls on deaf ears. The pair try, it seems, to create this public image of harmony and concord, but by the time they're in Rome, they divide the imperial palace between themselves, they don't cross each other's paths ever. They increasingly fight to have appointments in military judicial civil areas to favor their chosen men and they both start amassing ginormous bodyguards as well there's a question of whether the pair are trying to poison each other so you know they're not eating any food without extreme caution and they really just don't cross each

other's paths. Now this is best seen in again going back to Cassius Dio a sort of fictive episode where Dio has the priests of Concord try to sacrifice to the pair but he has the priests of Concord unable to find each other in the middle of Rome to conduct this sacrifice so there's this idea of a push for Concord but everybody knows something desperately bad is about to happen. Now this is really an important point when we talk about the rivalry as a whole because if we read our surviving sources and indeed a lot of the histories that come thereafter we're really content to view Caracalla as this overbearing absolute villain of the piece. He is the bad guy in this and Geta is, particularly if you read the Historia Augusta, a little bit of a fop,

a little bit of a dandy, but he's squeaky clean and he's probably a lot of fun to have a drink with. It's just self-evidently not the case though. Both of these brothers are, as I say, 11 months apart in age. They are both paid up in this conflict. They are out to win it. And I think that if we accept that Caracalla is trying to engineer the social situation and the imperial situation to overcome his brother, I think we have to accept that Geta's doing exactly the same,

if not even more virulently, because he has a lot of catching up to do. Geta's coinage, for example, is extraordinary from 209 to 211. It changes. He goes from this kind of boyish figure, bare-faced, to this bearded emperor reminiscent of dad. And so the pair of them are desperately trying to control

the visual language of the regime to their advantage. And it is arguing with hindsight to say it was only ever going to wind up one way but it was only ever going to end up one way and so when does this sibling rivalry turn deadly it reaches a head before the end of 211 in the final months of 211 we have word from herodian apparently that there'd been this abortive discussion about dividing the empire into two distinct realms but this seems to be a fiction designed to give us a kind of set piece involving Julia Domna where she comes in tearfully and says well you can't divide your mother boys please what are you doing with each other come on find calm yourselves down and find some kind of common ground while that episode is obviously probably fictionalised, it seems reflective of the reality

that there was just no way that these two were going to find a peaceful solution to their rivalry. So we have a fairly convoluted, again, plan apparently being concocted by Caracal. This seems to be his modus operandi. Figure out a way to distance his enemy from anybody that might protect him. And so according certainly to

diowin herodian the story augusta i think mentions it as well caracal concocts a meeting in julia domna's apartments in the imperial palace and the reason that this is conducted there is that both men would turn up without their massive bodyguards this is the meeting caracal apparently says that he wants to discuss a detente a bit of a reconciliation Geta walks in and at that point depending on who you read either Caracalla just absolutely leaps on him and it stabs him himself brutally this is certainly Herodian's take on it although the actual climax of the scene is missing unfortunately in the original text or if you believe Cassius Dio

Geta comes in the discussion starts and then shortly thereafter a group of around 10 centurions probably from the Praetorian Guard had been previously instructed by Caracalla burst into the room and attack Geta who I mean it's an absolutely terrifying scene if we stop to think about it for just a second. For somebody born and raised in Edinburgh it has real evocation of the murder of David Rizzio. I don't know if anybody is familiar with the murder of Mary Queen of Scots Courtier but these men just absolutely crashing into the room and Geta in a panic running to his mother and clinging to his mother physically begging her to intercede and the guardsmen apparently just don't stop they stab him at his

mother's breast and julia in her attempt to shield her son also receives a wound to her arm so that you know the palace is just thrown into chaos one of the co-emperors has been murdered by his own brother and colleague in office and at that point caracalla runs to the guard and runs to the local military presence and claims that he was in fact the victim of an attempted assassination that he's only just escaped with his life so it's incredibly dramatic and really it's a very tragic scene if you read between the lines of these sources that want to revel in the more gratuitous detail. I mean it's tragic, horrific, very gruesome, and just adds one further case to the list of horrific deaths

within the Severan family. And interestingly, and I know this is something that you've also done a lot of work on recently with Matilda, who came on the podcast not too long ago, when she was talking about this deadly sibling rivalry between two sisters a decade later, between Suemias and Mamea, which also ends up with one of those Suemias getting brutally murdered along with her son Elagabalus.

It is quite interesting, Alex, to see the parallels that you have between these two cases. Yes, yeah, it's exceptionally interesting. Matilda and I were, I think, studying in separate realms about these two explosions of sibling violence and really started talking to one another about them and how they might interact and interplay. And, you know, it really starts with Caracalla and Geta, certainly. Caracalla lays down kind of the precedent about how you handle internal familial conflict

within a sovereign context. and it seems that later on they've missed no lessons it seems on what happens when families fall out in this period when the empire is at stake as well because i think that that's the other big complicating factor these familial dynamics were so primed to see them on purely the human level, which is correct, because these acts are absolutely despicable and abhorrent on a human level. But there is a different mindset and there is a strong political dimension to these family relationships that complicates the situation somewhat. Absolutely. I mean, but let's go back then to Caracalla. Geta is no more. But in the wake of this horrific act, he's killed, he's murdered a family

member, either by his own hand or by his cronies. In the wake of this, how does he attempt to revolutionise his public image, as it were? Let's start, first of all, with the soldiery, with the military. How does he keep the soldiers on side? How does he placate any possible unrest? Well, again, when we think of Caracal, we think of a military man, and we might think that he has a smooth ride with the army, but that's not entirely true. So in the aftermath of the murder itself, I say he bolts from the apartment and runs towards the nearest Praetorian units and claims that he himself had just avoided being killed. And it's an interesting thought an interesting thought

exercise to say well did the pair actually fight did Caracalla and Geta actually just come to blows themselves was there any truth to this but Caracalla wins over the initial military garrison in the form of the Praetorians basically by placating them saying that he's one of them he's a soldier and his position as emperor is really at its most beneficial because it allows him to bestow favour upon those men of the soldiery. So basically telling the Praetorians that they'll be all right with him in charge. That seems to work in the initial moment. There's a tale in the Historia Augusta however that slightly leaves a bum note in this little easy story for Caracal. The Historia Augusta claims that he goes out to the legion

at Alba about 20 miles outside of the capital where he petitions the second legion Parthica which has been based there as almost like a strategic reserve strike force and according to the author the legion closes the door on him. They keep him outside the camp because they swore allegiance to both sons of Severus and what is this he's coming to with them about a tale of Geta being murdered? The way that Caracal apparently overcomes this though is just by offering them an absolute ton of money and the soldiers then find their way to open the gate and let him in and accept the new regime for what it's worth. So he uses his growing military persona, he weaponises that to some degree. But like many, many emperors before

him, donatives are the way to secure the loyalty of the military, at least in the short term. Classic, classic. And I've got my notes here that I need to ask next. The Antonine Edict. Alex, what is this? Why is this so interesting, so important? So the Antonine Edict, the Antonine Constitution, the Constitutio Antoniniana. This So the Antonine Edict, the Antonine Constitution, the Constitutio Antoniniana, this has been a slight fixation of mine for some years. This was the topic of my doctoral thesis. It's the topic of my first book. In one stroke, Caracalla enfranchises nearly every free person living within his realm through this edict. This is creating a new normal, to use something of a really contemporary parlance. Why he does it, though, is up for debate. Now, there are a lot of legal arguments that say he's smoothing out processes that have been, you know, just time consuming and problematic beforehand.

smoothing out processes that have been, you know, just time-consuming and problematic beforehand. Cassius Dio is adamant that there's an economic concern or at least a fiscal concern behind there. He's nominally honouring his new citizens, but he's also making them eligible for a bunch of tax and taxation payments. Now, underlying all these, and I think there are kernels of truth to all of these little bits and bobs, but there is a starkly political explanation for this as well and i think it has to do with caracalla's

requirement to revolutionize what it is to be a sovereign emperor post 211 so what we have on a surface level is that the edict is phrased it's pitched as a religious thanksgiving so it's thanking the gods for protecting and sanctioning Caracalla's regime. So there's an implicit condemnation of Geta as an enemy of that regime in the document. Although the text is really fragmentary, there is potentially even mention of a conspiracy being foiled, and that would be in reference to Geta. Now what we also have to think about is what this edict actually does. Why make everybody citizens at that point? Caracalla's murder of Geta had removed his colleague in office. His marriage to Plotilla had failed and he had had no children. The army

might have liked him but some might not have. He had to use money to grease the wheel with that. have liked him but some might not have he had to use money to grease the wheel with that the senate absolutely seemed to detest him even more than they didn't really get on with septimius severus which isn't saying terribly much so when we look at all this in the round caracalla doesn't have a massive loyalty or support base and he's just eroded it by murdering his own brother even further so what i think we can see in the Antonin Constitution is an attempt to reach out and engineer a new support base. Because when we think about grants of citizenship on an individual level prior to that point, it was almost, well it was, a part and parcel of that patron-client relationship. So the patron gives something,

the client is expected to have some degree of reciprocity. And in this case, it's a bit of goodwill. It's a bit of loyalty to the person who has promoted you to the rank of citizen in the state. So I think the explanation for the Antonine Constitution is multifaceted. But in the context of Geta's murder and the aftermath, Caracal is redefining both the history of the Severan period where Geta has moved from this kind of indivisible brother one of the in crowd to the enemy of all things good and proper he is condemned as the evil in a good versus evil struggle with Caracalla through roots like this constitution and so Caracalla's stabilizing the ship he's steadying the ship at this point when his regime,

while there doesn't seem to be terribly many people out there ready to challenge him, it's at its most fragile at that point. Indeed, and exactly at the same time, Alex, it seems like Geta's face, his imagery, is also being completely erased too. Yes, I'm glad you pointed that out because that's almost the flip side to his love bombing of the Roman populace. We have Geta condemned to the political practice we refer to now as damnatio memoriae, which is an obliteration of the memory rather than just a damnation. We've seen this kind of thing in the modern sense in Stalinist Russia with the vanishing commissars. We've seen it even in

modern day Egypt when the uprising came, all the former regime's names were scrubbed off of public buildings. This is what happens in Rome and throughout the provinces, throughout the empire at this point. Geta's memory, his image is utterly condemned. So his public image, his sculpture, his titles, everything, if that appears on a monument, it is eradicated his inscription is removed for example from the arch of the silversmiths in rome you can see where it's been scrubbed out and extra titles have been put in for caracalla in its place the best known example of this practice in effect though is the artifact now in berlin known as the severin tondo

and this was a just a very small wooden artistic piece produced in Egypt originally with a family portrait of Severus, Julia Domna, Caracalla and Geta. And what we have is the parents in the background, the two boys in front, and Geta's face, just his face, has been scrubbed out.

The head and shoulders still remain. So this is what makes me think that it's not an eradication. We're not trying to pretend that Geta didn't exist we're trying to show that geta did exist and was removed and indeed i think i'm correct in saying that chemical analysis of the tondo showed that there might even have been some kind of dung or excrement removed in effacing geta's portrait and so it really is a massively denigrating process with a political objective of destroying geta's reputation post-mortem as much as anything else and to top it all off caracalla is not renowned as being the most violent exponent of this practice for no reason

it apparently reaches the coinage you have some coins where geta's little portrait has been scrubbed out of coins and you have a tale certainly in daioh that karakala condemns geta's eternal soul essentially so he keeps having offerings made to geta's manes so that that keeps geta pinned in the underworld and doesn't even allow him to become deified in the way the Emperor's past had become. So it's not even that Caracal wants Geta's face eradicated. He just wants him utterly destroyed. And he's very effective at doing that. That is nasty. A sibling rivalry on a level I had never really heard of before.

I mean, Alex, the other key figure in all of this, and you mentioned Julia Domna involved, well, present at the murder of Geta. Do we know what happens to Julia Domna? So Julia Domna survives. She goes on and she survives Caracalla, in fact. She dies only after Caracalla is later assassinated. So in the immediate aftermath, there's a sense that, or there's a claim made rather, that Julia Domna was not allowed to grieve publicly for Geta in any way, shape or form, because this would obviously undermine the message

that Caracalla is trying to craft. That said, Julia then becomes one of the most important figures within Caracalla's later regime. She's one of the figures, obviously, from whom Caracalla claims legitimacy. While he might want to change the overriding narrative of the regime, he can't really detach himself from the dynastic forerunners that he was born of. And yet Julia becomes essentially, near the end of his reign,

responsible for a lot of his imperial correspondence while Caracalla's out in the field. Now for me that is one of the most mind-boggling elements of this whole story because I can only imagine how the familial relationship between Julia and Caracalla must have functioned. We can imagine on human terms there was absolutely no love lost but Julia is still an important figure in the public image of the Severan dynasty and she plays that part exceptionally well. She stops being used as the maternal garantor, a phrase coined by Julie Langford, as the kind of anvil upon which the dynasty is founded, that very physical maternal image and she starts to take on almost a maternal image on a cosmic level and she becomes kind of mother to

the empire her image is paired during caracalla's reign with various deities such as vesta venus kibble all maternal with much wider cosmic qualities and so she certainly is there for the duration and it's noteworthy that once Caracalla is assassinated, Julia only survives a few more months. She apparently maybe had breast cancer but there's also a claim that she committed suicide in the aftermath of Caracalla's assassination and the usurpation of the new emperor Macrinus. Now it's interesting Cassius Dio's treatment of Julia is slightly all over the place when it comes to this later period in particular because julia is on one hand

the stabilizing influence on the wayward militaristic caracalla on the other hand dio infers that she committed suicide because she couldn't bear the thought not of having lost her sons but rather of losing her own power and privilege. Dio compares her to somebody like the figure of Semiramis in that sense but then Dio changes tack again and gives us this really tragic obituary to Julia saying that her life really is a watchword for tragedy and we can take from her life the fact that people who accede to this exceptional power can take from her life the fact that people who accede to this exceptional power often are utterly miserable. So it's a very imbalanced, in my mind, presentation of Julia. She's kind of used as a tool in Dio's narrative, and it shows very clearly because of that. But she was an exceptionally

important figure within the regime, even after the murder of Geta. Alex, just before we wrap up this part of the podcast and later go on to talk about caracalla in the east the macedonian phalanx and all of that one area we haven't really focused on one group of people that i'd like to quickly ask about we've talked about caracalla's relationship with the soldiers do we have any idea what sort of relationship he had with the senate so caracal's relationship with the Senate is, I think, it's not too diplomatic to say that it's just it's a cool relationship. They don't tend to get along eye to eye. Now, a complicating factor in this is the testimony of

Dio, because Dio is a senator at that point. And yet there's a lot of discussion over whether we can accept Dio's testimony is representative of a senatorial mindset or whether it's just Cassius Dio moaning and complaining for the sake of being Dio and being overlooked perhaps in favor of other senators during Caracalla's reign. Now as a rule during this period one of the big trends is that we find a movement away from having senators in high office positions or important administrative positions and they're being replaced with a rising equestrian class and a juristic class moreover as well. So that maybe explains partly why the relationship between the senate and Caracalla is so cold. We also have the fact that the Senate just didn't favour, in many cases, Severus's regime.

We have this idea that senators were writing to people like Claudius Albinus, begging him to march on Rome to overthrow Severus. So Caracalla is just a follow-through from that kind of problem. Caracalla as well just doesn't seem terribly bothered about playing into the conceit that a lot of the republican institutions and things still exist when he goes on campaign he takes a senatorial council a concilium with him he basically ignores them 90 of the time which really annoys them and he leaves them waiting while he fraternizes with the soldiers and he'll call a council meeting within you know leave them for six hours while he goes and drills with his men so there is a lot of testimony out there which suggests that Caracalla just doesn't act he doesn't perform as an emperor in a way that is acceptable

to the majority of the senate and this really well it's I think it's striking that the fact that I sort of come to when we talk about Caracalla's relationship with the Senate is that when he dies in 217, there's apparently only one senator anywhere near him in his entourage at that point, an old consular individual. And so this shows that the Senate, by that point even, is just not really on his radar and they don't care very much for him. not really on his radar and they don't care very much for him. Don't care very much for him and it seems like the feeling was mutual as Caracalla then heads east which we will chat about in due course but for the end of this podcast last but certainly not least Alex you mentioned during the course of our chat that you have written a book on this area of ancient history. Yes so my first book is called The Antonine Constitution, an Edict for the Severan Empire. And what I do is I take the Constitutio Antoniniana as my focal point. And I try to break down in as accessible terminology as I can, why that edict at that time. I look at some of the bigger systemic military economic issues facing the empire at that point. And then I zone in on Caracalla specifically.

So topics like those we've been talking about today, sort of does the Alexander mania play into this idea? Is it to smooth things over after murdering Geta? And I think the answer is all of the above. And so it was a great book to write. It was based on my doctoral thesis and so i hope that if some people read it they do enjoy it absolutely don't give away too many spoilers before they got the book but they will no doubt alex last thing thank you so much for taking the

time to come on the podcast today absolutely my pleasure a pleasure to be involved.