Between AD 138 and 222, Marcus Aurelius breaks the tradition of imperial adoption, and the Han Dynasty finally collapses
HADRIAN’S UNAGGRESSIVE RULE was followed by more of the same. In 138, he adopted an heir: Antoninus Pius, a middle-aged politician who had served both as consul and as governor. Pius was fifty-two years old, and his new adoptive father was sixty-two.
In the same way, Augustus had adopted his son-in-law Tiberius, and Claudius had adopted Nero. This sort of adoption had nothing to do with nurturing. It created a “blood relationship” in law, the same sort of bond that the Han Dynasty eunuchs used to create their own clans. For the Roman emperors, it was a useful way to combine the great advantage of a father-to-son succession (it was always perfectly clear who the next emperor was supposed to be) with the great republican notion that only the deserving should have power. Adoption allowed each emperor to pass his throne not to the son he had, but to the son he had hoped for.
Like Hadrian, Antoninus Pius had a reasonably long and uneventful rule; the most exciting event during his twenty-three years was a big festival, in 148, celebrating Rome’s 900th anniversary.1 Pius himself formally adopted not one but two heirs: his nephew, Marcus Aurelius, and another boy nine years younger, Lucius Verus.235
84.1 The Parthian Invasion
When Pius died in 161, his older heir Marcus Aurelius was forty. He had done his term of duty as a politican, including a year as consul, but he disliked politics. He was an intense introvert, a scholar by nature (the fourth-century Augustan History tells us that he “took a passionate interest in philosophy” before the age of twelve),2 and he was not enthusiastic about becoming emperor of Rome. He was “compelled by the Senate” to take up his appointed task, and he retaliated by making his younger brother Lucius Verus, who was already serving as consul, his co-emperor.3
Immediately the two were forced to deal with a war. The Parthians were on the move again; King Vologases IV, perhaps encouraged by the placidity of the previous two emperors, was already marching through Armenia (which he had seized) and invading Syria.
The Parthians got a warm welcome in Syria, largely from the Jews who had fled the massacre that followed the Bar Kochba rebellion, and were able to defeat the Roman garrison stationed there. Lucius Verus took command of the Roman army and marched east, while Marcus Aurelius watched over the home front. By 162, Lucius was in Syria, and fighting a very effective war against the Parthian forces. He himself invaded Armenia and succeeded in taking it back; meanwhile one of his commanders marched southeast with another division, invaded Mesopotamia, and captured Ctesiphon. Vologases IV retreated, losing his palace, which the Romans destroyed.
The troops returned to Rome in triumph in 166, and brought plague with them. The disease was already sweeping through the city by the time the victory parades had ended.
The Greek physician Galen, who came to the city in 168 in answer to a desperate summons from the emperors, wrote down his own account of the plague in a treatise called Methodus Medendi. He describes his patients as suffering from fever, sore throat, and pustules: in all likelihood, this “Antontine Plague” was smallpox. The epidemic went on for three full years, with two thousand people a day dying at its height, and so many bodies to dispose of that Marcus Aurelius outlawed the building of new tombs in order to force Romans to haul their dead out of the city.4 The sickness remained present in the city for years afterwards.
In the middle of this, with the army severely weakened by illness, the tribes along the Danube took the opportunity to attack the Roman frontier. Both emperors went up to deal with the threat, but it had been beaten back before they arrived. The catastrophe came on the way home, when Lucius Verus suddenly began to have seizures, and died before he could be brought back to Rome.
Marcus Aurelius came home to the city with the body of his adoptive brother and co-ruler, and saw him properly buried. Then he returned to the Danube. He spent almost the entire remainder of his reign—except for necessary journeys back to Rome to take care of imperial business, and one trip to the eastern frontier to deal with a rumored rebellion—in the German province, fighting against invasions which spread and intensified.
Absence from the capital often made an emperor unpopular, but Marcus Aurelius earned himself a reputation for keeping the empire safe, and for dealing gently with his people. When the treasury was drained by the constant wars in the north, he auctioned off the furniture, gold dishes, and jewels from the imperial palace, rather than raising taxes; this made him even more beloved. (The Augustan History says that he even sold “his wife’s silk and gold-embroidered clothing,” which may not have done much for him at home.)5
Life in an army tent, well away from a capital city filled with chattering senators and noisy Roman masses, was actually Aurelius’s preferred place of residence. In his years on the German front, Marcus Aurelius was able to indulge some of his time in philosophy; his philosophical writings, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, became one of the classics of Stoicism. They are the musings of a man trapped by his own duty, carrying the weight of an empire that he was happiest when farthest from. “Let it make no difference to you whether you are cold or warm,” he writes, “if you are doing your duty; or whether you are drowsy or satisfied with sleep, ill-spoken of or praised, dying or doing something else.”6 “Take care that you are not made into a Caesar,” he adds, a little later, “that you are not stained with such a dye, for such things happen. Keep yourself simple, good, pure, serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice.”7
He had never wanted to be Caesar himself, which probably accounts for his premature pushing of his son Commodus into leadership. Marcus Aurelius fathered fourteen children (rumor said that more than a few had been conceived by his wife in his absence; the Augustan History remarks that he once found his wife breakfasting with an overnight guest and pretended not to notice),8 but Commodus was his only son to live past the age of four. He appointed Commodus to be his heir when the boy was only five, and in 176, when Commodus was fifteen, he declared Commodus co-emperor. Marcus Aurelius did not have much longer to live. He had been in pain for some time, possibly suffering from cancer; Dio Cassius says that he had become accustomed to take regularly a drug that made it possible for him to deal with his pain, which suggests that he may have been addicted to opium.9 In 180, after a week of severe illness, he died at the front.
Commodus, emperor at nineteen, at once negotiated a peace with the Germans, halted the campaign on the frontier, and came back home. He was the first natural son to inherit the throne since Domitian, and Rome had been the better for it. The system of emperors adopting their heirs had avoided the worst pitfalls of hereditary kingship; once a wise and efficient ruler had the throne, he tended to appoint an heir of the same quality.
But Marcus Aurelius broke the system. Commodus’s position as emperor was the biggest disaster to befall Rome during the century, and the mistake of a father who was too withdrawn to pay much attention to the personalities around him. Solitary by nature, finding close friendships exhausting, Marcus Aurelius did not find any man to replace him; he defaulted to his blood heir, a much simpler task.
Commodus’s behavior was decadent almost from the moment of his accession. In his return procession to Rome, he brought his male lover into his chariot and kissed him during the parade. Homosexuality was certainly not uncommon in Rome, but it was considered Greek, and thus effeminate; if you were going to have a boy as your lover, it was tactful not to wave him in the face of the Roman public.
His misdeeds after that became the stuff of legend. He assembled an equal-opportunity harem of three hundred women and three hundred boys; he insisted on fighting in gladiatorial games, dressed as a gladiator himself; he murdered one of his sisters and forced another to sleep with him; he walked around Rome wearing “women’s dress and a lionskin,” striking down citizens with a club.10 But if he had gone mad, he had not entirely lost touch with reality: “He used to singe his hair and beard from fear of the barber,” the Augustan History tells us, which suggests that he knew how likely it was that someone might kill him for his behavior.11
84.1. Commodus. Bust of Commodus, Emperor of Rome 180–192, as a child. Louvre, Paris. Photo credit SEF/Art Resource, NY
Rome as a whole decided that he must be the product of one of his mother’s affairs with a gladiator; he could not possibly be a blood relation of the saintly Marcus Aurelius. This did away with the problem of murdering a rightful emperor. In 192, a courtier and one of his concubines gave him poison. When he did not die fast enough, they went and fetched a wrestler to strangle him.
Civil war erupted at his death. Between 192 and 193, four different men tried for the support of the Praetorian Guard. The victor was a general in charge of an army near the troublesome Danube front: Septimus Severus, a small but energetic man who had been born in North Africa and had served in the Senate during Marcus Aurelius’s rule.
He marched towards Rome with his army, but even before he arrived, the Senate made him emperor. He entered the gates on June 10, and immediately took steps to secure his position; he summoned the Praetorian Guard to a ceremonial parade (which meant that they came without their weapons) and then brought his own, German-tempered army out to surround them. Every guard suspected of preferring another candidate was warned to leave the city. When they fled, he at once appointed his loyal men to replace him.
After this, his reign was taken up with the usual campaigns against the Parthians, a standard journey into Britain to harass the Scots, and various other defenses of the border. But he had learned nothing from the drama played out in front of his eyes. In 198 he appointed his oldest son Caracalla as his heir.
In 209, two years before his death, he also appointed his younger son Geta to be co-emperor with his brother. Perhaps this was an attempt to make up for his first choice, which had begun to look like a mistake. Caracalla, a competent soldier, had already threatened to kill his wife, carried out the murder of his father-in-law, and had tried to kill his own father. Despite that, he remained his father’s first choice as heir.
Marcus Aurelius had dealt the empire an almost-fatal wound. The Republic had died, but the empire had grown up to replace it, like an adopted cousin with a faint family likeness. The empire had sickened, under Caligula and the emperors who followed him, but it had made an unlikely recovery. The Romans had managed to figure out how to combine imperial rule with republican trappings, while avoiding the sort of dynastic declines which had been a problem ever since the Chinese had first cautioned about it back on the banks of the Yellow river valley three thousand years earlier. But now, the principle of hereditary succession was about to pull the power of the empire apart.
IN 184, THE BREWING REVOLT of the Yellow Turbans finally boiled over.
The fighting was led by three brothers of the Zhang family: Jiao (or Jue), Bao, and Liang. In one of the classics of ancient Chinese literature, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, they are portrayed as men who combined a millennial hope with a sort of proto-Marxism; their slogan was “The Han has perished, the rebellion will rise; let there be prosperity in the world!” and they hoped to take away the land of the wealthy and share it out evenly, among all Chinese.
But the most complete account of the Yellow Turban revolt and its aftermath is found in the history Zizhi Tongjian, written by the scholar and statesman Sima Guang in the middle of the eleventh century. This is long after the fact, but Sima Guang made heavy use of official records that stretched back for centuries.
Fighting began south of the Yellow river, near the Shandong peninsula. At first the Yellow Turban rebels were driven back by government soldiers, and Han officials—confident that the fighting would soon end—gave the celebratory name “Peace Achieved” to the year 184.12But the revolutionaries soon regathered themselves and pushed forwards again. By 189, fighting had reached the capital Loyang itself.
In May of that same year, the emperor Lingdi died. He had not named an heir at his death; instead he left the decision to his widow, the empress dowager, and the palace eunuch Jian Shi. Sometime before he had also given Jian Shi control of all the armed forces in Loyang, which made the eunuch one of the most powerful men in the country.
The two decided that the throne would go to Lingdi’s fifteen-year-old son Shaodi. With the power of Loyang now firmly in his hands, the eunuch Jian Shi also made plans for a private purge; he intended to kill the Han chief general to increase his own power.
The chief general found out about this, and himself began to plan a wholesale extermination of all the palace eunuchs—a plot which in turn made its way to the ears of the eunuchs. The palace began to divide into suspicious factions, both armed. Finally the eunuchs made the first move; they seized and beheaded the chief general, upon which one of the other commanders ordered the gates of the palace locked and all of the eunuchs slaughtered. “Altogether some two thousand people died,” says Sima Guang, “including several whole men, who had no beards and were killed by mistake.”13
Another Han general who was outside the palace, Tung Cho, saw his opportunity to take over. He abandoned the fight against the Yellow Turbans and marched to the palace, taking control of the chaos. He ordered the empress dowager confined and began to appoint ministers of his own, using his army to back up his orders.
In fact, he was bluffing; he had fewer men than he needed for such a takeover. But every night he had a troop or so sneak out of Loyang in the dark, and then return loudly the next morning with flags flying and drums beating, so that it looked as though more and more soldiers were joining him at the palace.
The fifteen-year-old emperor and his younger brother fled from the palace, fearing for their lives. Out in the fields, they could find nowhere safe to go, nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat. Desperate, the two eventually came back to the palace and asked for sanctuary. Tung Cho granted it. He pronounced the younger brother, Xiandi, the new emperor, under his protection. But the fifteen-year-old Shaodi was old enough to be dangerous. Tung Cho broke his promise of sanctuary, and had the young man killed.
However, Tung Cho was not the only general with hopes of bettering himself. The Yellow Turbans had not yet been defeated—but now fighting broke out among the defenders themselves. Tung Cho was forced to retreat from Loyang, hauling the young Xiandi along with him. Another general, an able fighter named Ts’ao Ts’ao, who had inherited his own estate from the adopted son of a eunuch, cornered him in Chang’an and killed him.14
Ts’ao then offered his protection to Xiandi, who had little choice over accepting it; if he did not put himself under Ts’ao’s control, he would die. He agreed, and Ts’ao promply married the young emperor to his own daughter and set about recapturing the north of China for his new son-in-law.
Fighting against the Yellow Turbans dragged on. Ts’ao finally managed to defeat the last Yellow Turban fighters in 205, but the years of war following on decades of mismanagement and corruption had already destroyed the country. Xiandi had returned to Loyang, and sat on the Han throne. But he was as powerless and unimportant as the Zhou emperor had been, back at the end of that dynasty’s reign. Wars between would-be kings broke out all around the imperial territory. Ts’ao had been mostly successful in recapturing the north, but he had no allies in his quest to reunify the Han lands; too many rival generals did not want to see Loyang become powerful again.
In 208, Ts’ao’s army met the troops of his two greatest rivals at the Yangtze river, at a place called the Red Cliffs. The two armies lingered on opposite banks of the river for days; both sides were exhausted by the unending fighting of the last years.15 When Ts’ao finally launched an attack, he found that the wind had turned against him. The opposing commanders took the opportunity to launch a fearsome weapon towards the other bank. First they sent a letter of surrender to Ts’ao; and then they “took ten covered ships of war,” in Sima Guang’s words, “filled them with tinder grass and dried wood, poured oil inside, then covered them with tent curtains and set up flags.” The dummy ships were sent across the water towards Ts’ao’s own encampment and anchored ships; and when they were almost to the bank, soldiers in light boats behind them set them on fire. “The fire was fierce, and the wind was strong, and the ships went like arrows,” says Sima Guang. “The whole of the northern fleet was burnt, and the fire reached the camps on the bank. In a very short time smoke and flame stretched across the sky and a multitude of men and horses were burned or drowned or died.”16 Ts’ao’s men, fleeing, found themselves facing roads made impassable by mud. They tried to cover the road with enough grass to create a hard surface, but the grass sank beneath the horses’ hooves, and more men and animals died in the muck.
The route ended Ts’ao’s hopes of reuniting China. He retreated with only the north remaining to the Han king, and although battles continued he did not again challenge his competitors.
84.2 The Three Kingdoms
Xiandi himself must have known that his claim of emperorship was a fraud. When Ts’ao died in 220, Xiandi abdicated, handing power over to Ts’ao’s son. After 426 years, the Han kingdom had ended.
China was now split into warring kingdoms. Ts’ao’s son, Ts’ao P’ei, controlled the old Han land in the north. In the south, two rival dynasties were established by Ts’ao’s two opponents at the Battle of Red Cliffs. Sun Ch’uan, in the Yangtze valley, boasted himself the founder of the Wu Dynasty and had a royal capital at Chien-yeh—modern Nanjing. Liu Pei ruled over the southwest from his own capital on the Min river, Chengdu, as first king of the Shu Han Dynasty.17 The Three Kingdoms had replaced the Han Dynasty, and even the possibility of peace had passed. The next three centuries would see nothing but unending war.
TO THE WEST, Septimus Severus had died, and the two brothers Caracalla and Geta were locked together in one imperial office. They had never been good friends, and Geta was the victim of their joint rule: Caracalla had him murdered in the imperial quarters and ordered his body burned.
The Augustan History suggests that Caracalla then had a tricky time of it, getting the Praetorian Guard on his side:
After his father’s death, he went to the camp of the [Praetorian] Guard and complained before the soldiers that…. his brother had prepared poison for him, and that he had been disrespectful to their mother, and he publicly rendered thanks to those who had killed [Geta]. Indeed, he gave them extra pay for being so loyal to him. Some of the soldiers took the killing of Geta very hard, and they all said that it was to two sons of Severus that they had promised allegiance, and that they ought to maintain it to both. The gates [of the camp] were shut, and for a long time the emperor was not admitted. The soldiers were only placated when their minds had been made easier, not only by the complaints and accusations that he uttered against Geta, but also by an enormous payment of money.18
He then began a purge of anyone who might resent Geta’s murder. “During these days countless numbers were killed who had supported his brother,” the History says, “slaughter everywhere. There was even murder done in the baths, and some were killed at dinner too.”19 Dio Cassius adds that Caracalla even abolished the observance of Geta’s birthday.
Then he announced a new law: All free men in his empire were now Roman citizens.
Three hundred years earlier, Rome had gone indignantly to war at the suggestion that the Italian cities should be granted citizenship. Now the law passed without much debate or discussion, and with no public outcry.
From one point of view, the grant of Roman citizenship had grown more meaningless: Rome was no longer a republic, so being Roman was no longer a matter of getting the vote (which had been the biggest issue in the Social War). But from another direction, Roman citizenship looked far from meaningless. Hadrian’s wall and the turning of client kingdoms (with a kind of independence and national pride of their own) into tightly controlled provinces both pointed to the same inevitable end, for those peoples enclosed within Rome’s borders. They could not be allowed to remain a collection of countries “under Roman rule,” like marbles in a jar; their first loyalty would always be to their first identity, and when crisis broke the jar, the marbles would escape. They had to be pulled away from the past, and pointed towards a new loyalty. They had to be made Roman.
But to be Roman no longer meant to have a vote in your nation’s affairs. It no longer meant that Rome was your birthplace; the empire had spread across so many lands that hundreds of thousands of Roman citizens had never actually set foot in the city which now offered them its name. It did not mean that you knew the proper Roman way to eat a meal, or enjoyed the poetry of Seneca, or even spoke Latin.
In Caracalla’s hands, Roman identity meant three things. It meant, as Epictetus had observed decades before, that you were obedient to the emperor. It meant that, like all Roman citizens, you had certain rights: if you were sentenced to death for a crime, you could appeal to Rome (unless you happened to get caught in a purge), your marriages and other contracts could be upheld as legal in Roman courts, your children were guaranteed to get their inheritance under your will. And it meant that you paid your taxes. Caracalla was broke. His bribes had drained the treasury, and he needed more citizens so that he could collect more money to refill them.
Roman citizenship, in short, had become a trade-off. In exchange for legal protections, the free men inside Rome’s borders would pay out money. It was not a particularly bad bargain (or not yet; taxes had not yet begun to spike), but it certainly didn’t have much in the way of bonding potential: nothing like Pericles’s appeal to the Athenians to commit themselves to the idea of Athens, or like the Jewish conviction that God had promised the descendents of Abraham their own land. These were ideas that bound men together.
IN 212, THE SAME YEAR as Caracalla’s announcement of citizenship, a Parthian vassal king named Ardashir was carefully waging small campaigns against the vassal kingdoms around him. Ardashir’s own kingdom was in Pars, the Parthian province where Persians still lived; his capital was Gur, and his family was one of the last remnants of the old Persian empire. Later traditions say that he was a distant descendent of Darius himself, pushed into obscurity.20 Quietly, without doing too much to alert the distant Parthian king, he was persuading or terrifying the nearby vassal kings into switching their allegiance over to him.
He probably wouldn’t have gotten away with this for very long, except that the Parthian king Artabanus V was having troubles of his own. One of his own relatives had challenged his crown, and after a nasty bit of civil war had managed to occupy Ctesiphon and take control of the lower Mesopotamian valley. Artabanus had been driven out of his own capital and was uncomfortably camped to the west, in the northern plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates. He was not paying much attention to what was going on east of Ctesiphon.
Caracalla, seeing a chance to reduce the Parthians to vassals, sent a message to the displaced Artabanus V offering to help him, in exchange for a marriage alliance with Artabanus’s daughter. Artabanus, seeing this not as a genuine alliance but a takeover attempt, refused; and so Caracalla journeyed to the east, with an army, and attacked the western Parthian border in the fall of 216. He campaigned until winter, and then set up a winter camp to wait and renew the attack in the spring.
In early April of 217, just before the renewed assault was planned, Caracalla was suffering from a badly upset stomach. He was riding with one of his bodyguard when he was seized with stomach cramps. He jumped off the horse and yanked down his breeches. The bodyguard took the opportunity to kill him while both his hands were occupied.
Mounted soldiers a little farther away rode up then and killed the assassin with javelins. Like Caligula’s killers, he had done the empire a favor at the cost of his own life. Caracalla’s body was cremated, the ashes sent to Rome; he had ruled for six years, and had died at the age of twenty-nine.
The eastern legions, left without an emperor, proclaimed their general Macrinus to be the new emperor. In late spring of 217, Macrinus led them again across the Parthian border. But Artabanus V had gathered himself, over the winter, and after hard fighting the Romans were forced to drop back without victory. Macrinus, unwilling to try another assault, offered to pay them off and handed over a staggeringly huge sum of money.
This infuriated many of his soldiers. An emperor who had gained his power solely because of his military abilities had nothing left, once he began to lose battles; and there was a rival candidate for emperor right at hand. He was Caracalla’s first cousin once removed (the grandson of his mother’s sister), a tall and handsome fourteen-year-old named Elagabalus, who looked something like Caracalla and was widely rumored to be his illegimate son.
On May 16, a few months after the defeat, a group of soldiers proclaimed Elagabalus emperor in Macrinus’s place. Macrinus found more and more of his own followers abandoning him to follow the new emperor. Finally he fled, but pursuing soldiers found him, a month later, at Chalcedon, trying to cross the Bosphorus over into Thrace.21 He was put under guard, and not long after was murdered in custody.
Elagabalus turned out to be weak minded and bizarrely self-indulgent; if even half of the stories related by the Augustan History are true, he went insane shortly after his accession. Most of the details are summed up in the History’s acid remark that the soldiers soon lost patience with “a princeps who was the recipient of lust in every orifice of his body.”22 He also indulged himself in strange religious rituals, one of which involved worshipping a stone which he had found and declared to be a god, and another of which led to him trying to circumcise himself (apparently he partly castrated himself instead).
By 222, the Praetorian Guard had lined up another candiadate for emperor, and a troop of guards went to find Elagabalus. He heard them coming and hid in a public latrine, but they dragged him out, killed him, and then dredged the body in a sewer, dragged it around a chariot-racing course, and finally pitched it into the Tiber with a stone tied to it. His blood relationship to a previous emperor had brought him to the throne; but it had not saved him.
