A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

the treasury. When he died at the age of fifty-nine, the task of shoring up the Roman Empire was
still uncompleted. Yet the Meditations reveal that he had achieved the serenity of a man who knows
that the key to the mystery of existence lies in the mind itself. In the murderous history of the
Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius stands out like a beacon.
If he noticed that his son was a vicious ruffian, it was too late to prevent his becoming emperor.
The moment his father died, Commodus abandoned the war against the northern tribesmen and
rushed back to Rome to enjoy himself. He changed the name of Rome to Commodiana, voted
himself the name ‘Hercules’ and behaved exactly like every bad emperor in Rome’s violent history.
Nero had been an aesthete; Commodus liked to think of himself as an athlete. His greatest pleasure
was to fight in the arena against carefully chosen opponents - whom he despatched with his sword -
and to take part in the chariot races. He boasted that he had killed thousands of opponents with his
left hand only. This homicidal maniac was probably insane. He would dress up as Hercules and
then walk about hitting people with his club. An attempt on his life made him paranoid, and he
proceeded to execute senators by the dozen. Finally, when it became clear that no one’s life was
safe, his own mistress poisoned him, then a wrestler throttled him. In a mere twelve years, he undid
all the good work of the previous four emperors and left Rome bankrupt.
Commodus was probably the worst thing that had ever happened to Rome. It was not that he was
worse than Caligula or Nero; only that the empire was bleeding to death and could not afford
another madman. It had once been a privilege to be a citizen of Rome; now it only meant paying
heavy taxes to a series of generals who managed to fight their way into power. When Commodus
died, four would-be emperors scrambled for power. The winner was, ironically, a Carthaginian
named Septimius Severus, a coarse, brutal but efficient soldier who re-established Rome’s military
supremacy, murdered the regulation number of senators, and died a natural death after ruling for
eighteen years. He advised his two sons to stick together, pay the soldiers, and forget the rest. They
ignored his advice and set about trying to murder each other; Caracalla, the elder, proved to have a
better grasp of the science of treachery; he invited his brother to a conference in their mother’s
boudoir and had him hacked to death in his mother’s arms. Caracalla then murdered twenty
thousand men he suspected of supporting his brother and instituted a reign of terror reminiscent of
Marius. He surpassed most previous emperors in sheer malignancy when he went to Alexandria -
against whose citizens he held a grudge - and invited most of its youths to some celebration on the
parade grounds; then his soldiers surrounded them and cut them down. The one act for which he
deserves credit was granting Roman citizenship to all the freedmen of the empire; but even this was
probably a measure to increase the number of taxpayers. When Caracalla was murdered by his own
officers, the senate was bullied into proclaiming him a god.
After that, ‘barrack emperors’ came and went with vertiginous speed, most of them assassinated.
One of the few whose name is recalled by posterity was Heliogabalus (218-22 A.D.), whose name
has become a synonym for peculiar vices. In fact, he was merely what we would now call a
transsexual - a woman born in a man’s body. Soon after he became emperor - at the age of fifteen -
he advertised for a doctor who could perform the sex-change operation, but finally settled for
castration. He then married a beefy slave called Zoticus, and the ceremony was followed by a ritual
defloration and honeymoon. The ‘empress’ (as he insisted on being called) then decided to become
the patroness of the city’s prostitutes; he called them all together and made a speech in which he
showed an exhaustive knowledge of every perversion that they might be called upon to satisfy. This
interest in prostitutes soon revealed itself as a desire to take up their calling; he began to tour the