this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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If only Marcus Aurelius had bothered to form an opinion on whether or not Commodus would make a decent successor as emperor.
Ok but were you not entertained?
I mean it was understandable— everyone praises the five good emperors for choosing successors but none of them actually had biological kids, and there was no precedent that the successor would be chosen. Realistically, Aurelius wanted to avoid a civil war and wasn't like entirely throwing, I think I saw like a story about how he like. Didn't want to do it but it was like the only good outcome or optimal at least
Commodus doesn't appear to have descended into megalomania until a few years into his sole rule. One expects the power got to his head rather than him simply being born wrong. C'est la vie!
Was he even as bad as they say? I mean, probably, absolute power and all that, but from what I hear the madness of Caligula is severely overblown since the main sources we have on him are the Roman versions of tabloids, so maybe it's similar with Commodus.
Never really looked into it too closely though, and it's probably safe to err on the side of "absolutist ruler was an asshole".
Commodus was likely as bad as they say. Emperor Septimius Severus is said to have decried Marcus Aurelius for not strangling the kid when he had the chance. Of course, Septimius Severus's kid would turn out to be a gruesome fellow like Commodus, so he doesn't actually have much room to throw stones.
Caligula revisionism is... very problematic. The most I would say there is that some of the pop culture interpretations of him are false, and some of the incidents mentioned as rumors by Roman historians are likely exaggerated. He was pretty unambiguously a tyrant and extremely arbitrary in his rule. If you take 'madness' as 'detached from reality', Caligula probably wasn't mad. If you take 'madness' as 'sociopathic and impulsive', then Caligula was almost certainly mad.
He was a bit busy trying to not form an opinion about people who are smelly and don't take care of themselves (yes, an actual line from Meditations)