Chapter IV: The cruelty, follies and murder of Commodus [with added Pertinax]

[nwhyte]

Available here, here or here.

1) Good quotes

After an introductory couple of paras about Commodus' father and mother, Gibbon moves from historical scene-setting to moral scene-setting: Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society, are produced by the restraints which the necessary but unequal laws of property have imposed on

Comments

[strange_complex]

I was away over the weekend, and thus unable to comment here on Saturday, but I did read this chapter while on the plane. I don't have much to say about it myself, but will pick up and expand upon a couple of things nwhyte has said.

1. Gibbon's attitudes towards both Commodus and Pertinax appear to me to be strongly coloured by Dio's accounts of their reigns. He had lived through both personally, and more importantly was writing about them under emperors (the Severans) who based their legitimacy in part on links to Pertinax. Their official line was that they had come to power as a result of civil wars prompted by the need to avenge his murder - and so of course he had to be painted as whiter than white in order to emphasise the severity of the Praetorians' crime and the necessity for engaging in civil war in order to right it (and not, of course, because they wanted power themselves - oh no, guv, honest!). Meanwhile, Commodus's character needed to be blackened in order to justify his murder and Pertinax's original accession to the throne.

Dio would have been very ready to follow this line, not only because he was writing under the Severans and would prosper by flattering them, but because Commodus had (apart from the things mentioned above by nwhyte) also shown such a preference for the advice and influence of favourites such as Perennis, Cleander and Marcia over that of traditional senators. This is exactly the sort of thing always guaranteed to put senatorial authors' backs up, as also shown by the literary tradition regarding Claudius and his wives and freedmen - and of course would have been more rawly painful in this case, because Dio had lived through Commodus' reign himself, and thus experience the effects of being sidelined directly.

With rare exceptions, it's clear that Gibbon doesn't really think in terms of identifying the biases and agendas of his sources in this way, and thus will tend to accept their portrayals of the various emperors he treats uncritically. If people in this community would like an accessible corrective to that, I can recommend the biographies available on the De Imperatoribus Romanis website, which are written by modern scholars. Not all of them are of equal quality, and the one on Commodus is rather thin, but the one on Pertinax is a very useful supplement to Gibbon's text here.

2. The omission of the atque ore from the Historia Augusta passage really is interesting, since to a Roman reader this would have been key to the impact of the original text. Allowing the mouth to be penetrated was the ultimate sexual taboo for Roman elite males - probably worse than anal penetration, though that was pretty bad too, since it involved being passive like a woman. As the tool of the orator's trade, the mouth was supposed to be kept pure - so it would have spoken volumes to the text's original readers to learn that Commodus didn't care about this. Meanwhile, the omission from the 1921 translation is a very good argument for why it is important for each subsequent generation to re-visit and re-translate ancient texts. If we were still reliant on this translation for understanding Commodus' sexual behaviour, it would severely limit our ability to identify the sexual taboos which applied in the ancient world, and the reasons why they had developed.

3. Purely a point of fact - actually members of the Praetorian guard led the assassination of Caligula as well as arranging the accession of Claudius. Which, of course, further tells against Gibbon's contention that something specifically new and worse was happening to the system of power during Commodus' reign.

[swisstone]

Commodus's character needed to be blackened in order to justify his murder and Pertinax's original accession to the throne

Yes, but this needs to be at least qualified with the information that Septimius Severus, having adopted himself into the family of Marcus Aurelius, then identified Commodus as his brother, reversed the damnatio memoriae, and had him deified.

With rare exceptions, it's clear that Gibbon doesn't really think in terms of identifying the biases and agendas of his sources in this way

Having now got as far as Chapter XIV, I don't think this is entirely fair. He's not hot on the biases of the sources for the second century, but he's rather better on those for the third and fourth (especially when dealing with Christian sources).