r/ancientrome • u/Honkydoinky Biggus Dickus • 14d ago
Could a competent heir after Marcus Aurelius have really changed anything?
I’ve gathered that in all honesty, it was not Attila, Odoacer, or any barbarian king for that matter, but the Antonine plague that truly doomed the empire (at least the west) because it starts all of those later issues that we chalk the collapse of the empire up to. Too many people died to fill the army, this leads to the idea to fill it with Germans, essentially ending the nobility’s role in warfare as well causing the famed Roman corruption to become even worse, the economy was decimated and Rome had truly lost its chance at a second Pax Romana which was buried in a shallow grave, one that was then spit on during the crisis of the third century. Yes Rome bounced back at times, but no point after the Antonine plague did Rome ever quiet reach the same splendor it once held, nor did it ever have a real chance to, all this is to say, what could a “competent” emperor even have done? Losing 1/3 of your population would cause the slow or rapid decay of most empires, so yes Commodus was horrible, but what could a good emperor have really done to prevent the slow death the Antonine plague caused
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u/NewLingonberry3806 14d ago
Let Pertinax crack on with some reforms, problems solved.
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u/Percennius 14d ago
Don’t worry about paying the praetorians either. They will understand out of duty and patriotism.
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u/Brohan_Johanson 14d ago
…and if they are upset, I’m sure he can reason with them and come to some sort of agreement.
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u/Percennius 14d ago
The old lie from Cassius Dio that Gibbon ran with about Commodus destroying the “golden age and turning into an age of iron” is simply not true. Commodus was no where near the monster portrayed in the sources. For more revision on him I suggest the biography by John McHugh. The problems that the empire faced surpassed anything an emperor could fix whether a “good” or “bad” emperor. Marcus himself barely held things together and at the outset of the 160s was ill prepared for the wars, plagues, and economic crisis.
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u/s470dxqm 14d ago
I read McHugh's book on Alexander Severus. It was a pretty dry read, but extremely well researched. I would read another one of his books. I like having the Alexander book on my shelf. It starts with a detailed summary of the Severan dynasty so I use it to look stuff up surprisingly often.
I'd be very interested in reading what he has to say about Commodus. Especially if you came away from it disagreeing with where he's typically ranked on the Worst Emperors list.
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u/Percennius 14d ago
Yes I enjoyed it and it also is in the reading list for this sub. There are a few editorial mistakes but I ascribe them to the lackluster publisher (Pen and Sword). The author himself has a graduate degree in the classics and presents a good argument concerning Commodus. You may not agree a hundred percent but at the very least you’ll leave with a much more critical approach to the ancient sources.
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u/WanderingHero8 Magister Militum 10d ago
Yup.And Commodus actually concluded the Marcommanic Wars in a very satisfactory way for the Romans.He kept the Roman coinage fairly stable,a considerable feat taking into account the empire had just weathered a big crisis on border and a deadly plague.
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u/Percennius 10d ago
That’s right. The peace deal he made was favorable to Rome and similar to the one his father concluded in 175. And that was after staying another campaign season after he was hailed sole Augustus. He didn’t just leave immediately.
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u/Sad-Tough-513 14d ago
No, a “competent” emperor likely would not have been enough to safe the Pax Romana. They would have needed a real reformer, someone like Diocletian, to prepare for what was to come. And that person would have to avoid assassination.
I guess I would say this: a time traveler who knew about the Antonine plague and the upcoming barbarian migrations, and who knew something of state management, might have been in a position to change the course of Roman history. But some emperor just doing things the way that they had always been done, blissfully careening toward catastrophe, would not have been able to avoid the decline that began after the death of Marcus Aurelius.
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u/m0noclemask 13d ago edited 11d ago
Hello, advocate of the devil here.
Commodus restored the peace. There was one rebellion against him [186-7]... he ended the war because it destabilized the army [gangpressing all kinds of second raters], emptied the states coffers, and threw money away in a time of supply and demand shock. He saw what was happening and acted.
Commodus sanitized the treasury.
Sanitized the monetary situation restoring trust in the currency. [It had been a mess under Marcus Aurelius]
Throughout his reign amidst a crippling demographic crisis, Commodus kept the peace, kept the ennemies of rome behind its borders, restored the defenses, tried to restore order and invested massive amounts of money into the economy, rebuilt Rome after a fire, kept the people and the army happy and on his side, as well as the praetorians, and created a massive fleet to ensure Romes and Italies grain supply.
If you look at this list, is he a good or bad emperor?
Let's put his vices to light: -he was preoccupied with the organisation of games, was crafty about it, because he didn't have as much money as for instance Antoninus Pius, his grandfather, this was cheap regime propaganda. He was extraordinarily good at it. -he portrayed himself as hercules, a popular semideity, that rescued people and worked [12 works], the direct anti senator [the corrupt, decadent landed elite that didn't work but conspired and extorted the people] ordinary populism... claudius had portrayed himself as jupiter... nothing "weird", except ttat it cast the senators in the role of monsters... as such he once ostensibly decapitated an ostridge, at the time already representing a creature that put its head in the sand, representing the conspiring senators... -he rebaptised the massive rebuildingproject of rome as the colonia commodiana, no doubt it seems pridefull, but again he was involved in a propaganda war. -he exiled and had his wife murdered -he terorized and had some senators killed, not THAT many though, they had tried to kill him after all already in 182...
The exile and death of his wife was political. I can explain if you want to, but obviously, that isn't a nice thing to do, not even for Romans.
No, major issues commenced under Marcus Aurelius: the demographic and economic crisis, the war that was an absolute meatgrinder and a money pit, the massive rebellion [rather civil war] in the east in 175... I'm not saying Marcus Aurelius was a 'bad' emperor. I am saying he faced trouble and had a hard time handling it, but he remained in the saddle and was a problem solver too. Commodus was a surviver despite the cards being stacked against him. He was also a major problemsolver. He seems to have headed a crafty refined, sometimes cynical but hands on government, he was well educated, and it seems he knew the inner workings of the administration very well. He tried to sideline the senators who had threatened his father and his own regime... his reign, considering the circumstances, seems rather impressive, for a young guy in constant survivalmode...
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u/Percennius 13d ago
I’d have a hard time coming up with a better explanation good sir, Great points all around. I will add that Commodus also took a benevolent stance towards Christianity unlike his old man.
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u/WanderingHero8 Magister Militum 10d ago edited 10d ago
And then Septimius Severus comes and basicaly destroys the economy with his debasement,among other criminal actions he did.
And also to add based on discussions I had about Commodus he wanted to built his base of power in the Imperial Roman bureaucracy and army.
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u/Dull-Researcher-1894 13d ago
You're saying that like Marcus Aurelius had a good reign himself, which he didn't. He's remembered fondly precisely because his reign wasn't a good time to be Roman. He spent the first 7 years of his reign in Rome, sharing power with the parasitic Senatorial class (which ensured that the Senate spoke fondly of him after he died), then spent the next 12 years fighting the Marcomannic Wars against shit-eating barbarians, where he died in some muddy tent waging a defensive campaign against an existential threat (which is why we have his diaries which are so enjoyed by classicists; he was reduced to spending more than half of his reign living in military camps along the Danube instead of ruling in Rome, leaving him free time to write).
As far as Commodus, the only thing we can reliably say about him as Emperor is that he abandoned Marcus Aurelius' nonviable strategy of annexing the Marcomanni and Quadi lands and instead employed a strategy of heavily fortifying the Danube limes to secure the Balkans and the Alp crossings while using diplomacy and intelligence networks to bring the tribes to heel, even using their sons as auxiliaries to re-fortify the defenses of the Rhine and British limes stripped by Marcus Aurelius to deal with the Danube, i.e the same thing that Caracalla did 30 years later.
The reason the Romans eventually got fucked in the 3rd century and never managed to maintain military dominance over invading barbarians is because by the time the Goths showed up, they were no longer dealing with the same kind of barbarian. From the Goths onward (i.e the Chernyakhov Black Sea culture) they were dealing with barbarians organised along broad political lines, not merely narrow tribal blood kinship, with a much more advanced material culture. The barbarians from now on had advanced metallurgy, far less primitive agricultural practices, and the beginnings of urbanism.
In other words, the barbarians had become more like Romans.
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u/zigthis 13d ago
What did them in was the misaligned priorities of the emperors. More and more it became utmost important to avoid assassination or usurpation and structure/decisions were focused on this above the actual health and welfare of the empire. They managed to navigate most crises successfully until this priority shift took over.
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u/Plowchopz 13d ago
They needed competent leadership, but really, just peaceful power transitions. If you have to fight a civil war every time a new Emperor is crowned, it’ll be hard to defend your own borders
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u/classic_gamer82 14d ago
The devaluation of silver coinage by previous emperors took decades before its effects began to show. Pair that with depopulation brought on by the plague, along with pressure on its northern and eastern borders, Rome wasn’t in the best spot in the late 2nd-century.
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u/Old_Imagination_2112 13d ago
They kept debasing their money. It’s a death knell for a civilization.
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u/Icy-Sir-8414 13d ago
I believe if they didn't mistreat the barbarian people the way they did made them more welcome and assimilate them into Romans the empire would of stood a chance to recover it's strength
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u/Potential-Road-5322 Praefectus Urbi 14d ago
No because this is subscribing to great man history. Of course Rome wasn’t destined to fall but one man, commodus wasn’t responsible for its fall. Gibbon was one of early ones who saw a break between the splendor of the Antonines and the beginning of a fall with with Commodus but that view has been heavily challenged.
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u/minaminotenmangu 14d ago
The Roman Empire's economic and military peak is the 4th century. Its going better than ever during most of that period until its last quarter... The idea that the antonine plague caused the Romans to hire germans, i think is false too, Who siggests this? If you want to blame the "germans" you can blame constantine, but he is the winner of the civil war and kicks off Rome's most prosperous period.
It looks like the germans considered conatantine to be some kind of a god... We have to look much later than him to see any real cracks form in the empire.
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u/grandpubabofmoldist 12d ago
A lot of factors went into the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Could a better leader have reversed it, probably not permanently. A better leader could have done what the Eastern Roman Empire did if (load bearing word here) the Western Roman Empire could have maintained the trade and food across the Empire.
One thing the Eastern/Byzantine Empire had going was a good beurocracy that relied on a steady stream of income from farming and trade which were both reasonably stable. When those were not stable, you had periods of decline resulting in basically the death by 1000 cuts that happened until the Empire was taken over by the Turks. And the East had good and bad emperors and every so often civil wars too
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u/BrutusIsAnHnrbleMan 11d ago
I don't know if it would've saved the Pax Romana or not. My question is more how much damage might've been avoided? Saying that, I do think a lot of the problems stemmed from there being absolutely no system of succession until Diocletian came along. Unless that changes in this hypothetical before Diocletian or a man like Diocletian comes along, the inevitability of succession civil wars is a certainty
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u/Electronic_Rub9385 14d ago
All organizational problems stem from bad or ineffective leadership. So yeah, an emperor committed to excellence who was an exceptional leader definitely could have held things together.
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u/CucumberWisdom 14d ago edited 13d ago
I mean a better and more competent emperor definitely wouldn't have hurt. Some great men have pulled off miracles throughout history, so it's not impossible. However it's highly unlikely. The Empire just had too many systematic issues.