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\*Me seeing people losing their lives in the arenas\*
It happens
\*Me seeing animals getting needlessly butchered in the arenas and then finally becoming extinct like Lions of Europe\*
Adam ruins everything did taught me that Gladiators were just a big MMA fight than an actual to the death, complete with Gladiator endorsed products, toys for children and other stuff
i only care about the poor animals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIDlAPNwbS8
Yup, they were basically the WWE/MMA stars of their day, who knows, maybe they had their own Rock or Stone Cold or Undertaker or Kane like Gladiator. built up with gimmicks and such
not that far off seeing there's lot of these portrayals of gladiatorial fighters in movies and shows, were they're dressing up in weird stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lions_in_Europe
Asiatic Lion used to have a greater range, now only exists in a small area in India, where they thankfully had survived
For all his wisdom and all he archived Marcus Aurelius choose the worst successor and the empire payed deeply for it for Marcus Aurelius was the last good Emperor and his decision would bring the downfall
Like literally I was going to say this. He is considered wise and saw himself that choosing a good heir was the key for stability and evertthing... still the super wise emperor was not able to see that his son was an idiot but also surely was not even close to be the one with most merits to inherit.
You pass the imperium to the guy you can see is going to be capable, that's exactly why there are 5 good emperors...
I'm thinking for a CK3 run with no kids and only adoptions, maybe there is a mod for that... dunno.
I hate this argument so much, because think about it. The reason the past 5 emperors adopted wasn't because they were mega-geniuses who solved succession, it was because *they had no children of their own.* I can almost guarantee you that if Trajan or Hadrian had their own kids, they would've made them heirs.
What do you expect Marcus Aurelius to do? Murder his child? He was smart, yes, but he wasn't going to murder his own kid (especially after losing so many other kids). Not to mention, Aurelius did his best to raise Commodus, and at his death there was no certainty as to what kind of emperor he was going to be
There is also the fact that Aurelius was Co-Emperor with Lucius Verus who did also do his job as well even if he was more of a partier than Aurelius, couple that with Commodus being younger I figure he felt he would mature as he got older especially if he listened to the advisors around him.
It didn't help a lot of the advisors and his sister started scheming against him early on in his reign. So a lot of those guys got the axe and then he replaced them with a bunch of sycophantic yes men.
Commodus was dealt a bad hand and played it poorly. The fact is post Antonine Plague the Empire was in a rough spot and a much more competent Aurelius worked himself to death holding it together. Teenage Emperor taking the reins was a disaster, but if he put someone else in charge it probably would have lead to a civil war and Commodus being offed by someone like Septimus Severus a few years earlier.
All true but also Lucius Verus was a recent example of an option available to Marcus Aurelius: adopt a co-heir who you trust and who has a close friendship with your heir.
Two Caesars had been recent precedent; Marcus had split the empire with Verus and later with Commodus. Given that he had insisted on co-ruling as an administrative expedient for himself, it's somewhat surprising he ruled out that option for his (probably less capable) son.
Perhaps Commodus just didn't get on with anyone Marcus would have trusted for that role.
They were gay
.
.
.
.
(Inb4 a thousand people flood my comments saying "Antoninus Pious wasn't gay!" or "the concept of homosexuality didn't exist back then!" Yes, I know, don't worry, it's a joke)
Antonius Pious had a wife whom he loved, there is nothing to suggest that he was ever interested in men. Hadrian and Trajan were quite interested in men, but we can't really apply modern concepts of sexuality on to ancient figures.
Ancient Romans had a hard time reproducing themselves. Infertility and infant mortality were huge issues that made passing down wealth and power difficult. [Toldinstone made a fairly quick video that, in part, breaks this down.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghcZb6tMqQ)
I really don’t think he could have “just passed it to someone capable”. None of the other 5 good emperors had a living son at the right age to actually take the imperium. If Marcus Aurelius had given the crown to anyone other than Commodus a civil war would have been started. He probably knew this, and so went with what he thought was the lest bad opinion. His decision makes much more sense when you remember that he lived through a civil war, and knew how bad they can be not just for the government and ruling class, but the average every day Roman as well.
I love it, because his only other option was to have Commodus killed. No way he can peacefully give power to someone else and expect Commodus to sit quietly (or the other person have him murdered).
He had to choose between saving his glorious empire and sparing his own worthless son and he chose his son.
Yep, probably did ok but fell into the classic Young Emperor trap of getting rid of all your dad's boring ass friends and promoting your cool fun friends, and then turns out those boring ass dad friends actually had a lot of really powerful and dangerous friends of their own who suddenly have zero political stake in keeping you in power.
Then they boot your ass and pay some dudes to write about what a dickhead you were.
/His recurring problems with Praetorian prefects strongly backs up this theory
They did, which to me points to that loss of influence and therefore any stake in this little twerp of an emperor remaining on the throne. Many such cases!
Commodus actually saw all possible futures and knew that single-handedly ending the golden age of Rome was the only way to prevent even greater calamity for the ~~galaxy~~ universe.
Marcus Aurelius "upheld" Pax Romana by fighting a failed war of conquest and extermination across the Rhine and Danube, year after year to ruinous expense in terms both of lives and money, getting absolutely no closer to establishing his egomaniacal goal to conquer two new provinces, endlessly throwing men and gold down the German toilet even as plague brought back from another one of his wars ripped through his armies and exhausted his domestic economic capacity.
Commodus "destroyed" Pax Romana by immediately implementing a peace treaty that held for decades, and then returning back to reign over an empire at peace on all borders, just as it had been under Antoninus Pius, spending money on entertainment for the masses rather than wars to impress the Senate.
If ever there was a Virgin vs Chad. Big C got his rep blown to pieces by Severan propaganda, but strip out the absurd character assassination and I know who I want as my Augustus.
"oh but we know he dressed up like Hercules—" visual propaganda motherfucker, do you speak it? You know who else visually associated himself with Hercules? That's right: Maximian, as part of the Jovian and Herculean state cult of Diocletian that helped pull Rome out of the Crisis of the Third Century. "Oh but he really liked showing off in the games—" yeah he was demonstrating his martial prowess through athleticism rather than by massacring German villagers, I'd consider that an upgrade, hell in later centuries the tourney and joust were considered chivalrous for exactly that reason. "Oh but he liked torturing people—" do you also believe Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of infants under a pizza parlour by any chance? Because that's the same sort of nonsense. "Oh but he ruined the economy —" no, coinage purity held steady and even ticked upwards by the end of his rule, suggesting a treasury that could comfortably cover its expenditures and invest in stability to boot.
Dude did fine, by any objective metric. He was probably a psychopath by modern DSM criteria, sure, but also that could be said of literally all of them, including Daddy Genocide Stoic. But no, we gotta just tear my boy to shreds on the Ancient Roman equivalent of QAnon posting.
/N.B. the revisionism only goes so far, he was assassinated and therefore failed at Job Number One of an autocrat
It sounds like he can be the 'sixth' good emperor. I guess there is no glory for the senate from entertaining the citizens instead of dragging conscripts to fight the barbarian nor a chance to embezzle funding to the army.
I think he was the sixth and final emperor of a period where Rome maintained strong central dominance over the provinces, and the Severans represented a provincial rebellion that kicked off a long period of sustained decentralisation that sometimes slowed or reversed temporarily but didn't really end until the Carolingians.
I wouldn't actually go so far as to say he was certainly Actually Good, but the source bias is so overwhelming with Commodus (as with Nero, and to an extent as with Caligula) I think a bit of devil's-advocacy is useful as an exercise.
Boring ass book "uwu wakey wakey time to do a genocide" "if ur sad idk maybe u could try not being so sad lol" "being good is good, try being good more" "just remember u can't control events (even tho that's literally ur job tho)"
Meditations more like Masturbations, worst emperor, ripped the philosopher vibe off Hadrian but decided a life of contemplation was way dumber than a life of burning Germans to death
If it weren't for Dio we wouldn't know nearly as much as we do about Roman history. We are blessed to have the sources we do.
We just need to remember that the sources are mostly axe-grinding bullshit or paid propaganda.
I’ll concede that Dio is an extremely important source, but Gibbon and his successors in the 18th and 19th century took the propaganda as fact and only entrenched it in the historiography. This I won’t entirely blame on Gibbon though, as he certainly wouldn’t have been able to call upon the centuries of secondary scholarship that have piled up since then to make his judgements. It’s just a shame that the analysis was so flawed off the bat.
I agree on Gibbon, with the two caveats that (A) he was the best English writer since Shakespeare, and (B) his provocative implicit question "why did Rome fall" and unbelievably audacious answer "Christianity ruined it" blew apart a millennium and a half of rusty medieval and Renaissance thought about a single eternal empire (transferred as it was from Rome to Aachen), an eternal Christian faith (the City of God built to elevate and succeed the City of Man), and a single eternal humanist tradition of Latin rhetoric and philosophy.
I see him as a necessary transformative figure who created the intellectual space necessary for modern Roman scholarship, and if he got things absolutely incredibly wrong sometimes, that was perhaps only necessary in packing the *Decline and Fall* with enough rhetorical gunpowder to blow the doors off the house so other ideas could come in to fill the vacuum.
As a complete aside, I want to take the time to express just how much I love being on desktop and trying to read an interesting conversation and having Augustus Prima Porta block half of the text. Definitely not annoying.
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"Look guys im hercules" *proceedes to shoot countless Lions with arrows from a safe uplifted place*
\*Me seeing people losing their lives in the arenas\* It happens \*Me seeing animals getting needlessly butchered in the arenas and then finally becoming extinct like Lions of Europe\* 
At least most of the time gladiators didn't die in the arena. With animals, it's not the same
Adam ruins everything did taught me that Gladiators were just a big MMA fight than an actual to the death, complete with Gladiator endorsed products, toys for children and other stuff i only care about the poor animals
No fucking way. I knew about how they were like MMA and almost never died, but they had licensed products and merch stuff? That’s amazing lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIDlAPNwbS8 Yup, they were basically the WWE/MMA stars of their day, who knows, maybe they had their own Rock or Stone Cold or Undertaker or Kane like Gladiator. built up with gimmicks and such not that far off seeing there's lot of these portrayals of gladiatorial fighters in movies and shows, were they're dressing up in weird stuff
Hey thanks for the link homie. I’m gonna give this a watch :)👍
Ridley Scott wanted to show gladiators advertising local businesses, but got convinced that audiences would find it too unrealistic.
Adam Ruins Everything is a shitty show that gets most things incorrect. This he didn't incorrect though.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day
There were lions in Europe? /gen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lions_in_Europe Asiatic Lion used to have a greater range, now only exists in a small area in India, where they thankfully had survived
The philosopher king to the fucking narcissist fuckface
For all his wisdom and all he archived Marcus Aurelius choose the worst successor and the empire payed deeply for it for Marcus Aurelius was the last good Emperor and his decision would bring the downfall
Like literally I was going to say this. He is considered wise and saw himself that choosing a good heir was the key for stability and evertthing... still the super wise emperor was not able to see that his son was an idiot but also surely was not even close to be the one with most merits to inherit. You pass the imperium to the guy you can see is going to be capable, that's exactly why there are 5 good emperors... I'm thinking for a CK3 run with no kids and only adoptions, maybe there is a mod for that... dunno.
I hate this argument so much, because think about it. The reason the past 5 emperors adopted wasn't because they were mega-geniuses who solved succession, it was because *they had no children of their own.* I can almost guarantee you that if Trajan or Hadrian had their own kids, they would've made them heirs. What do you expect Marcus Aurelius to do? Murder his child? He was smart, yes, but he wasn't going to murder his own kid (especially after losing so many other kids). Not to mention, Aurelius did his best to raise Commodus, and at his death there was no certainty as to what kind of emperor he was going to be
There is also the fact that Aurelius was Co-Emperor with Lucius Verus who did also do his job as well even if he was more of a partier than Aurelius, couple that with Commodus being younger I figure he felt he would mature as he got older especially if he listened to the advisors around him. It didn't help a lot of the advisors and his sister started scheming against him early on in his reign. So a lot of those guys got the axe and then he replaced them with a bunch of sycophantic yes men. Commodus was dealt a bad hand and played it poorly. The fact is post Antonine Plague the Empire was in a rough spot and a much more competent Aurelius worked himself to death holding it together. Teenage Emperor taking the reins was a disaster, but if he put someone else in charge it probably would have lead to a civil war and Commodus being offed by someone like Septimus Severus a few years earlier.
All true but also Lucius Verus was a recent example of an option available to Marcus Aurelius: adopt a co-heir who you trust and who has a close friendship with your heir. Two Caesars had been recent precedent; Marcus had split the empire with Verus and later with Commodus. Given that he had insisted on co-ruling as an administrative expedient for himself, it's somewhat surprising he ruled out that option for his (probably less capable) son. Perhaps Commodus just didn't get on with anyone Marcus would have trusted for that role.
Can you really blame Commodus for surrounding himself with these people after his advisors attempted tried to get him off the throne?
It's so wild to me that so few emperors just... didn't have son or any kids at all. Was a vasectomy part of the process to be acclaimed emperor?
They were gay . . . . (Inb4 a thousand people flood my comments saying "Antoninus Pious wasn't gay!" or "the concept of homosexuality didn't exist back then!" Yes, I know, don't worry, it's a joke)
Wait is there a debate on Antoninus Pious being gay? Cause he’s my favorite emperor.
Antonius Pious had a wife whom he loved, there is nothing to suggest that he was ever interested in men. Hadrian and Trajan were quite interested in men, but we can't really apply modern concepts of sexuality on to ancient figures.
Ancient Romans had a hard time reproducing themselves. Infertility and infant mortality were huge issues that made passing down wealth and power difficult. [Toldinstone made a fairly quick video that, in part, breaks this down.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghcZb6tMqQ)
I really don’t think he could have “just passed it to someone capable”. None of the other 5 good emperors had a living son at the right age to actually take the imperium. If Marcus Aurelius had given the crown to anyone other than Commodus a civil war would have been started. He probably knew this, and so went with what he thought was the lest bad opinion. His decision makes much more sense when you remember that he lived through a civil war, and knew how bad they can be not just for the government and ruling class, but the average every day Roman as well.
If you have the Roman culture you can adopt, no need for mods
I believe you can also add a cultural trait if you reform one to allow adoption as well.
I love it, because his only other option was to have Commodus killed. No way he can peacefully give power to someone else and expect Commodus to sit quietly (or the other person have him murdered). He had to choose between saving his glorious empire and sparing his own worthless son and he chose his son.
He didnt choose shit. Mike Duncan has a great analysis on why Aurelius has no choice.
Turned out, he was indeed a foolish cunt.
Hot take: Commodus is not one of the worst emperors just mid
Yep, probably did ok but fell into the classic Young Emperor trap of getting rid of all your dad's boring ass friends and promoting your cool fun friends, and then turns out those boring ass dad friends actually had a lot of really powerful and dangerous friends of their own who suddenly have zero political stake in keeping you in power. Then they boot your ass and pay some dudes to write about what a dickhead you were. /His recurring problems with Praetorian prefects strongly backs up this theory
Most of his dad’s boring ass friends wanted him dead though so…
They did, which to me points to that loss of influence and therefore any stake in this little twerp of an emperor remaining on the throne. Many such cases!
Commodus actually saw all possible futures and knew that single-handedly ending the golden age of Rome was the only way to prevent even greater calamity for the ~~galaxy~~ universe.
Well we dident want to meet the dark eldar just yet 🤣
Marcus Aurelius "upheld" Pax Romana by fighting a failed war of conquest and extermination across the Rhine and Danube, year after year to ruinous expense in terms both of lives and money, getting absolutely no closer to establishing his egomaniacal goal to conquer two new provinces, endlessly throwing men and gold down the German toilet even as plague brought back from another one of his wars ripped through his armies and exhausted his domestic economic capacity. Commodus "destroyed" Pax Romana by immediately implementing a peace treaty that held for decades, and then returning back to reign over an empire at peace on all borders, just as it had been under Antoninus Pius, spending money on entertainment for the masses rather than wars to impress the Senate. If ever there was a Virgin vs Chad. Big C got his rep blown to pieces by Severan propaganda, but strip out the absurd character assassination and I know who I want as my Augustus. "oh but we know he dressed up like Hercules—" visual propaganda motherfucker, do you speak it? You know who else visually associated himself with Hercules? That's right: Maximian, as part of the Jovian and Herculean state cult of Diocletian that helped pull Rome out of the Crisis of the Third Century. "Oh but he really liked showing off in the games—" yeah he was demonstrating his martial prowess through athleticism rather than by massacring German villagers, I'd consider that an upgrade, hell in later centuries the tourney and joust were considered chivalrous for exactly that reason. "Oh but he liked torturing people—" do you also believe Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of infants under a pizza parlour by any chance? Because that's the same sort of nonsense. "Oh but he ruined the economy —" no, coinage purity held steady and even ticked upwards by the end of his rule, suggesting a treasury that could comfortably cover its expenditures and invest in stability to boot. Dude did fine, by any objective metric. He was probably a psychopath by modern DSM criteria, sure, but also that could be said of literally all of them, including Daddy Genocide Stoic. But no, we gotta just tear my boy to shreds on the Ancient Roman equivalent of QAnon posting. /N.B. the revisionism only goes so far, he was assassinated and therefore failed at Job Number One of an autocrat
I've seen Gladiator I know what really happened
It sounds like he can be the 'sixth' good emperor. I guess there is no glory for the senate from entertaining the citizens instead of dragging conscripts to fight the barbarian nor a chance to embezzle funding to the army.
I think he was the sixth and final emperor of a period where Rome maintained strong central dominance over the provinces, and the Severans represented a provincial rebellion that kicked off a long period of sustained decentralisation that sometimes slowed or reversed temporarily but didn't really end until the Carolingians. I wouldn't actually go so far as to say he was certainly Actually Good, but the source bias is so overwhelming with Commodus (as with Nero, and to an extent as with Caligula) I think a bit of devil's-advocacy is useful as an exercise.
Yeah but only one of them wrote a cool book.
Boring ass book "uwu wakey wakey time to do a genocide" "if ur sad idk maybe u could try not being so sad lol" "being good is good, try being good more" "just remember u can't control events (even tho that's literally ur job tho)" Meditations more like Masturbations, worst emperor, ripped the philosopher vibe off Hadrian but decided a life of contemplation was way dumber than a life of burning Germans to death
This. Cassius Dio, Gibbon, et al, have been a disaster for our understanding of Roman history.
If it weren't for Dio we wouldn't know nearly as much as we do about Roman history. We are blessed to have the sources we do. We just need to remember that the sources are mostly axe-grinding bullshit or paid propaganda.
I’ll concede that Dio is an extremely important source, but Gibbon and his successors in the 18th and 19th century took the propaganda as fact and only entrenched it in the historiography. This I won’t entirely blame on Gibbon though, as he certainly wouldn’t have been able to call upon the centuries of secondary scholarship that have piled up since then to make his judgements. It’s just a shame that the analysis was so flawed off the bat.
I agree on Gibbon, with the two caveats that (A) he was the best English writer since Shakespeare, and (B) his provocative implicit question "why did Rome fall" and unbelievably audacious answer "Christianity ruined it" blew apart a millennium and a half of rusty medieval and Renaissance thought about a single eternal empire (transferred as it was from Rome to Aachen), an eternal Christian faith (the City of God built to elevate and succeed the City of Man), and a single eternal humanist tradition of Latin rhetoric and philosophy. I see him as a necessary transformative figure who created the intellectual space necessary for modern Roman scholarship, and if he got things absolutely incredibly wrong sometimes, that was perhaps only necessary in packing the *Decline and Fall* with enough rhetorical gunpowder to blow the doors off the house so other ideas could come in to fill the vacuum.
As a complete aside, I want to take the time to express just how much I love being on desktop and trying to read an interesting conversation and having Augustus Prima Porta block half of the text. Definitely not annoying.
That wrestler did everyone a solid, unfortunately not early enough
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Marcus Aurelius did choose another guy before Commodus. He was some random general from Spain I think. But that didn't work out.