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In the second century BC, Roman troops razed the city of Carthage and obliterated its civilisation. So why, asks Eve MacDonald, did the victors remain obsessed by their conquered foes for the next 200 years?
Carthage burned for six days. After three long years of siege, in the spring of 146 BC Roman soldiers finally broke through the city’s defences and began to slaughter the population. But still the Carthaginians resisted. Street by street, they threw themselves at their enemy. Rome’s relentless military machine moved from the city’s ports, across the temple-filled marketplace and up the streets that lined the central hill. There they were assailed by projectiles hurled down from roofs by women, children and old men. Yet the Romans’ fierce assault on that already ancient city on the north African coast could not be stopped. They went from house to house, ascending to roofs, rooting out Carthaginians from their hiding places. Houses burned and bodies lined the streets while a unit of ‘sweeper’ soldiers cleared away the dead to allow access for more troops. The scene, as told by the Greek historian Appian – in what, it seems, was an eyewitness account – paints a gruesome picture of conquest in the ancient world. It was so brutal, in fact, that the Roman commander, Scipio Aemelianus, had to change his troops frequently, sending in fresh fighters to combat the Carthaginians’ desperate attempts to defend their land, their houses, their families, their gods and their very lives. Those attempts at defence came to nought. The people of Carthage were slaughtered or enslaved, their once-beautiful city left in smouldering ruins on the shores of the Mediterranean. As a result of the destruction, and of the memory of the wars fought between these two ancient superpowers, Carthage became an integral part of the story of Rome and its rise to empire. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/shutterstockeditorial14491209jWeb-Ready-b90d516.jpg" width="5824" height="3883" alt="A photograph of a ruin. The foreground is a large, ragged stone arch, and beyond it, there are some white columns coming out of various size of rocks" title="A century after destroying Carthage in 146 BC, Rome made the city the empire’s main urban centre in Africa, installing familiar elements such as the extensive Baths of Antoninus (Image by Shutterstock)" /> Stolen story The tale of Carthage became a lesson to all those who dared to challenge Rome. Once it had been razed, all that remained of the history of this great city was co-opted by its enemy. The story of those who had built and designed its urban landscape, its technologically superior ports, its defensive walls, and its multi-story houses with indoor plumbing and waters cisterns disappeared. So, too, the memory of its mothers, fathers, grandparents and children – all inundated beneath the tales Romans told of their great victory. In the centuries that followed, the complex culture of Carthage was largely reduced to a simplistic account of Roman wars. Nonetheless, Carthage and all it stood for became a foundational part in the Roman story. The victors believed that, in defeating the Carthaginians, Rome had become the imperial power it is still renowned as today. That view is clear in the comments of the Roman historian Livy, writing well over 100 years after the fall of Carthage – and following many other wars – who remembered the events of the second conflict between the two powers (218–201 BC) as “the most memorable war ever fought”. But who were the Carthaginians? We remember very few of its citizens, even though their city had stood on the north coast of Africa – its ruins now preserved just east of Tunis – for over 600 years before its destruction. Thanks to its location and rich agricultural land, Carthage was prosperous, and its influence stretched across the central and western Mediterranean, a thriving hub with connections to east and west. The city was founded by Phoenician-speaking people in the ninth century BC – and the story of that genesis is intertwined with Roman myths of their own civilisation’s origins. In particular, one recounted by the poet Virgil (70–19 BC) told of a famous queen named Dido, who tempted the Trojan hero Aeneas and played the femme fatale in the epic story of Rome’s foundation. Born a Phoenician princess named Elishat, Dido had clashed with her brother in Tyre (now in Lebanon) and left to lead an expedition to the western Mediterranean where, according to the legend, she established her new city. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/2F7T19TWeb-Ready-e8652c6.jpg" width="4560" height="3040" alt="A brown and gold mosaic showing a couple with their arms wrapped around each other. On either side of them are trees with winding trunks and brown leaves" title="The mythological Phoenician princess Dido, who reputedly founded Carthage, shown with the Trojan hero Aeneas in a Roman mosaic. Virgil painted Dido as a temptress, reinforcing Roman views of Carthaginians as duplicitous (Image by Alamy)" /> Melting pot The Phoenician name for Carthage was Qart Hadasht – ‘the New City’. From its very earliest days, it was a melting pot of cultures. Here, north Africans (called Numidians or Libyans in the Greek and Roman sources, today known as Amazigh), Greeks and Phoenicians from ancient centres of the eastern Mediterranean lived and intermarried, along with various Semitic-speaking peoples and others from western regions. As the city evolved into a state, it created new citizens who, by the fifth century BC, had become Carthaginians. This colonial story reflects the origins of so many of the great cities of the western Mediterranean, whose origins were a mix of eastern Mediterranean and indigenous western peoples. Carthage was, like Rome, founded under a monarchical rule that evolved into a republican-styled oligarchy built on a mix of religious traditions and ethnicities. Archaeological excavations have revealed more about these years. They tell us that it was not an easy start for the Carthaginians, the population growing slowly from the city’s foundation on a hill called Byrsa. But within a few centuries they were producing steel in their forges, exporting agricultural produce and importing luxury goods from the east, west, north and south. Material found in burials in the city reflects a dialogue between different influences from the eastern Mediterranean, central Italy and the far west. There are decorated ostrich eggs and gold jewellery with Egyptian-influenced imagery, and unguents and perfumes imported in delicate vessels from the east. Carthaginians traded across the Mediterranean, and were allied to many different cities and states – including the Romans, whose earliest known treaty was with Carthage, in the sixth century BC. The two cities shared cults, competed for markets and had related families; they were friends before they ever became enemies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/426522001cmykwebready-b3a37d5.jpg" width="3071" height="2048" alt="A Carthaginian limestone stela fragment featuring the anthropomorphic symbol believed to represent Tanit, their most important female deity (Image by the Trustees of the British Museum)" title="A Carthaginian limestone stela fragment featuring the anthropomorphic symbol believed to represent Tanit, their most important female deity (Image by the Trustees of the British Museum)" /> The Phoenician cities of the Levant – broadly, from Lebanon to Syria, Israel and Palestine today – were conquered by the Achaemenid Persian empire in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. That changed the relationship between Carthage and its mother city, Tyre, providing the catalyst for the African city to grow into its own power. This coincided with an increasingly linked Mediterranean world and a boom in wealth and knowledge across the region – with Carthage in the middle of it all. Phoenician-speaking peoples from ancient cities such as Byblos, Tyre, Sidon and Beirut (all in what’s now Lebanon) had spread out across the Mediterranean, bringing with them an alphabet that was adopted by the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans, and which seeded the characters we still use today. From the eighth and seventh centuries BC, connected cities were established on Sicily, Sardinia, Malta, the Balearic Islands, the north coast of Africa and the southern coast of Spain and Portugal, all of which shared a Phoenician language and culture of origin. Paradigm of power At the centre of this network was Carthage, which grew powerful and wealthy – but also became drawn into conflict with other city states in the region, especially on the island of Sicily, which by the mid-third century BC was partially under direct Carthaginian control. In c264 BC, the Romans launched an all-out war on Sicily that shifted the paradigm of power and, in their own records, created a new narrative about their might. The Greek historian Polybius (c200–c118 BC)sets up his account of the rise of Rome with the lines: “I shall take as my starting point the first time that the Romans crossed to Sicily.” From the late third century BC, as the Romans fought wars with Carthage, they also started to write about them. Only fragments of lost epic poetry survive from this period, but these few words are some of the earliest surviving pieces of Latin prose and verse, including Naevius’s Bellum Poenicum (The Punic War). So the Carthaginians, and the wars they fought with Rome, were a foundational part of the creation of Latin literature. The events of these so-called Punic Wars (more on that name later) shaped the very nature of the written culture that went on to influence all of the literature of the later European languages that derive from Latin. A Carthaginian history of the wars survived, too, and we know that pro-Carthaginian (or at least anti-Roman) histories existed in the second century BC, mentioned by Polybius. These are now long lost, with only a few fragments remaining in later sources. So, though Carthage is embedded in the history of Latin literature, only the Roman view survives. The First Punic War lasted over 20 years, exhausting both sides. As a result, it’s often compared to the First World War in its devastating, and unintended, impact. Polybius described the combatants as “like two equally matched boxers, both courageous, fighting it out for a prize”. At the war’s end in 241 BC – Rome having claimed Sicily, but only briefly invaded north Africa – both sides were almost bankrupt and had lost tens of thousands of soldiers and marines. The peace was only ever likely to be temporary, giving the two cities time to regroup. Because Carthage had lost, it had to pay war indemnity to Rome for 10 years – and the peace held for only a few years longer than the payments continued. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/HNNYGBWeb-Ready-7f6a4db.jpg" width="5400" height="3600" alt="A painting showing a man dressed in a pink gown and turban, riding an elephant across a field, surrounded by a large crowd of people carrying spears. In the background, there are some trees, mountains and a cloudy sky" title="A 16th-century fresco shows the Carthaginian general Hannibal on an elephant during his 218 BC offensive into the Roman heartland, epitomising the bravery attributed to his people by Rome (Image by Alamy)" /> The Second Punic War between the two great cities began just 23 years after the end of the first. The Carthaginian general Hannibal, son of the famous commander Hamilcar Barca, led an army into Italy and challenged the power of Rome in its heartland. That he did this in an attempt to protect the Carthaginian lands of Spain and Africa from an imminent Roman attack in 218 BC is largely forgotten. History blames Hannibal for the war, even though our ancient sources acknowledge so much confusion around the actual causes of the conflict that, just 60 years later, Polybius referred to the details as “the common gossip of a barber shop”. This was contested history in action – and we know today, more than ever, that historical ‘truth’ is not always easy to come by. When Hannibal crossed the Alps with war elephants, horses and an army, he created a legend for posterity – and sparked mayhem in Italy. Between 218 and 216 BC, he won over to his side forces formerly allied with Rome, and defeated Roman armies in battle after battle. The Roman memory of Hannibal and the challenge he presented to their state in these years really epitomises how much the Romans created themselves in the face of their battles with Carthage. In the Roman mind, Hannibal was the perfect enemy: brave, intelligent and committed, but also cruel, treacherous and without integrity, according to Livy. It is worth noting that Livy used a famous Latin phrase – “perfidia plus quam Punica” – which translates as “a treachery more than Punic”. This epitomises the cultural stereotype that the Romans created for the Carthaginians, using the term ‘Punic’ to refer to the culture and language of Carthage. The word comes from the Latin poenus, thought to derive from the city’s founders, the Phoenicians. ‘Punic’ was an ethnic stereotype current in Latin literature by the late third and early second century BC. By the time Livy wrote his history, between 27 and 9 BC, this concept had become very important to the memory of Carthage. That’s because by then the Carthaginians no longer existed: that civilisation had been destroyed well over 100 years earlier. In Livy’s era, a new Roman colony was being built on the land taken from the Carthaginians. It was also a time when Virgil’s epic poem of Roman identity, the Aeneid, linked Dido and Aeneas – who, according to the myth, became the ancestor of the Romans – in popular memory as star-crossed lovers. The Aeneid refers to the Carthaginians as deceitful: it calls them “the double-tongued people of Tyre”, tying them to their near-eastern roots and to duplicity. The poem served the interests of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, painting the Carthaginians as the offspring of a vengeful woman, who aimed to destroy Rome. The second century AD satirist Juvenal described Hannibal as “the one-eyed commander/ perched on his monstrous beast!” For Romans of the second century, the Carthaginians had been distilled down to these two caricatures – the wily Dido and the monstrous Hannibal. Roman propaganda The Roman imperial propaganda machine so convincingly painted the Carthaginians as monsters to be destroyed, rather than rivals to be contended with, that the story of their culture is difficult to tell today. The reality is that the wars between Carthage and Rome were fought between two powerful city states, formerly allies, for control over the western Mediterranean. After Carthage was destroyed in 146 BC, the survivors scattered across Africa or were enslaved across the Mediterranean, and Carthaginian culture was slowly absorbed into the landscape of a new imperial power. Gradually, the western Mediterranean came to speak Latin, not Phoenician or Greek as many of its people had previously, and Rome dominated the region for the next 600 years. But the memory of Carthage persisted. The Aeneid, Livy’s history of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita) and the stories of epic war created a lasting, compelling memory of the Roman past. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History tells us, “a statue of Hannibal may be seen in three places in [Rome] within the walls of which he alone of its national foes had hurled a spear”. Loot from Carthage decorated Rome, and the visual memory of the north African city was embedded in the stories of the battles re-enacted in public games and celebrations. During Rome’s civil wars, the general Marius fled and took refuge at Carthage, resting among the ruins. The historian Velleius Paterculus wrote that “he endured a life of poverty in a hut amid the ruins of Carthage. There, Marius, as he gazed upon Carthage, and Carthage as she beheld Marius, might well have offered consolation the one to the other.” The Romans framed their own rise to power and empire through their defeat of the Carthaginians, and these stories have preserved a narrative of the city for us today. At the end of antiquity, this memory continued to fascinate, and the idea of Carthage persevered in works ranging from those of Arabic geographers to the Renaissance translations of Latin epics. For centuries, Europeans framed their own wars in the shadow of Rome and Carthage: when Napoleon crossed the Alps in 1800 en route to the battle of Marengo in Piedmont, he echoed Hannibal’s great journey (famously depicted in David’s painting Napoleon Crossing the Alps). Each year, new scientific techniques and discoveries expand our understanding, and reveal more of a different story of the people of Carthage. But an enduring fact is that without Carthage, the Roman empire as we know it would not have existed. Eve MacDonald is senior lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University. Her latest book, Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire, was published by Ebury in August
Alice Roberts: “Christianity didn’t invent itself as an empire from nothing: it adapted existing Roman structures”
Alice Roberts speaks to Danny Bird about the evolution of the new religion that swept across the Roman empire and beyond
Danny Bird: What made you decide to write about the collapse of the western Roman empire and the rise of Christianity? Alice Roberts: I’ve long been fascinated by this historical period, especially in Britain, where written records are scarce. This book grew from my interest in burial archaeology, shaped by excavations I took part in 20 years ago on a Welsh cliff. Bones were eroding from the cliff face, and we uncovered cist graves – stone-lined, coffin-like structures – some dating from as early as the fifth century. One grave even had a stone lid carved with a simple cross. These early Christian burials sparked my curiosity. More recently, I visited an excavation at Llantwit Major, where archaeologists are investigating what may be Britain’s earliest monastery, possibly dating to the fifth century. This raised further questions: why was Christianity spreading so early? And who was behind it? Rather than relying on broad generalisations, my book focuses on individuals: the people who carried Christianity across regions, and their motives. A story that began with burials in Wales led me across the Roman world from Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) to Alexandria, aiming to find out how Christianity spread so widely, and what that reveals about the fall of the western Roman empire. Christianity presents itself as a faith for the powerless, but your book suggests that it was adopted by urban elites in its early centuries. How does this challenge the mythology surrounding its origins? It stands in stark contrast, really. It’s a tricky point, because those writing about Christianity were necessarily literate members of the elite. So, from the outset, we’re seeing a movement that appears to have spread among relatively well-off individuals. By the fourth century, it had clearly reached the highest echelons of Roman society. Emperor Constantine had begun to take notice, convening a council of bishops in AD 325. But even in the earliest years, this was a movement involving influential figures. Take Saint Paul – or Saul, as he was originally known. One of his first actions was to meet the governor of Cyprus – not preaching to the poor but engaging with powerful individuals in the Roman empire who had the means to support him. The governor then sent him back to what is now Turkey to reconnect with his family. It seems that Paul recognised that patronage by adopting the governor’s name, ‘Paulus’ – which is a very Roman thing to do when offered someone’s backing. What’s your take on Constantine? Is it right to describe him as the ‘Christian emperor’? It’s not as straightforward as it seems. We have a biography written after his death by Eusebius, who explicitly claims that Constantine was Christian and experienced a conversion on the way to the battle of the Milvian Bridge. Eusebius describes Constantine having a vision and carrying a Chi-Rho [a combination of chi and rho, the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ] into battle, supposedly with Christ supporting him. It’s quite striking, because at that point the context is entirely military: Christ becomes someone you want on your side as you move to defeat the emperor in Rome and claim sole rule. (Constantine was never destined to be emperor; he effectively eliminated the other three rulers until he was the last man standing.) Eusebius asserts that Constantine’s conversion occurred en route to that decisive battle. Afterwards, Constantine erected a triumphal arch in Rome. If the vision and conversion had truly occurred en route to the Milvian Bridge, you might expect some Christian symbolism on that arch – but there’s none. Instead, it’s full of traditional Roman iconography. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-486776899webready-38d8437.jpg" width="4369" height="2913" alt="Did Constantine’s (above left) use of the Chi-Rho symbol indicate his Christian faith, or was that a later interpretation? (Image by Getty Images)" title="Did Constantine’s (above left) use of the Chi-Rho symbol indicate his Christian faith, or was that a later interpretation? (Image by Getty Images)" /> What’s important to remember is that none of this history comes to us without agenda. Any written account, then or now, reflects the perspective of its author. Eusebius – a bishop – clearly had reasons to portray Constantine as a committed Christian. However, when you examine Constantine’s broader communications – particularly coins, which were vital tools of imperial messaging in a largely illiterate empire – you see something different. His coins continued to depict Roman gods including Sol, to whom he appeared especially drawn, well after his supposed conversion. That led me to investigate the Chi-Rho more closely. More than 1,000 different coin designs were minted during Constantine’s reign, and only a handful bear the Chi-Rho. Even on those coins, it appears in subtle ways: on a military standard, on a helmet – all very martial in character. Read more | “The Roman empire cannot have been governed by a series of psychopaths. It would not have survived”: Mary Beard on Roman Emperors What surprised me most was discovering the Chi-Rho’s ancient origins. The symbol appears in pre-Christian literature and papyri. There’s even one on a Greek bust dating back to a time before the supposed birth date of Jesus Christ. The most plausible explanation from the papyri is that Chi-Rho was originally an abbreviation for the Greek word archōn, meaning ‘ruler’, not Christos as Eusebius claimed. So even if Constantine did carry the symbol into battle, did it mean Christ? Or was that the first time anyone interpreted it that way? Up until then, it meant something else entirely. And we can’t even be sure he used it in the battle. Another contemporary account says he carried a cross, not a Chi-Rho. Why do you think the early Roman church was able to so deftly fill the power vacuum as imperial rule declined? Christianity didn’t invent itself as an empire from nothing: it adapted existing Roman structures. Early on, it functioned like a collegium – a Roman guild – offering social support, patronage and mutual aid, just as Roman professional associations did. This model suited the well-to-do among Roman society, and helped embed Christianity within everyday life. As elites adopted Christianity, it became tightly woven into their world. Roman aristocrats were educated in the liberal arts, and expected to govern provinces and cities. Over time, church institutions began to provide this same education, adding scripture to the traditional Roman curriculum, the cursus honorum, which fast-tracked noble-born Roman men into various civic offices. Christianity thus became the default cultural and ideological framework for elite careers. By the fifth century, bishops had effectively become city administrators, assuming roles once held by imperial officials – such as distributing the grain dole. Rather than creating something entirely new, Christianity absorbed and continued Roman civic functions. This fusion made the church remarkably resilient. As the western Roman empire fragmented, Christian bishops continued running cities. In Gaul, for instance, elite families retained their status across the Roman, Visigothic and Frankish regimes. Individuals such as Saint Sidonius Apollinaris exemplify this continuity, remaining influential under the shifting political circumstances. It’s unlikely that anyone at the time consciously planned to create a resilient ideological-administrative system that could survive the empire’s collapse. They were probably more concerned with preserving their own careers and ensuring opportunities for their children. For instance, elite Roman families would have been thinking pragmatically about how to secure a future for their sons amid instability. Of course, reducing everything to economics would be simplistic. Christianity was also a compelling system of ideas and belief. Many were genuinely devout, drawn to the religion for spiritual reasons, whereas others were more focused on its social and political benefits. These different motivations coexisted and contributed to Christianity’s development. There was no single way to be a Roman Christian. Is this Roman-ness still evident in Christian practice and ritual? The fact that the pope still rules from Rome and has the title of Pontifex Maximus (the most senior priestly rank in the ancient Roman religion), together with the church’s use of Latin and its adoption of imperial purple, all perpetuates this legacy. Plus, high-ranking members of the church are often canonised, echoing the Roman practice of deifying emperors. I traced some of these continuing rituals in my earlier books. When writing Buried (2022), I looked at Roman graveside feasting rituals, particularly at a burial in Caerleon, south-east Wales. A pipe from the surface was used by mourners to pour libations into the grave while holding feasts there – not just on the day of the funeral, but also nine days and 50 days afterwards, as well as on set days for honouring the dead. When I mentioned this pipe burial to my Russian friend Natasha, who grew up in Siberia, she exclaimed: “We did that!” She described a day when families would gather with food in cemeteries, the adults drinking vodka. She believed this was a Russian Orthodox celebration called ‘Parents’ Day’. When I researched further, I discovered that it mirrored the Parentalia festival of the ancestors in the pre-Christian Roman calendar. Read more | Roman gods and goddesses: 17 of the most important deities of ancient Rome These traditions carried over into Christian practice. And such customs persist in both the Greek and Russian Orthodox calendars, as well as in the Catholic church and the Church of England. For instance, the moveable feast known as Pentecost occurs 50 days after Easter; elements of Pentecost recall Rosalia, an ancient Roman summer day of the dead, when graves were decorated with roses. It’s another example of Roman traditions persisting in Christian ritual to this day. A few weeks ago, I happened to be in Orvieto, Italy, on Pentecost. A friend told me to look out for the medieval procession, so I stayed to watch. It was remarkable – people in full medieval dress parading through the streets to the cathedral, and women carrying great armfuls of flowers. The tradition continues. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/A0R03Cwebready-245b12f.jpg" width="5020" height="3347" alt="Children parade with flowers at the Sciò la Pica Pentecost festival in Monterubbiano. Like many other Italian celebrations, this tradition seems to be rooted in ancient pre-Christian beliefs (Image by Alamy)" title="Children parade with flowers at the Sciò la Pica Pentecost festival in Monterubbiano. Like many other Italian celebrations, this tradition seems to be rooted in ancient pre-Christian beliefs (Image by Alamy)" /> What was the relationship between Christianity and pre-existing faiths and philosophical thought? The early Christians were Jewish, and Christianity emerged within a Hellenistic-Roman context. These influences were deeply intertwined. Greek philosophy played a huge role in shaping Christian ideas but, from the start, theology was diverse and fragmented. To maintain unity and authority, the early church had to suppress doctrinal splits. Councils such as that at Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey) in AD 325 were about enforcing consensus, not simply defining belief. Still, divisions continued: between east and west, and, much later, Protestant and Catholic, because interpretation remained contested. Claims of Christianity’s radical uniqueness are often overstated. There are strong parallels with other cults, such as that of Mithras, and even Roman emperors’ devotion to a single god in the classical pantheon suggests a tendency towards monotheism. The term ‘paganism’ to describe non-Christian beliefs is a Christian invention, originally derogatory, which implied that the individuals who adhered to such beliefs were rustic or not ‘soldiers’ of Christ. We still use it for lack of a better alternative, though it defines by exclusion. The idea that Christianity invented charity is false, too. Roman society valued public service, and philanthropy was expected, especially from the elite. Caring for the vulnerable was essential to civic life. What Christianity did was adapt to the needs of growing urban centres. As cities expanded and poverty increased, the church offered a system to manage – not eliminate – urban destitution. Supporting the poor served both moral and political aims, helping to extract wealth from the rich while reinforcing the church’s influence. How important were Roman bishops and saints in entrenching the hegemony of Christianity more widely? That was very evident in the Celtic west, where Christianity was spreading as the Roman empire disintegrated, in locations that the empire never fully reached – places such as Ireland. You see early Christianity spreading through individuals with very Roman names – including Patricius, otherwise known as Saint Patrick. There are fascinating tales of voyaging saints, often travelling in small coracles, sometimes even with stone coffins. These journeys were just a continuation of what the elite were already doing. They were extremely well connected. In the hagiographies and accounts of these voyages, the saints are rarely heading to places where no Christian has ever been. By the time we hear about these saints, they’re visiting other Christians, often kings. These so-called ‘missionary’ journeys often involved being welcomed at royal courts. It’s always been about nobility and the interconnectedness of powerful families. Some of these saints were bishops, some kings; some began as generals and became bishops. Take, for example, Germanus of Auxerre. He remained rather military in outlook. At the request of the bishop of Rome, he travelled to Britain to deal with the growing divergence in Christian practice, which was causing concerns that the British might splinter away from the church in Rome. So Germanus was sent to bring them back in line, arriving with troops and even joining some battles. It’s striking how these figures, often romanticised as humble ascetics, were anything but isolated. They didn’t retreat from the world; instead, they established themselves close to the seats of power – for example, Saint Cuthbert on Inner Farne island, overlooking Bamburgh Castle. Do you think it’s time we stopped talking about the ‘fall of Rome’ and start seeing it more as a rebrand? I absolutely do. You’ve hit the nail on the head. This is essentially the thesis of my book. The Roman empire, particularly in the east, continued for another thousand years until the Ottomans entered Constantinople in 1453, marking its end. When the Ottomans took that city, the sultans declared themselves to be the Qaisar-e-Rum (‘Caesars of Rome’). In other words, they saw themselves as the inheritors of that legacy. In the west, the empire officially disintegrated in the fifth century but, as we’ve discussed, much of its culture endured and was repurposed by those who filled the power vacuum. If we define the empire as the emperor, then that connection is severed. But if we understand the empire as the broader system – its administration, education and social hierarchy – then that continues under the Roman church. Read more | Religion in Roman Britain: spreading the word of the gods You’re a former president of Humanists UK and one of Britain’s best-known atheists. How did that shape your approach to this foundational era of Christian history? I hope it didn’t, because I’m trying to approach this history by meeting people on their own terms and understanding why this set of ideas was being spread. In the book, I focus mainly on the political, economic and cultural perspectives. In some ways, that means I’m not approaching it from a position of personal investment in the ideas themselves, though I’m fascinated by them. I know a fair bit about them, having been brought up as a Christian, and being immersed in that tradition. I’m especially interested in where those traditions come from – for example, how some church festivals today trace back to pre-Christian times. I think Christianity is a compelling and important part of our culture. As society becomes more secular, and biblical knowledge declines, we risk losing sight of Christian history. Yet there’s still, I feel, a tendency to obscure the history of early Christianity, treating it as if it simply appeared fully formed. For me, it’s about cultural evolution: understanding where it began, who adopted it and who helped spread it. I hope I’ve explored that as objectively as possible. Alice Roberts is an anthropologist, broadcaster and author, based at the University of Birmingham. Her newest Channel 4 series, Roman Empire by Train, will air early in 2026. She will be touring the UK with her new book, Domination, from August to November. alice-roberts.co.uk/tour This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Caesar's funeral drama: anger and revenge after death
The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC drove tensions sky-high in ancient Rome. As Jessica Clarke reveals, plays staged at his funeral were carefully chosen to inflame anger and incite revenge on his killers
On 20 March 44 BC, a violent death in Rome was about to send assembled masses into uproar – sparking pandemonium that threatened to engulf the city. The incident described by the ancient biographer Suetonius wasn’t a real murder but, rather, the climax of a theatre show. If we reconstruct the performance, using both Suetonius’s writing and fragments of the scripts that survive from the time, we can picture the leading actor standing in the centre of the stage before a packed auditorium. He would have raised his sword over his head and declaimed boldly, his voice ringing out across the stands: “What, did I save these men so that they might murder me?” With these words, he would have plunged the blade into his chest. Falling forward onto the stage, he would then ‘die’ slowly and dramatically in front of his enthralled audience. Cries of sorrow broke out from the audience, Suetonius tells us, and shouts of indignation were raised against the characters who had instigated his suicide. Like so many other theatre shows at the time, which are recorded for us by the ancient writer, orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, this performance – staged in the last years of the collapsing Roman Republic – caused a volcanic reaction among the crowd. The performance was part of the funeral of Gaius Julius Caesar. Five days earlier, the Roman general and dictator had been stabbed to death at a senate meeting by a group of conspirators. The city had gone into mourning, and a huge celebration had been organised to commemorate Caesar’s military and political achievements. It would include the usual eulogy and burning of the funeral pyre – but the centrepiece of the event would comprise two magnificent theatre shows. Incendiary shows First came the Contest for the Arms of Achilles, set during the legendary Trojan War. In it, Greek heroes Ajax and Odysseus argue over who should keep the sword and shield of their deceased comrade. Odysseus wins the debate and is proclaimed the victor. Unable to bear his defeat, Ajax takes his own life. According to Suetonius, this staging of the mythical story was designed to provoke a visceral reaction in the crowd – one of intense “pity and indignation” for the wrongful death of the great hero. He also informs us that the tumult continued into the performance of a second play, Electra, which also retells a Greek mythological story. Set a few years after the events of the Trojan War, it follows the story of the eponymous young heroine, who seeks revenge on her father’s assassins. With the help of her brother, Orestes, she exacts her retribution and returns the throne to its rightful heir. Read more | The shockingly simple question historian Tom Holland would ask Julius Caesar Suetonius recounts that this performance, like the first, was greeted with “shouts of indignation” from the crowd. Rome, already a tinderbox of intrigue and rival factions, threatened to erupt into chaos. Events in the city had progressed at a dizzying pace. At the beginning of the year, Julius Caesar had been at the height of his powers. Yet by the middle of March he was dead – and, just days later, his funeral seemed poised to descend into violent mayhem. How had popular feeling in Rome reached such a climactic fervour? And what could have ignited such violent reactions in the audience at the great leader’s funeral? Assassination plot Born in Rome in 100 BC, Julius Caesar had advanced swiftly through the ranks of the senate. Aged around 42, he had launched the lengthy campaign that led to the conquest of Gaul. On his return in 49 BC, he had come into conflict with his one-time ally, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus – now known as Pompey the Great – defeating him at the battle of Pharsalus the following year. And in January 44 BC he had been elected dictator perpetuo: dictator for life. This had caused panic among many in the Roman senate. Within the established Republican system, the office of dictator had been traditionally a temporary position held during a period of political or military crisis, with the incumbent expected to relinquish the role once the danger had passed. Now Caesar had, to all intents and purposes, been made the sole and permanent ruler of Rome. A plot was hatched by those opposed to this new state of affairs, led chiefly by Marcus Junius Brutus – the son of Caesar’s long-term mistress – and Gaius Cassius Longinus, Brutus’s brother-in-law. On the appointed day, Caesar would come to a senate meeting – and there he would be set upon with daggers. The now-familiar story goes that Caesar, waking early on the morning of the Ides (15th) of March, was warned by his worried wife, Calpurnia, not to go to the senate that day. As she told her husband, she had seen omens that foretold calamity if he left the safety of their home. But Caesar did not heed his wife’s advice, and attended the meeting as planned. As he took his seat of honour, the plotters gathered around him; suddenly, one tugged at his toga to reveal his chest – a signal to the others to act. Caesar was felled by 23 stab wounds, or so the story goes, uttering not a word until he saw the young Brutus among the assassins – when, as he lay dying, he murmured in Greek: “And you, child?” The conspirators had planned to drag his corpse to the river Tiber and to confiscate Caesar’s property. Instead, fearful of the dictator’s loyal friend Mark Antony – who’d been kept from the senate meeting that day – they fled, abandoning the lifeless body. According to Suetonius, three slaves eventually came and carried Caesar’s body home, with one arm hanging down from the litter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-587490474cmyk-b0fa33d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A crowd of people stand around a raised platform. On the platform, a man dressed in white stands, holding up a bloodied piece of cloth" title="Mark Antony displays Caesar’s bloodied toga while delivering an impassioned eulogy at his comrade’s funeral, shown in a 19th-century painting (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | Alternate history: what if Julius Caesar had not been assassinated? The assassins were right to fear Mark Antony’s reaction, which was both cunning and effective. Rather than seeking direct violent retribution against those who had plotted against his friend, Antony set about planning a spectacular funeral, orchestrating an event designed to stir up popular goodwill towards Caesar and fan the flames of hatred against the conspirators. And he began with a clever selection of plays. Show of strength Theatre performances had long comprised a traditional element of Roman funerals. The practice seems to have originated in the Etruscan civilisation who may have introduced wrestling and gladiatorial combats in the eighth century BC. In Rome, the earliest evidence of such shows relates to the funeral of Junius Brutus Pera in 264 BC, at which his sons seem to have organised gladiatorial shows on a temporary wooden stage. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-122321047-WL-3c001f7.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A stone carving shows 6 men dancing and playing games, wearing helmets and holding spears" title="Games and dances are depicted on an Etruscan tomb monument from the fifth century BC. This ancient Italic civilisation seems to have started the practice of staging funeral performances (Image by Getty Images)" /> Over time, such events became increasingly lavish; indeed, sumptuary laws were passed to curtail the greatest excesses of the wealthy elite. These upper-class funerals might include not only stage shows but also a procession of actors dressed up in costumes and masks to resemble deceased members of a great Roman family. Parading through the city’s streets, the procession celebrated the passage of the deceased from death to life, and reminded the crowds of that aristocratic family’s eminent lineage. Why did Antony select The Contest for the Arms of Achilles and Electra to be performed at Caesar’s funeral? What was he hoping to convey to his Roman audiences? On the surface, these seem rather odd choices, particularly Electra; that play (possibly a Latin translation of Sophocles’s earlier work, written in Greek in the fifth century BC) was by Atilius, whose work does not seem to have been well regarded in Rome. One late Republican commentator described his writing style as “iron” and “very harsh”, and Cicero decries Atilius’s Electra as being rather a bad play. However, exploring the two plays’ thematic content might reveal Antony’s motivation for his production choices. Written by Pacuvius, the Arms of Achilles begins just after the eponymous hero has been killed by an arrow shot from the Trojan ramparts. In the verbal contest for Achilles’ sword and shield that follows his death, Odysseus outsmarts Ajax, securing victory through cunning and subtle arguments. It might be seen as an apt metaphor for the situation in Rome in March 44 BC: two sides struggle for control of a powerful weapon, with the loyal Ajax ultimately losing to the duplicity of his comrades. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-122216797-WL-b9687ed.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A stone relief shows two people bent over in mourning, while a horse stands to the side" title="Electra and Orestes mourn their murdered father, King Agamemnon, in a fifth-century BC relief. A play of this story, chosen for Caesar’s funeral, highlighted the virtue of vengeance (Image by Getty Images)" /> If this was the message Antony intended to convey, he seems to have been successful. Suetonius recounts that the audience expressed furious outrage as they watched Ajax take his own life on stage. Did they draw a parallel between the death of the legendary Greek hero and the murder of Julius Caesar? Electra’s story of revenge, too, features themes that may have been deliberately intended to evoke the contemporary political situation: a wrongful murder and the righteousness of seeking retribution. Little wonder, then, that emotions were running high by the time Mark Antony took to the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum later that day. Inflammatory eulogy The exact words spoken by Antony during that famous eulogy are now lost. However, according to Suetonius, the central part of his speech was the recitation of a senatorial decree honouring Julius Caesar. As Antony read, he lingered over the passage of the decree in which every senator swore to protect Caesar – highlighting the contrast between these faithful promises and the events that had unfolded on 15 March. As a final flourish, Antony is said to have displayed Caesar’s bloodied toga to the crowd, pointing out each of the stab wounds. It was clearly a powerful performance, much like those that had just taken place in the theatre – and one that had a powerful effect. Read more | Who are the most underrated Roman emperors? As the funeral bier bearing Caesar’s body was carried into the Forum, the crowd rushed forward and set it alight before it reached the official site of the cremation. Bystanders heaped dry branches on top of the body, smashing up the seats and benches on which they had been sitting and adding them to the flames. Musicians and actors reportedly tore off their robes and threw them into the fire, while women tossed in their jewellery and their children’s amulets. As the mass outpouring of grief reached a climax, the fired-up masses turned from the flaming pyre and rampaged through the streets of Rome. Bent on destruction, they surged towards the houses of Brutus and Cassius – but were prevented from attacking by sentinels posted outside. Turning away, the crowd came across the unsuspecting poet Helvius Cinna – and, mistaking him for his near-namesake Cornelius Cinna, who had supported the conspiracy, killed him. They cut off his head and, mounting it on a spear, paraded it through the streets of Rome. Although Brutus and Cassius survived the night, they soon had to flee the city with their fellow conspirators. It would take Antony more than two years to track them down, finally facing them in October 42 BC at the battle of Philippi. And it was Antony who emerged victorious from this clash – as from the battle for popular approval in Rome. Caesar’s funeral began with theatre shows and ended with a bloody riot. With their themes of duplicity, murder and righteous revenge, the plays seem to have been selected very deliberately to provoke and nurture hysteria in the massed crowds. It is surprising, therefore, that very little about them is mentioned in accounts of the funeral, which tend to focus much more on the eulogy given by Mark Antony. When we think of theatre today, we think perhaps of Shaftesbury Avenue or Broadway – of decorous, darkly lit auditoria filled with well-dressed spectators. But in the ancient world, the theatre could be as riotous and politically impactful as any rhetoric declaimed from the speaker’s platform. Jessica Clarke’s new book, A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre, will be published by Liverpool University Press in December This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Rome's worst nightmare: the story of Spartacus
When the Spartacus revolt erupted in 73 BC, it exposed a terrifying truth: that the cocksure Roman Republic was nowhere near as invincible as it liked to believe. Guy de la Bédoyère takes up the story
It’s a measure of the enduring appeal of Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 swords-and-sandals epic that, when most of us hear the name Spartacus, a dimple-chinned Kirk Douglas springs immediately to mind. Heroic. Noble. Doomed. Roman citizens, it’s safe to say, saw Spartacus rather differently – as a rebellious slave who threatened the future of the Roman Republic. Violent. Disobedient. Dangerous. Though writing in the imperial Roman era long after the defeat of Spartacus, the words of the author Plutarch (AD 46–c120) capture something of the dread the warrior inspired. “It is said that, when he was first brought to Rome to be sold, a serpent was seen coiled about his face as he slept,” noted Plutarch, “and his wife, who was of the same tribe as Spartacus, a prophetess, and subject to visitations of the Dionysiac frenzy, declared it the sign of a great and formidable power which would end in misfortune.” So what’s the truth behind these very different legends? Why did Spartacus take up arms outside the gladiatorial arena? And why was the uprising he led – the third of the so-called Servile Wars, following rebellions in 135–132 BC and 104–c100 BC – perceived as being so threatening to Rome? Brutal degradations To answer these questions, it first helps to remember just how reliant upon slaves Rome had become by 73 BC, when the renegade band of trainee gladiators led by Spartacus burst out of their barracks in southern Italy. Their rebellion exposed the terrifying truth: that every city, every village and every villa estate was at risk from the slaves on whom every aspect of Roman life depended. Paradoxically, this reliance on slave labour had grown from Rome’s success. Having seen off the naval trading power of Carthage in three Punic Wars (264–241 BC, 218–201 BC and 149–146 BC), and having seized Greece in 146 BC, Rome had vastly increased its reach and territory. The Romans had also defeated Macedon and, in 133 BC, been granted the kingdom of Attalus III of Pergamon (spanning much of western Anatolia, now in Turkey) by the terms of his will. Booty poured into Rome. In an era when slavery was ubiquitous, this included the trafficking of human beings – a practice Rome industrialised on an unimaginably vast scale. Its generals brought back hundreds of thousands of slaves – people who were sold in its markets and put to work on tasks that ranged from looking after wealthy men and women in fine homes to labouring on plantations. For some of the least fortunate, the brutal degradations of the mines awaited. The streets of Rome heaved with slaves scuttling about on the business of their masters and mistresses. Then there were the gladiators. This profession had grown out of a funerary custom of the Etruscans (the people of central Italy from whom the Romans borrowed many traditions) to evolve into a central component of crowd-pleasing Roman entertainment, funded by the elite as part of their political competitiveness. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-170979965-CMYK-f7cdcdf.jpg" width="3898" height="2597" alt="Two men wrestle each other over a fountain. Around them, three other men stand in military stances" title="Wrestlers in a sixth-century BC Etruscan tomb fresco near Tarquinia, central Italy. Roman gladiatorial games evolved from Etruscan funerary customs" /> Among those gladiators was Spartacus. Born in Thrace, an area in the south-eastern Balkans spanning parts of modern Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, Spartacus had, according to one translation of the historian Appian (c95–c165 AD), “once served as a soldier with the Romans”. Not unlike the fictional Maximus Decimus Meridius in Ridley Scott’s 2000 blockbuster Gladiator, he had somehow been enslaved and eventually sold to a school run by the lanista (gladiator trainer) Lentulus Batiatus in Capua, southern Italy. It seems that Spartacus’s military training stood him in good stead when, outraged by Batiatus’s treatment of his fighters, mostly Gauls and Thracians, he took part in a rebellion to overpower the training-school guards. Surviving accounts of the revolt written by Plutarch and Appian some 200 years later unsurprisingly don’t quite tally – an all too common problem with ancient sources. Nevertheless, it seems that around 200 gladiators planned a breakout, and that 78 did manage to escape. Only then did they elect Spartacus as leader. He had a reputation for being unusually wise and cultured for someone of his background. He was also exceptionally courageous and strong. Whatever the precise details of those events, the Third Servile (or Spartacus) War had begun. Spartacus and his rebels made for the nearby slopes of Vesuvius, and were joined by runaway slaves and even some free peasants. Any loot gathered along the way was shared out equally – an egalitarian gesture that attracted others. They defeated soldiers sent from Capua and helped themselves to their equipment, discarding their own less-effective gladiatorial weapons. Around 140 years later, Pliny the Elder (c23-79 AD) recorded how Spartacus had allegedly forbidden any of his followers to possess gold or silver. Pliny interpreted this rule as showing that slaves in Rome’s recent past had more moral fibre than Romans themselves. Opportunity missed At the start of the rebellion, few took Spartacus and his followers too seriously. Initially, the praetor (commander) Clodius was sent from Rome with 3,000 troops to trap the rebels on the volcano. The renegades, though, made ladders from vines and shinned down sheer cliffs to make their escape. Even then, arrogance and complacency prevailed in Rome, where no one appreciated quite how dangerous the revolt was becoming. Once more, only a scratch force was sent against Spartacus, who repeatedly beat off attacks. His army grew larger, stronger and better equipped day by day: with his military experience, Spartacus was able to oversee training and the manufacture of weapons. Appian estimated the number of rebels at 70,000; however, such rounded figures are meaningless, especially when they involve Rome’s enemies. Not only was there no way of accurately measuring the strength of armies but, by exaggerating the strength of opponents, Roman victories were given additional sheen – a powerful incentive to tell tall tales after the event. Only belatedly was a proper consular army of two legions sent out by the Senate. In 72 BC, they defeated a force of ‘30,000’ rebels led by another gladiator, the Gallic Crixus, killing “20,000” including Crixus himself. Read more | What were the lives of gladiators like in ancient Rome? According to Plutarch, this defeat made Spartacus more cautious. “Spartacus was soon great and formidable,” he wrote, “but he took a proper view of the situation. Since he could not expect to overcome the Roman power, he began to lead his army toward the Alps, thinking it necessary for them to cross the mountains and go to their respective homes – some to Thrace and some to Gaul. But his men were now strong in numbers and full of confidence, and would not listen to him, but went ravaging over Italy.” Determined to pursue his escape plan, Spartacus persevered with his march north – but was cut off by one of the consuls (Rome’s highest elected officials), while the other blocked his retreat. However, the consular army amounted to only about 10,000–12,000 men, so splitting them up was a mistake. Spartacus attacked each half of the Roman army in separate engagements: his force having now grown to (supposedly) 120,000, he defeated both, sending the consuls fleeing in separate directions. Buoyed up, Spartacus headed towards Gaul, defeating the 10,000-strong army of the governor of Gallia Cisalpina (in the north of what’s now Italy). Spartacus executed 300 Roman prisoners as a sacrifice in honour of Crixus. He then marched on Rome and – acting as brutally as his former Roman masters – killed all of his remaining prisoners and his pack animals so that he could move as quickly as possible. By now, the consuls had regrouped and together tried to block Spartacus. He defeated them again. Terrifying humiliation That highly trained Roman troops were being repeatedly overcome by an army led by an ex-slave was a devastating and terrifying humiliation for the Roman military. Spartacus, though, understood that his force, for all its size, lacked the equipment and training to take Rome. Instead, he captured the city of Thurii (on the Gulf of Taranto in southern Italy) and traded with merchants for iron and brass to manufacture more arms. Another victory over a Roman army followed. The Spartacus War was now in its third year, and the revolt represented an unmatched opportunity for any Roman general who could crush it. Rome had two great military leaders at the time. One was the fabulously wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus (c115–53 BC), who had fought on the side of the dictator Sulla in the civil war of the 80s BC. The other was Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (106–48 BC), commonly known as Pompey, who had recently crushed the rebellion of the senator Sertorius in Spain. The Senate placed Crassus in charge of the war. Determined to win at all costs, and desperate to do so before Pompey was called upon to help, he raised an army of six legions and added the consular army of two legions – except those men he executed as punishment for their failure to defeat Spartacus previously. In one ancient account of what followed, Crassus sent Mummius, one of his legates, with two of the legions to fight Spartacus. Mummius was defeated, and some of the survivors fled. Crassus regrouped them, but took the 500 most cowardly and decimated them – executing one in 10. Though brutal, his methods worked: facing 10,000 of Spartacus’s men, who were encamped some way from the main force, Crassus’s force killed two-thirds. With that victory under his belt, he led his men to rout the rest. Spartacus’s army fled south to the sea, hoping to cross to Sicily, but was thwarted when Cilician pirates, who had agreed to help him with sea transport, double-crossed the rebels. He and his men were now trapped in what’s now Calabria, on the far south-western tip of Italy’s toe. Plutarch described how any chance of the rebels escaping from southern Italy was thwarted: “[Crassus] determined to build a wall across the isthmus, thereby at once keeping his soldiers from idleness, and his enemies from provisions. The task was a huge one and difficult, but he accomplished and finished it, contrary to all expectations, in a short time, running a ditch from sea to sea through the neck of land 300 furlongs [about 37 miles] in length and 15 [Roman] feet [about 4.4 metres] in width and depth alike. Above the ditch he also built a wall of astonishing height and strength.” Read more | Was Maximus Decimus Meridius real? These five historical figures inspired Gladiator’s hero Whatever the justice of his cause, we should be under no illusions about Spartacus’s capacity for brutality. According to Appian, “He crucified a Roman prisoner in the space between the two armies to show his own men what fate awaited them if they did not conquer.” Spartacus ignored the fortifications for a while but, as his food supplies dwindled, he was forced to break out with some of his men – and Crassus became worried that Spartacus might now decide to march on Rome. The events that followed are confused in the accounts, and difficult to follow. However, it seems that, though Spartacus suffered the defection of some of his army, he enjoyed some success, too. The last battle Back in Rome, concern that the siege might drag on even longer drove the Senate to invite Pompey and his army, recently returned from Spain, to head south and help defeat Spartacus. This infuriated Crassus, who believed that Pompey would take all the glory from such a victory, and was desperate to fight Spartacus before his rival arrived. So when the rebel leader tried to negotiate terms with Crassus, the Roman bluntly refused. Nevertheless, Crassus seemed to have lost his chance of glory when Spartacus escaped and headed for Brundisium (now Brindisi) on the Adriatic coast in another attempt to flee by sea. The rebel leader, though, abandoned that plan when he heard that Lucullus, proconsul (governor) of Macedonia, had arrived back in Brundisium after defeating supporters of Mithridates, king of Pontus. Crucially, at that point Spartacus defeated a force sent against him under the command of Quintus, one of Crassus’s officers. Until then, Spartacus had kept his head – but now “this success turned out to be the undoing of Spartacus, because it filled his slaves with overconfidence”, said Plutarch. Those rebels attacked the Roman soldiers as they were digging fortifications, and that confrontation forced Spartacus into preparing for a full-blown showdown with Crassus. The story goes that Spartacus was brought his horse, ready to carry him into battle – but instead he pulled out his sword and killed it, saying that if he won this day, he would have many fine horses from the enemy – but if he lost, he would want none. The Roman and rebel armies finally met in open conflict in the clash that became known as the battle of the Silarius River – where, Plutarch and Appian affirm, Spartacus died on the field. Appian wrote that the renegade’s body was never found, but that he “was wounded in the knee, holding his shield in front of him and contending this way against his assailants until he and the great mass of those with him were surrounded and slain”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/HIP2630637-2-CMYK-1184840.jpg" width="4331" height="2886" alt="A black and white depiction of Roman soldiers in hand to hand combat, with spears" title="Spartacus’s death, imagined in a 19th-century engraving. The Roman historian Appian wrote that the rebel leader “was wounded in the knee... he and the great mass of those with him were surrounded and slain”" /> Revenge and recrimination The Romans fell on the remainder of Spartacus’s men, who were now floundering around in leaderless confusion. Crassus had won, but Pompey rolled up in time for his men to cut down the surviving rebels as they tried to escape. Some fled into the mountains, and Crassus pursued them. According to Appian, the last 6,000 fugitives were captured and crucified by Crassus along the Via Appia between Capua and Rome. Pompey, though, claimed that it was he who, by mopping up the vestiges of the rebel forces, had brought the war to an end. The following year, 70 BC, the two men were joint consuls – but disagreed on almost everything. Even worse for Crassus, Pompey was able to hold a magnificent triumph in Rome to celebrate his defeat of Sertorius in Spain, while Crassus was too ashamed to hold one for merely winning a slave war. The Third Servile War had put Rome in a precarious position. Spartacus had dented the military prestige won by Rome over several centuries of expansion, and made a mockery of the military system that the Greek historian Polybius, writing in his Histories, had so feted only 80 years earlier. The Roman historian Florus, writing almost two centuries later, summed up Roman disgust at what had happened: “I know not what name to give to the war which was stirred up at the instigation of Spartacus, for the common soldiers being slaves and their leaders being gladiators … added insult to injury which they inflicted upon Rome.” Read more | “She returned smelling of smoke and sex:” why powerful Roman women were branded nymphomaniacs Never again? Considering the damage to Rome’s prestige, one of the most remarkable aspects of the Spartacus War is that there was no repeat in later years. This certainly wasn’t because Rome changed its stance on slaves: untold numbers continued to be acquired in, for example, Caesar’s Gallic Wars. This reliance on slaves had a profound impact on Roman society. Under the emperors from Augustus (27 BC–AD 14) onwards, historians habitually bemoaned how wealth and power were turning the Romans into feeble, luxury-loving layabouts. With slaves on hand to do almost everything for them – carrying them in litters, cooking, labouring, flapping away flies and even telling them the time – Romans who could afford these unpaid servants were, it was said, no equals of their ancestors, hardy farmers and soldiers. Perhaps one of the reasons nothing like the Spartacus rebellion happened again was because the Romans, once the bloodshed and retribution were over, managed to find a way to give slaves a form of hope. The Romans were as barbaric as any other ancient civilisation – more so, in terms of the sheer scale of their dominance – but there was one crucial difference: they were endlessly pragmatic and adaptable. Not only did the Romans develop a system of manumission, giving slaves the opportunity to gain their liberty, but freedmen and freedwomen were able to run businesses, accumulate savings and see their children grow up not just free but eligible to vote and hold office. That did nothing to overturn the cruelty and injustice of slavery, but the tombstones of freedmen and freedwomen in the cemeteries of Rome, the port at Ostia and at Pompeii bear witness to the lives that some of the more successful built for themselves. It was certainly better than risking crucifixion along the Appian Way by rebelling. Despite the risks they faced in the arena, gladiators, too, could become popular heroes and celebrated heartthrobs – they might even be freed, some becoming wealthy along the way. The truth, of course, was that most of them ended up dead or disabled long before that happened, but the fact is that there was no second Spartacus, nor anyone like him. No gladiator-led slave rebellion ever threatened Rome’s existence again. A slave to the truth? How accurate is Kubrick's 1960 blockbuster, Spartacus? It’s one of the most famous films of the 20th century. When the Stanley Kubrick-directed Spartacus was released in 1960, its scale and ambition caught the imagination of cinema-goers everywhere. But how true to real events is it? The answer is: more than you might think. The central narrative in the film is the conflict between Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) and Crassus (Laurence Olivier), reflecting historical accounts. In the movie, Crassus encounters Spartacus while watching a private bout at Batiatus’s gladiator training school, though is unaware of his identity. In fact, it seems that Crassus never knowingly saw Spartacus in real life. Pompey does not appear in the film, though is mentioned. The success of the rebels’ breakout and defeat of Roman armies is essentially accurate, as is Spartacus being wrong-footed by the duplicity of the Cilician pirates. The brilliant Peter Ustinov played the real lanista Batiatus, shamelessly stealing every scene in which he appeared. Who could forget his pompous arrival with his entourage in search of new gladiators, spying a bedraggled Spartacus being punished for hamstringing a guard? “Hamstrung? How marvellous,” he says, “I wish I’d been here! I’ll take him.” Some key characters in the film are fictitious, including Spartacus’s ex-slave wife from the gladiator barracks, Varinia (Jean Simmons), and Crassus’s slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis), who joins the revolt. In fact, Spartacus’s wife, name unknown, was said to have been Thracian. The screenplay did capture vividly the notion of Rome as a living force beyond the insignificance of human beings. As Crassus, Olivier proclaims that Rome, “that bestrides the known world like a colossus”, cannot be withstood by any man. The city must be served, and all must abase themselves and grovel before Rome, he declares: “You must love her.” The final, celebrated “I’m Spartacus” scene, in which every one of the surviving rebels stands up to claim to be the eponymous hero, is of course pure movie make-believe. The mass execution along the Appian Way was not – this was Rome’s way of deterring any slaves from attempting such a venture in future. In the movie, Varinia shows the dying Spartacus his son, promising that the boy would grow up in liberty: “He is free Spartacus, free.” Yet slavery lasted as long as the Roman empire and beyond. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2GD63MB-CMYK-10a7c48.jpg" width="2916" height="1942" alt="Kirk Douglas (centre) portrays the rebel gladiator Spartacus in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie – which was more historically accurate than you might expect" title="Kirk Douglas (centre) portrays the rebel gladiator Spartacus in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie – which was more historically accurate than you might expect" /> Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and broadcaster. His latest book is Populus: Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome (Abacus, 2024)
Monsters of Rome: do emperors such as Nero and Caligula deserve their reputations?
Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, a key source for the early Roman emperors, has just been translated anew by historian Tom Holland. He reveals what insights it yields into these titans of ancient history
Rob Attar: Could you please begin by introducing Suetonius and his best-known work, The Lives of the Caesars? Tom Holland: Suetonius is probably the most famous of all the ancient biographers. He was secretary to the emperor Hadrian, so was right at the heart of imperial power. He’d also worked as an archivist and librarian in the imperial palace, and therefore had access to all kinds of historical documents. He drew on these to write [in around AD 121] the biographies of the rulers who had come to be known as the 12 Caesars: the 11 emperors from Augustus to Domitian and, before them all, Julius Caesar – the adoptive father of Augustus. The Lives has had a massive influence on how people understand the Roman empire. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about the Roman emperors Of all ancient classical texts, this is probably also the most influential on modern culture. It inspired Robert Graves, who would later translate the Lives for Penguin Classics, to write I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), which were then adapted into the celebrated 1976 BBC drama series [starring Derek Jacobi]. And that series inspired all kinds of US dramas, ranging from Dynasty in the 1980s, to The Sopranos in the nineties and noughties, and Game of Thrones in the 2010s. You could say that Suetonius is the godfather of the murderous dynastic drama. As a historian yourself, do you consider that Suetonius was doing something similar to what you do today? It’s important to say that Suetonius wasn’t actually a historian – he was a biographer. He was not aiming to do what Tacitus, his great contemporary, was doing – creating a record of the whole sweep of Roman history. But of course, because the emperors are so important to our understanding of how the Roman world operated, his work does offer a sense of the Roman empire in the first century BC and the first century AD. That was a period of convulsive change: the Republic collapsed, Augustus established an autocracy, and then there was a process of evolution over the first century AD. After Augustus died in AD 14, Rome was ruled by his family – the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero – after which that family went extinct. There was then a murderous bout of civil war in AD 69, notorious as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ – Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian – whose lives were among the 12 related by Suetonius. Vespasian, who established his own dynasty, was succeeded by his eldest son, Titus, who was then followed by his younger brother, Domitian. The lives of those three emperors are covered by Suetonius as well. What approach did Suetonius take to writing these biographies? His range seems to have been very extensive. From surviving fragments of his other works, we get a sense that he was interested in what today we might call social anthropology: customs, habits, the things that people do. Aside from his biographies of the Caesars, he wrote a collection of the lives of the great courtesans – and sex is also an obvious theme that runs throughout The Lives of the Caesars. But he also wrote about children’s games, and about the insults that people give one another. He wrote about clothing, and about all kinds of aspects of social life – and these in turn informed his portraits of the emperors. He wrote about what they did as children, their appearance, their sexual habits. For Suetonius, this provided windows onto their characters and the way that their reigns were shaped. It enabled him to situate the emperors more clearly in the social, political and cultural context of the world that they ruled. Listen | An episode of BBC Radio 4’s Natalie Haynes Stands up for the Classics on Suetonius Why and how did you go about translating The Lives of the Caesars? I was asked to do it because it was felt that the translation done by Robert Graves many decades ago was a bit old fashioned. There are certain problems, I think, with his work. One strange choice he made was that, instead of using Roman military terms such as centurion or tribune, he gave characters titles such as ‘sergeant major’ or ‘colonel’ or whatever. That’s perhaps unsurprising, because Graves fought in the First World War, but it gives his text a slightly postwar, 1930s flavour. I’m sure that in maybe 60 or 70 years, my translation will seem very 2020s, but I hope that I’ve been truer to the Latin text than Graves was. One other stylistic quirk of Suetonius’s I noticed was that, when writing about an individual emperor, he almost never mentioned them by name – it’s always “he” did this, “he” did that. Suetonius might introduce, say, Augustus by name at the beginning of that Life, but, from that point on, it is assumed that any third person verb will be referring to Augustus. And the effect is very powerful. By not drawing attention to the emperor’s name, it becomes kind of omnipresent: this emperor is so significant that you don’t even need to name him – everything is revolving around him. I hope that, even in English, the reader will find this stylistic effect striking. Did you have to make any difficult decisions when translating the text? Purely in terms of how to render Latin – and, indeed, Greek, because there’s quite a lot of Greek in the Lives, too – the huge problem is always puns. Meaningfully translating Suetonius’s linguistic puns is always a challenge. One of them revolves around oral sex, and that touches on another, slightly more moral problem: there are passages within Suetonius that are shocking. And these passages have always been shocking. There’s a tradition that, in the 15th century, Gilles de Rais – a Frenchman fighting the English during the Hundred Years’ War – was seduced into becoming a child killer by reading Suetonius. The Marquis de Sade reputedly owned a copy of the Lives. Then, in the Victorian period, school copies featured large chunks that were just replaced with asterisks. Even though today, in the 21st century, we might pride ourselves on being more permissive and less easily shocked, the fact remains that there are repellent passages. The question of what to do with them was a moral consideration, but in the end I decided that I wanted to give as accurate and complete a rendering of Suetonius’s language as I could. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/gr0027387H-e0d0d6b.jpg" width="3240" height="2158" alt="Smooth operator Augustus is glorified on an ancient onyx cameo. “He was probably the most remarkable political operator in western history,” says Tom Holland. (Photo by Topfoto)" title="Smooth operator Augustus is glorified on an ancient onyx cameo. “He was probably the most remarkable political operator in western history,” says Tom Holland. (Photo by Topfoto)" /> On that point, the Lives features some truly remarkable stories about some of the emperors’ debauched behaviour. How seriously can we take these? I would like to focus on two of those emperors, because in some ways their reputations for debauchery reflect very different Roman cultural traditions. The first of these was Tiberius. Near the end of his life, when he was about 70, he retired to the island of Capri. Suetonius gives us completely shocking details of what Tiberius is supposed to have got up to there: child sex, brothels, all kinds of things. Tiberius was then succeeded by Caligula – perhaps the most notorious of all of the Caesars. Rather than retiring to a private island, Caligula staged his sexual depravities on the most public of stages, according to Suetonius. Listen | Rome's most scandalous emperors: hear more from Tom Holland's interview about Suetonius The temptation is to take these accounts absolutely at face value: to assume that Tiberius was a hideous pervert, and that Caligula was such a sexual terrorist that he was in fact insane. But I think there are different layers in how you can respond to these stories. One of these is to recognise that the Roman understanding of what was shocking and scandalous about sexual behaviour is not the same as ours. Let’s think about Tiberius. He was the emperor – and an emperor should not retire. The only conceivable reason, in a Roman’s opinion, for doing that was because the person doing it was an absolute pervert. So you can see why Tiberius’s retirement was framed by people hostile to him as reflecting his desire to do disgusting things that he couldn’t do while he was in Rome leading a public life. The fact that Tiberius was a very old man, and that statesmen who had attained a certain age were entitled to a dignified retirement, was ignored – because Tiberius was emperor, and shouldn’t have done it. As for Caligula, he was taking to the public stage and rubbing the noses of his enemies in the Senate in the fact of their impotence. Both Augustus and Tiberius had shown the Senate respect, but Caligula had a different strategy. He wanted to demonstrate that he was the master, and that the senators were a bunch of lickspittles, nobodies. I think that the sexual abuse to which he submitted senators – and, notably, their wives – was a way of making that point. That was very brutal and shocking, and why Caligula became such a notorious figure, but there was perhaps an element of strategic thinking that Suetonius didn’t acknowledge. Caligula clearly wasn’t a liberal – he wasn’t Justin Trudeau – but there was probably method behind the seeming madness. This is part of the fascination of studying the lives of these emperors. There’s the shock appeal of the stories, and there’s the fascination of working out exactly how and why Roman attitudes to sexuality were different from ours. And then there’s the possible political context that was unspoken and unacknowledged by Suetonius, but which might nevertheless explain what is going on. Was something similar happening with Nero, who was another really notorious figure of this time? Did he get an unfairly bad press from Suetonius? No, because Nero brought it on himself. And, as with Caligula, I think it was a deliberate political strategy. There were really two traditions in Roman politics that the emperors inherited from the age of the Republic. There was the traditionalist approach, showing respect for the traditions of the state and traditional elites. And then there were populares – leaders who looked over the heads of the traditional elites to appeal to the masses of the people. Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius were all essentially traditionalist in their approach, whereas Caligula and Nero were both populares. They scorned the Senate and wanted to make themselves the darlings of the people. Because they were emperors, they had opportunities to do that in ways that, in the Republic, not even the most flamboyant nobleman would have had. And I think that’s what Nero was doing. He was clearly the most tremendous showman in a way that was calculated to be shocking to his senators. Emperors were not meant to tread the boards on stage. They were not meant to play musical instruments. They were not meant to compete in the Olympics. But Nero did all that – and he did it sufficiently well that people quite admired it. It’s as though a US president were to star in an Oscar-winning film, headline Glastonbury, or win a race in Formula 1. And even with the most shocking crime of his reign, the murder of his own mother, Nero very pointedly didn’t try to disguise it. Instead, he drew attention to it – and I think that’s because murdering your mother was the kind of thing that a hero would do in a Greek tragedy. Nero was casting himself as literally being ‘Augustus’, someone midway between heaven and earth. He was essentially presenting himself to the Roman people, and the world beyond, as a figure from myth – as a throwback to the ancient days of someone like the notorious matricide Orestes. Read more | The worst Roman emperors: 8 of the bloodiest from ancient Rome's history This policy undoubtedly caused collateral damage, and explains why Nero’s reputation was so bad in the wake of his death. And Suetonius was clearly drawing on those traditions. After all, Suetonius was working for an imperial system founded on the ruins of Nero’s reputation and career, so there was nothing for him in trying to redeem Nero’s reputation. Again, I think – as with Caligula and Tiberius – Suetonius’s portrait of Nero gives the historian enough clues to enable them to work out what Nero was doing, what he was up to. But you’ve got to read between the lines. In your introduction, you suggest that these rulers are both familiar and strange to us at the same time. Could you elaborate on that point? I think they’re familiar to us because Suetonius’s biographies give us details about these individual emperors to a degree that we simply do not have for comparable imperial figures from Near Eastern and Mediterranean ancient history. Think of the pharaohs, or the kings of Assyria or Babylon or Persia: these were autocrats ruling empires and civilisations that were just as sophisticated as the Roman empire. Compared with the portraits we have of Augustus or Nero, however, they seem anonymous. The whole point of royal iconography in Egypt or Persia was to anonymise the pharaoh or the great king. Thanks to Suetonius, though, we know how the emperors had sex, how they went to the toilet, what they looked like, the hairstyles they wore, their bodily blemishes, and so on. We know the most intimate details about them – and that makes them seem vivid and alive and familiar to us in a way that is fairly unique in ancient history. It explains, I think, why imperial Rome tends to fascinate the general public in a way that other civilisations don’t. At the same time, I hope you will get a sense from what I’ve been saying that ancient Rome was a very alien civilisation. The codes of behaviour that governed not just the emperors but also Romans generally were very remote from ours. And it’s that strange blend of the familiar and the weird that I think explains why Rome is so fascinating. There’s a kind of science-fiction quality to it. If you think of science fiction as being a mixture of what is familiar to us with worlds that are utterly alien, then that is what ancient Rome gives us. Of all of the weird and wonderful stories within this book, are there any that particularly stood out for you? One of the things that becomes very evident when you read the biographies in their entirety is that, even as Suetonius was clearly getting stuck into archives, he was also situating the stories in a dimension in which the supernatural was very vivid. One of the most dramatic and celebrated moments in Suetonius’s Lives is Julius Caesar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon [the river that marked the boundary of the area controlled directly by Rome]. Caesar sent his legions ahead of him, then travelled in secret through the night from Ravenna up to the frontier. He stood on the bank. He hesitated. And then, Suetonius tells us, a great ghostly figure snatched a trumpet and blew it. This served as the signal to Caesar that he should cross the river. The dice were thrown. The Rubicon was crossed. History changed – and the fact that there is this weird supernatural element, and it’s introduced exactly as though Suetonius is describing something completely everyday, is often written out of the story. For instance, I did not include that in my earlier account of the crossing of the Rubicon, but looking back at it now, perhaps I should have done. Throughout all of these stories, there is a sense that what was happening was being governed by fate – that the gods were always watching down, and that it was possible for mortals who could read these signs correctly to intuit what was going to happen. This is a really important part of the universe that Suetonius has bequeathed us. If, through some miracle of technology, you could interview one of the 12 Caesars on your podcast The Rest Is History, who would you choose? Julius Caesar – simply because his combination of an extraordinary life and piercing, ruthless intelligence would make him incomparably the most interesting guest to interview. I think, though, for my own selfish purposes – for wanting to understand how the Roman world ticked and how the course of Roman history was changed – I would choose Augustus. He was probably the most remarkable political operator, not just in Rome but in the whole of western history – maybe even world history. Read more | Who are the most underrated Roman emperors? Tom Holland is a historian, author and broadcaster who co-hosts The Rest Is History podcast with Dominic Sandbrook. His new translation of The Lives of the Caesars has just been published by Penguin Classics. This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The 15th of March – known as the Ides of March – was just another day in the Roman calendar. In 44 BC however, the date took on a sinister new meaning...
In 44 BC, the Ides of March took on a new meaning. Julius Caesar, who had seized power from the Roman Republic and made himself a dictator, was murdered by a group of 60 dagger-wielding Senators led by his friends, Brutus and Cassius. What does the 'Ides of March' mean? The term ‘Ides’ had a perfectly practical – and in no way sinister – meaning to the Romans. Their calendar, in connection with the phases of the Moon, used three terms to mark the passage of a month. A ‘Kalend’ was the first day of the month; a ‘None’ signified the first quarter of the Moon (the fifth or seventh day) and an ‘Ide’ was the full Moon (the 13th or 15th day). Therefore the Ides of March simply meant: 15 March. On this day in history | More events that happened on 15 March Why should we beware the Ides of March? Caesar had known that many wished him dead and a soothsayer allegedly warned him that harm would come to him before the Ides of March. On 15 March, Caesar reportedly passed the soothsayer joking, “The Ides of March have come,” but was met with the ominous reply, “Aye, Caesar, but not gone.” This moment has been immortalised by William Shakespeare in his play, Julius Caesar, first performed in 1599. It is from Shakespeare that we have the famous warning given by the soothsayer: “Beware the Ides of March.” Caesar’s murder failed to bring back the Republic, but triggered the start of the Roman empire under his adopted heir, Octavian (known as Augustus). Before the assassination, the Ides of March was best known as a festival. The popular time for feasting and drinking marked the festival of Roman deity Anna Perenna. It was also traditionally the time to settle debts – Julius Caesar certainly paid his. Read next | What if Julius Caesar hadn't been assassinated? This Q&A was taken from a 2014 issue of BBC History Revealed
Gladiator III: what could happen in a new sequel, according to Roman history
Whether there’ll be another sequel or not, here’s what could happen next in the story of a potential Gladiator III, according to Roman history
With its blend of real figures and fictionalised events from the history of the Roman empire, Gladiator II explores the struggles of Lucius (in the films, the son of Lucilla and Maximus Decimus Meridius, though in history a chimera of at least two people) and his ascent from tragedy to greatness. But, as Gladiator III could demonstrate, this fictional Lucius has inherited an empire on the cusp of profound challenges. How Gladiator II’s ending sets the stage for Gladiator III While Gladiator II’s historical accuracy veers toward the realm of fantasy (mutant baboons and sharks in the Colosseum, anyone?) the movie is rooted in the real historical context of ancient Rome in the 3rd century AD. So how does it pave the way for Gladiator III? By the end of Gladiator II, the Roman emperors Caracalla and Geta are both dead, Geta through the machinations of the Machiavellian Macrinus and Caracalla directly by his hand. For a very brief period, Macrinus succeeds them, before he himself is killed by Lucius – leaving Lucilla and Maximus’s son with the reins of power. Read more | The worst Roman emperors Gladiator III: here’s what really happens after Macrinus dies, according to history In real history, Macrinus rises to power following the death of Caracalla (which he is implicated in, he does not do the deed himself) and reigns as emperor for just over a year before being overthrown not by Lucius, but by Elagabalus. The historical Caracalla was a violent and unpredictable emperor; he had his brother and co-emperor Geta assassinated in AD 211 so that he could govern alone. In AD 216, he began a short-lived war against the Parthian empire, coming to a sticky end in AD 217 when he was assassinated by one of his own soldiers – possibly at the behest of Macrinus, who then succeeded him. Read more | The Roman punishment of decimation Macrinus focused his attention as emperor on bringing stability back to the Roman empire by attempting to conclude the several wars it was waging, as well as instituting a series of fiscal reforms to consolidate the Roman economy. However, conspiring against Macrinus were Caracalla’s female relatives. First was his mother Julia Domna, whom Macrinus had imprisoned, and later – and more significantly – his aunt, Julia Maesa. It was Julia Maesa who spread the rumour that Elagabalus was Caracalla’s illegitimate child, positioning him as a potential emperor. Her plans culminate in the battle of Antioch, where the military forces of Macrinus and Elagabalus meet. Macrinus was defeated, and fled, before being captured and executed. He was replaced by the victorious Elagabalus, sometimes remembered as Heliogabalus. Elagabalus’s reign was longer, but ended in similar fashion. Sensing that support for him was waning, Julia Maesa once again organised a plot to see the emperor replaced by her favoured choice. Read more | The Antonine plague Elagabalus was assassinated and followed by Severus Alexander, who would himself be assassinated – and whose death instigated the Crisis of the Third Century between AD 235-284. This was a period of nearly 50 years marked by civil wars, inbound invasions and economic collapse. The death of Caracalla, and Macrinus after him, set the stage for a Roman empire that would descend into chaos. Driven by the rapid turnover of emperors and competing factions fracturing the state, provincial governors and military leaders increasingly seized power, while external enemies exploited Rome’s internal divisions. What could happen in Gladiator III? If Gladiator III continues the story of the fictional Lucius while otherwise broadly following the real history of ancient Rome, it’s likely that Lucius will assume the position of Elagabalus and ultimately encounter the same challenges that faced the real Roman emperors and led into the Crisis of the Third Century. Like, Elagabalus, Lucius is responsible for the death of Macrinus and assumes the position of emperor after him, with Lucilla (here taking on the role of Julia Maesa) having laid the groundwork. Given that, it’s plausible that the fictional Lucius would face a similar fate to Elagabalus, and could soon discover that the reality of ruling the Roman empire in the third century AD was a far grimmer and more fragile affair than he bargained for. Even if Lucius successfully cemented his reign and found initial stability, he would not have been able to escape the broader challenges facing the Roman empire and the causes of its inevitable decline and fall. Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Roman women For Lucius, the struggle to consolidate power would be immediate. From the threat of rebellion to the strain of frontier wars and economic hardship, Lucius would face the same pressures that plagued the emperors of the Severan dynasty. The Roman empire’s ongoing wars would present themselves as Lucius’s most confronting and immediate challenge. Emperors were expected not only to maintain internal stability but also to defend the empire from external threats. At this time, Rome faced significant pressure from Germanic tribes along the Rhine and Danube, while the future Sassanian empire loomed as a growing threat in the East. View Green Video on the source website He would also be forced to deal with the Parthian war that Caracalla had reignited. Would he vie for peace, as the real Macrinus did, or continue the wars and place ever-greater pressure on the Roman coffers? Either option would bring the threat of internal plots to see him replaced as emperor. His rise to power would have been just the beginning of a far more complicated and precarious story – one shaped by the same forces that would ultimately drive the empire into one of its most turbulent eras. While the ending of Gladiator II presents Lucius as a triumphant, unifying figure for the Roman empire, history tells us that his reign would have been anything but easy. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week
The real Macrinus: how Gladiator II’s power broker became a short-lived Roman emperor
Rather than a trainer of gladiators, in real history Macrinus is remembered as the first emperor not to be from the aristocratic or senatorial classes. But, as Jonny Wilkes explores, he did not last long enough to make much more of a mark
Gladiator II is director Ridley Scott’s blood-soaked return to ancient Rome, 24 years after movie-goers first saw former general-turned-gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius challenge the emperor Commodus. Alongside the returning Lucilla, this new instalment introduces a new cast of characters out for their own interests – and perhaps the most mysterious of these is Denzel Washington’s gladiator-trainer Macrinus. Was Macrinus real? Yes, but he has absolutely nothing to do with gladiators. The real Macrinus was a political player who rose up from the relatively low ranks of the equestrian class, and *possible spoiler alert for the film* later became a short-lived Roman emperor. In Gladiator II’s fictionalised version of the Severan Dynasty, Macrinus is an arms dealer, owner of a gladiator stable, and a cunning political mover with his eyes on more power. The real Macrinus was not a behind-the-scenes businessman using gladiators, as said in the movie, as his “instrument”. In reality, he held a position high up in the emperor’s circle. He managed all civil affairs in Rome, before taking an opportunity to grasp the imperial throne after the death of Caracalla. Macrinus’s early life – did he know Marcus Aurelius? There is no evidence that Macrinus had any dealings with emperor Marcus Aurelius – much less that Aurelius kept him as a slave, as Gladiator II suggests. Marcus Opellius Macrinus was born in c164 AD in Mauretania Caesariensis, a Roman province in modern-day Algeria. He was of Berber ancestry, and the historian and senator Cassius Dio described him as “Moor by birth”. Little is known about his early life. Growing up in an equestrian family (which was the name for the social order below the senatorial class), he must have received a good education as he trained as a lawyer and moved to Rome, where he prospered. Dio put this down not to his knowledge of the law and precedent, but “his observance of them was faithful”. What is Macrinus’s relationship with Caracalla and Geta “I have the trust of the emperors,” Macrinus says of Carcaalla and Geta in Gladiator II. But how did he get there? The answer lies in the Praetorian Guard, the elite imperial bodyguard. Macrinus came to the attention of Plautianus who, as head of the Praetorian Guard during the reign of Septimius Severus, was a powerful official. This could have gone wrong quickly: Plautianus fell from power and was executed in AD 205, but Macrinus managed to maintain favour thanks to friends in the Senate. He continued to work as a lawyer, while taking on bureaucratic responsibilities under Severus. These included the management of the Via Flaminia, one of the major roads leading from Rome, and imperial finances. When Severus died in AD 211, his sons Caracalla and Geta ascended as joint co-rulers, albeit briefly. Caracalla had his brother killed before the year was out and established his own reign. He then appointed Macrinus as the praetorian prefect, elevating the lawyer from equestrian roots to one of the highest offices in the empire. “Macrinus supposedly doesn't have much of an education in terms of law and policy in Roman tradition,” says Professor Alison Futrell, a historian of Rome and the gladiatorial games, who spoke to HistoryExtra for our Gladiator II: historian reaction video. “Some of our sources do think of him as someone who is trying his best, someone who is not being presented as utterly evil or unprincipled or immoral through and through as others near the centre of power are.” View Green Video on the source website Macrinus and the assassination of Caracalla On top of his judicial, legal and administrative duties, Macrinus was commander of the Praetorian Guard and Legio II Parthia, one of the legions of the Roman army. In these roles, he joined the young emperor Caracalla’s campaign against the Parthian empire to the east. The invasion failed, and Macrinus became aware that the paranoid Caracalla, who had a history of bloodletting, might turn on him. Supposedly, the emperor had heard a prophesy that his praetorian prefect would overthrow him, and so contemplated having Macrinus killed. What he did not prepare for was a pre-emptive strike. On 8 April AD 217, a disgruntled soldier stabbed Caracalla to death on a roadside in modern-day Turkey, choosing a moment when the emperor was relieving himself. The assassin had allegedly been recruited by Macrinus. How did Macrinus become emperor? Three days after Caracalla’s assassination, the army proclaimed Macrinus as the new emperor. When news got back to Rome, the Senate had no reason to challenge this move: many senators despised Caracalla, so rejoiced at his death and willingly accepted Macrinus on the throne. Yet the soldiers loved Caracalla. To keep them on-side, Macrinus deified the man that he had had killed. He then adopted the name ‘Severus’ to associate him with the ruling dynasty. Macrinus made history by becoming the first emperor not to have come from the Roman aristocracy or senatorial class. In another first, he would also never step foot in Rome as emperor. Macrinus’s reign as emperor Following his ascension to the role of emperor, Macrinus remained at the army camp at Antioch where his first priority was the war against the Parthian empire. Enemy forces had regrouped and invaded Mesopotamia, leading to an extremely bloody but indecisive battle in the summer of AD 217, at Nisibis. Rather than continue the protracted campaign that had been started by his predecessor, Macrinus decided to sue for peace. For this, he agreed to unfavourable terms for Rome and paid huge sums of money to the Parthians. The war may have been over, but Macrinus’s reign took an early hit. In dealing with other threats from Armenia and Dacia, Macrinus similarly stepped away from further military engagement. He returned everything and everyone previously seized from the Armenians and confirmed their status as a client kingdom of Rome, and ordered the release of Dacian hostages. It would not be long before Macrinus made enemies both in the Senate (where resentment festered against his relatively lowly background) and the army. He cut the pay of new recruits and revalued the currency – reversing changes instituted by Caracalla – which damaged his popularity among the soldiers. Another foe was Julia Domna, Caracalla’s mother and a political figure in her own right. Hearing that she had begun to conspire against him, Macrinus had her arrested. But with her health already failing, Julia Domna starved herself to death. Was there a conspiracy against Macrinus? Julia Domna’s sister, Julia Maesa, continued to plot against Macrinus, spreading the rumour that her 14-year-old grandson, Bassianus – better known as Elagabalus (and sometimes known to history as Heliogabalus) – was, in fact, Caracalla’s illegitimate son. This ensured the boy, who served as chief priest of the Syrian sun god Elegabal, received plenty of support within the army. Many soldiers shifted their allegiance: after Julia Maesa had Elagabalus smuggled into the military camp at Raphanea, in Roman Syria, the Legio III Gallica proclaimed him as emperor in May AD 218. Macrinus responded by naming his nine-year-old son, Diadumenian, as co-ruler in the hopes of giving the impression of a stable dynastic line. His praetorian prefect, Ulpius Julianus, was sent at the head of a detachment of cavalry to put down Elagabalus’s rebellion, only for his men to kill him and join the would-be child emperor. How did Macrinus die? In June AD 218, Macrinus’s forces met the legions now loyal to Elagabalus at the battle of Antioch and suffered a decisive defeat. His reign all but over after 14 months, Macrinus fled for Rome to shore up support. But on the way, despite shaving his hair and beard, he was recognised and captured. Macrinus was executed shortly afterwards. The same fate befell his young son, before both of their heads were sent to Elagabalus. The Senate immediately acknowledged Elagabalus as emperor, having declared Macrinus and his son as enemies of the state. Not yet done, they then pronounced damnatio memoriae, the destruction of memory, by expunging them from the record and mutilating their image. As such, only limited resources remain attesting the life of Macrinus, most notably the words of Cassius Dio, who, as a senator, did not look kindly on this upstart from North Africa. “This man, now, might have been praised above all men, if he had not set his heart upon becoming emperor himself, but had selected some man belonging to the senate and had declared him emperor. “But instead of taking such a course, he brought discredit and destruction alike upon himself, so that he became the object of reproach and fell victim to a disaster that was richly deserved.” For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week
Caracalla and Geta: the real lives of the mad emperors of Gladiator II
The first Gladiator movie had a despicably deranged and dangerous antagonist in Commodus, but the upcoming sequel has a pair of emperors more than fit to take up that mantle. Jonny Wilkes explores the stories of Caracalla and Geta, brothers who rose up to the throne, but refused to share it
The sword-and-sandals epic Gladiator II promises a triumphant return to the half-historical, half-fictionalised ancient Rome of Ridley Scott’s original blockbuster. There is a new gladiator (Lucius, played by Paul Mescal), new thrilling battles in the Colosseum (featuring Pedro Pascal’s Marcus Acacius) and new behind-the-scenes plotting (headed by Macrinus, played by Denzel Washington). But stealing the show are not one, but two new megalomaniacal Roman emperors, Caracalla and Geta (Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn respectively). Framing the action around their shared reign means that it is possible to pinpoint exactly when the sequel takes place: AD 211. Caracalla and Geta – who did not get on as well as Gladiator II’s trailers suggest – ruled together for just 10 months, before their fractious relationship ended in fratricide. After having his brother murdered, Caracalla then ruled alone for another six years and earned a reputation as one of Rome’s more cruel, callous and changeable emperors. View Green Video on the source website The early lives of Caracalla and Geta As the sons of Septimius Severus, a rising statesman from North Africa serving as a provincial governor in Upper Pannonia (in modern-day Austria and Hungary), and his wife, Julia Domna, they were never meant for the imperial throne. Caracalla was born in AD 188 and named Septimius Bassianus. The name Caracalla was actually a pejorative nickname that came later, referring to a type of heavy, hooded cloak that he used to wear, which was used in the far reaches of the empire. The following year, Geta was born. Their paths changed in AD 193, the so-called ‘Year of the Five Emperors’ following the assassination of the much-despised Commodus. Out of that bitter period of rival claimants and fighting across the Roman empire, Severus – who had widespread support within the army – came out on top. Caracalla and Geta’s rise to power An imperative of Severus’s rule was to establish his own Severan dynasty. To that end, he renamed his eldest son as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, thus linking his bloodline to the successful and beloved Antonine rulers of the second century, which included Marcus Aurelius. Severus then appointed Caracalla as augustus, or co-emperor, in AD 198, around the time he turned 10. A relatively common practice in ancient Rome, this would smooth the issue of the succession. Read more | The real Lucilla Aged 14, Caracalla was married to the daughter of Severus’s influential and powerful second-in-command, Plautianus. It proved a deeply unhappy and tragic match, as well as an early sign of Caracalla’s cruelty. Within a couple of years of the marriage, he had Plautianus killed on a charge of treason and exiled his wife. Later, he ordered her death, too. Meanwhile, despite being only a year younger than his brother, Geta clearly remained a junior figure in their father’s rule. While both boys were showered with honours and titles, Geta had to wait more than a decade before his elevation to augustus. From AD 209, there were three emperors while the father and sons ruled, but any hopes Severus had for his sons to rule together became increasingly bleak. They disliked each other immensely. Typically, Geta has been presented as the intellectual interested in civil administration, while Caracalla’s wish was for glory in battle. Caracalla equally seemed impatient to be emperor. Accompanying Severus on his military campaign to northern Roman Britain, he supposedly tried to have his ailing father poisoned to hasten his accession. While that assassination attempt failed, Severus did succumb to illness in February AD 211, while in Eboracum (York). The brief joint rule of Caracalla and Geta Now co-emperors, Caracalla and Geta hastily ended the campaign in Britain and returned to Rome. As feared, however, it immediately became evident that the brothers’ shared rule would be a disaster. The next few months were defined by animosity, suspicion and constant conspiring. Caracalla and Geta would not even be in the same room without their mother and own guards present; they divided the imperial palace in two, and built their own factions of support with the aim of ousting the other. There were even talks of splitting the entire empire. The joint rule only lasted as long as it did due to the mediation of their mother, Julia Domna. For years, she had proven herself a canny operator as an advisor in Severus’s reign. Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Roman women Caracalla kills Geta Both Caracalla and Geta feared assassination by the other, and justifiably so. In December AD 211, Caracalla arranged a meeting with Geta in the neutral territory of their mother’s apartments, ostensibly to seek a reconciliation. Instead, soldiers stabbed Geta and he died in his mother’s arms. As sole emperor, one of Caracalla’s first acts was to commit damnatio memoriae: the damnation of memory, or the complete destruction of all record of his brother in an attempt to erase him from history. Across the empire, it became an offence just to say his name, while his image was removed from all coins, statues and art. Most famously, the Severan Tondo, a family portrait of Severus, Julia Domna and the two sons as young boys, has survived with the utterly obliterated face of Geta. Caracalla was not done, though. He purged the empire of anyone linked to his brother, from senators to servants. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, as many as 20,000 men and women were put to death. Caracalla as emperor Caracalla ruled for another six years after Geta’s death. There would be more bloodshed – during a visit to Alexandria in Egypt, he ordered a massacre, supposedly in retaliation to the jokes being made at his expense – and he was despised by the elite of Rome, notably the Senate. The legacy of his reign, however, hinges on two achievements. The former is the Antonine Constitution, also known as the Edict of Caracalla. Issued in AD 212, it granted Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. While it sounds like a great egalitarian reform, the purpose may have been simply to add to the tax-paying population or secure the frontiers with a gesture of bringing everyone into the Roman fold. Regardless, it had far-reaching implications in the empire as the meaning of citizenship shifted. The latter achievement was the Baths of Caracalla, a magnificent complex in Rome. The largest of its kind at the time, able to fit 1,600 people, it included vast baths and pools, vaulted ceilings, libraries, gyms, halls and gardens, and decorated with exquisite marbles, mosaics and statues. The baths remained in use until the sixth century. Yet while Caracalla got the credit, the baths’ commission and construction actually originated in Severus’s reign. What Caracalla truly cared about was military glory. Following his father’s last piece of advice to “enrich the army”, he was beloved by the soldiers for raising their pay 50 per cent and he wanted to be seen ‘mucking in’ with the men. On the other side, he longed to be the new Alexander the Great. Obsessed with the Macedonian empire builder, Caracalla tried to mimic him in every way, including his clothing, military strategy and – contradicting his image as a normal soldier – depictions as a great god king. Caracalla personally went on campaign against the German tribes, achieving reputation and ego-boosting victories, and was preparing for a second campaign against the Parthian empire. He would not live to see it through. How did Caracalla die? In AD 217, Caracalla, not yet 30 years old, was stabbed and killed while on his way through modern-day Turkey. The killer was a soldier named Justin Martialis. He had been recruited by Macrinus, a skilled lawyer and bureaucrat serving as praetorian prefect, a high office in the Roman empire. Having begun to conspire against the emperor, Macrinus knew that if he did not strike first then Caracalla would almost certainly come for him. It was said that Caracalla had stepped to the side of the road to urinate when the knife was plunged into his back. There is a certain irony that, given that his primary concern was military matters, it was a disgruntled solider – Martialis had reportedly been upset not to have been made a centurion – who ended his life. Gladiator II is in cinemas now. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week
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