Imperial decadence

COMMENTS on the visible decline and, in the most optimistic estimates, impending demise of the American empire often refer to the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago as a cautionary precedence. And the notorious emperors Nero and Caligula are occasionally compared with the incumbent US president.

Those comparisons might not be ridiculous, but there is potentially a closer, albeit lesser known, analogue. Commodus became co-emperor in his early teens during the reign of his revered father, Marcus Aurelius — best known for his philosophical Meditations — and sole emperor for nearly 13 years from AD180.

According to Edward Gibbon’s seminal work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “Nature had formed him of a weak, rather than a wicked, disposition. His simplicity and timidity rendered him the slave of his attendants, who gradually corrupted his mind. His cruelty, which at first obeyed the dictates of others, degenerated into habit, and at length became the ruling passion of his soul.”

Coincidentally, the first volume of Gibbon’s treatise was published in 1776, the year America declared its independence from British rule. The 250th anniversary of that event will be celebrated in the coming months, most likely overlooking the indigenous genocide and slave trade that accompanied the birth of what was then a much smaller nation, subsequently expanded through decolonisation and conquest.

There’s no such thing as an eternal empire.

Gibbon describes Commodus as someone who “from his earliest infancy discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal, and a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace”. These included “the sports of the circus and amphitheatre, the combats of gladiators, and the hunting of wild beasts”. The beasts were imported from as far away as Ethiopia and India. The emperor shot lions, ostriches, elephants and rhinoceroses with arrows from a safe perch in the arena, and when he personally entered gladiatorial contests his ill-equipped opponents knew better than to put up more than token resistance. He clubbed cripples to death, pretending they were giants.

According to Cassius Dio, a contemporary witness, Commodus was “not naturally wicked but, on the contrary, as guileless as any man that ever lived. His great simplicity, however, together with his cowardice, made him the slave of his companions”, leading him “into lustful and cruel habits, which soon became second nature”. That description should ring a few bells. He deputed the affairs of state to often incompetent favourites (who could nonetheless be beheaded at the emperor’s whim), while Commodus spent his hours, as Gibbon puts it, “in a seraglio of 300 beautiful women, and as many boys”, adding that “he was the first of the Roman emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of understanding”.

He didn’t fiddle when Rome burned during his reign, but wished the rebuilt city to be named after him. The imperial capital officially became Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana, and the months in the year were renamed after the 12 titles he had adopted. It became too much for the surviving senators, and even members of his household. After Marcia, his favourite concubine, discovered she was on a hit list, she conspired with fellow designated victims to knock him off. The poisoned wine Marcia had concocted proved insufficient, so the conspirators sent in a wrestler called Narcissus to finish the job. He strangled Commodus in his bath. Almost immediately afterwards, Rome recovered its name, and emblems of the preceding reign — including statues depicting the deceased emperor as Hercules — were demolished.

The Commodus ana­logy particularly ap­­p­e­als because of the way the brilliant British ca­­rtoonist Steve Bell — outrageously dismis­sed by The Guardian for an excellent caricature of Benjamin Netan­ya­­hu just as Israel stepped up its Gaza genocide — usually depicted Donald Trump’s head. The word ‘commode’ isn’t directly derived from Commodus, but there’s a shared etymology.

It’s worth remembering the Roman Empire did not crumble as an immediate consequence of Commodus’ vicious excesses in the domestic sphere. It remained on the maps for centuries to come. In the modern era, though, there are instances of empires disappearing with far greater rapidity. For instance, there was a brief period in the 1940s when the emperor in Tokyo ruled over more lives than his counterpart in London. Amid the exigencies of World War II, the Japanese empire rapidly disappeared replaced by the American variant.

The latter might not prove all that easy to banish, despite signs of a precipitous decline. But there’s no such thing as an eternal empire, and long after all its vestiges have vanished, future historians are likely to look back upon the 45th and 47th US presidencies as a crucial twist in the tale of American deterioration and decrepitude.

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Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2026