The bloodsoaked true story of Caracalla and Geta

You can always count on the Romans for some seriously messed up family dynamics, just as you can always count on Hollywood to add its own fictional twist to an already entertaining historical story. My previous article revisited Gladiator’s portrayal of Commodus, which dialed back some of the crazier facts about his life and added some made up bollocks into the mix. But despite egregious nonsense like him murdering his dad, Gladiator’s interpretation of Commodus is Pulitzer Prize worthy compared to the horrible treatment of Caracalla and Geta in the sequel. At least some of the Commodus storyline riffed on things that actually happened. All Gladiator II got right about Caracalla and Geta was the fact they were brothers.

The real tale of Caracalla and Geta is pure Shakespeare: two feuding siblings who were pathologically incapable of setting aside their own ambitions for the good of the empire, or even for the good of their own family. And like any decent Shakespearean tragedy, it ends in murder. Well, one of the murders is Shakespearean. The other is more South Park.

Caracalla and Geta weren’t twins but they were only a year apart in age, with Caracalla the elder of the two. They weren’t born expecting to inherit the Roman Empire, even though their parents were the Roman equivalent of Frank and Claire Underwood. Their father was Septimius Severus, who started out as a senator before emerging as the last emperor left standing during the political upheaval following Commodus’s death. He brought much-needed stability to the empire but he also believed if you kept the soldiers happy, the empire would pretty much look after itself.

Their mother, Julia Domna, was a political powerhouse. Born into a fabulously wealthy Arab family in Syria, she refused to be held back by the fact that women couldn’t hold political positions. As far as she was concerned, her place was alongside the men in her family, putting her considerable influence and intelligence to good use as their advisor, wherever in the empire they happened to be. Julia later became the first woman to be given the title Pia Felix Augusta, a beefed-up version of the standard honours usually used for empresses and one which suggests she commanded a great deal of respect.

Septimius Severus and Julia Domna were a legit power couple but their political instincts let them down in one major way: they wanted to keep the imperial crown in the family. This decision is even more baffling considering Septimius Severus had a front row seat to the shitshow that unfolded when Marcus Aurelius made the same mistake with Commodus. Yet he still named both Caracalla and Geta as his joint successors, knowing full well the two brothers hated each other. God knows why he expected anything other than a disaster, but I suppose everyone has a blind spot when it comes to their kids. No doubt Septimius Severus thought it was just ‘boys being boys’ when Caracalla got bored of waiting to become emperor and tried to kill him…

There were other early indications that Caracalla might have been a tiny bit psycho. When he was still a teenager, he was forced into an arranged marriage with the daughter of his dad’s second-in-command, Plautianus. Septimius Severus and Plautianus were cousins and childhood friends who had grown up together in North Africa, while Plautianus’s aunt was Septimius Severus’s mum. The marriage was supposed to strengthen the dynasty but the personalities of everyone involved meant it became a bin fire, like a fucked up version of Gavin and Stacey.

Plautianus had done extremely well out of his best mate becoming emperor, so he wasn't exactly thrilled that Julia Domna kept getting in the way. Julia Domna was equally unhappy about this guy taking up all the oxygen around her husband. Meanwhile, Caracalla was being classic Caracalla and kept threatening to murder his wife and father-in-law. When word of this reached Plautianus, he was understandably quite cross and decided he was finally done with all this feuding. But instead of walking away from the toxicity, Plautianus chose violence.

However, because it was all so incestuous, he simply wasn't great at coups, or perhaps because the whole thing had been engineered by Caracalla in the first place, Plautianus's plot to overthrow the Severan family was discovered and Caracalla had him swiftly executed. It should be noted that Caracalla was just 16 at the time. He also exiled his hated wife and made good on his earlier promise to murder her the moment he became emperor (he murdered his brother-in-law at the same time, which I suppose is one way of dealing with problematic in-laws).

What Geta was doing during the Plautianus drama is unclear, but it's often said he was the more sensible of the two brothers and simply wanted to get on with the job of governing. Gladiator II tries to explain the difference by suggesting Caracalla had brain rot from syphilis. In reality, Caracalla did not have the excuse of a debilitating venereal disease; he was just a dick. He even looked mental. Gladiator II portrayed him as an effete little elf but he actually looked like the sort of guy who would glass you for accidentally spilling his pint.

Behind the paywall: how Caracalla really killed his brother and perhaps the most ridiculous way an emperor has ever died.