Who was Roman Emperor Caracalla from the movie Gladiator II?

Ridley Scott's sequel to Gladiator gives us a relatively accurate portrait of a moment in time in around 210 AD. Two crazed, lunatic emperor brothers, Caracalla and Geta, are terrorizing Rome, while the scheming Macrinus waits in the wings.

While the five years or so of Caracalla's short yet influential reign are condensend into a two and a half hour movie (which I have seen and was fantastic, by the way), the portrait of Caracalla from the ancient sources provides a picture of one of Rome's most sexually debauched emperors. In the story of The Gays who Built and Broke the Roman Empire, Caracalla's story is one of a man driven to even greater depths of insanity by impotence.

Caracalla: the impotent tyrant who became a vicious bottom

The young Caracalla and his brother Geta were renowned for their debauched behaviour. Caracalla is known to have embarked on numerous affairs with married women, and also raped a vestal virgin. But around 212, Emperor Carcalla left Rome on a tour of the provinces and contracted an illness. Cassius Dio, who was in fact a contemporary of Caracalla’s, reported that this made the emperor impotent, and thereafter he began to bottom for numerous men, likely soldiers, which, it was reported, was done for “the well being” of the emperor.

Throughout his rather short life, the Emperor made no attempt to marry, despite being part of the Severan dynasty that did much to promote the imperial house as a family unit. Other reasons for this were rumoured to be that he was having an incestuous affair with his powerful mother, Julia Domna. She played a similar role in the public imagination as Agrippina did in the early reign of Nero, an emperor who was also accused of Oedipian affairs.

To take the reports at face value, we have an unhinged young man who was engaged in vicious competition with his brother Geta whom he later murdered in front of their mother. Raping vestal virgins was not beyond the pale for whom history records as a cruel tyrant. Illness left him impotent, and still unmarried, which led him to seek sexual gratification perhaps the only way possible.

Caracalla stands on the precipice of Rome’s descent into the crisis of the third century. A series of unstable and unable emperors since the last of the five ‘good’ emperors Marcus Aurelias had died in 180 CE would leave Rome on the verge of collapse during the fifty year period from 235 CE until the reign of Diocletian in 284, who radically transformed the empire and built the final stages of the Roman imperial legacy which would come to define government and society in the west for the next fifteen hundred years.

In fact, just a year after Caracalla’s murder in 217 CE, we get perhaps the gayest emperor of all, Elagabalus. Read more in my essay: The Gays who Built and Broke the Roman Empire.