Did Commodus kill Marcus Aurelius?

What the film shows

In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, an aging Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, tells his son that he will not be emperor. Power is to pass to the general Maximus, who will hand it back to the Senate. Commodus, played by Joaquin Phoenix, embraces his father and smothers him. It is a gripping scene, and none of it is history. Maximus never existed, Marcus never planned to restore the Republic, and he had already made Commodus his partner on the throne.

What the ancient sources say

Two accounts of the death survive. Cassius Dio, a senator who lived through the reign that followed, says Marcus died on March 17, not of the disease he was suffering from but at the hands of his physicians, as Dio says he was plainly told, who wanted to do Commodus a favor. Notice what Dio does not say. He loathed Commodus, yet he blames the doctors, not the son, and adds that the dying emperor commended Commodus to the soldiers so that his death would not seem to be his son’s doing.

The Historia Augusta, a Latin collection of imperial lives written much later and often unreliable, tells a slower story. Falling ill, Marcus urged his son not to abandon the war. Wanting to die, he stopped eating and drinking. On the sixth day he asked his weeping friends why they mourned him instead of thinking about the plague and the death that waits for everyone. On the seventh he let in only his son, sent him away at once for fear he would catch the disease, covered his head as if to sleep, and died in the night.

His last watchword to the guard, in Dio, was “Go to the rising sun; I am already setting.” Later writers disagree about the place: Vindobona, today’s Vienna, or Sirmium, in modern Serbia. Many historians suspect the plague that had raged since 165, but no source names the illness.

The real break

The turning point was a choice, not a murder. For almost a century emperors had chosen heirs by adoption: Nerva picked Trajan, Trajan Hadrian, Hadrian Antoninus, Antoninus Marcus. Marcus had a living son. He named Commodus Caesar at five and co-emperor in 177, at fifteen. In 180 the eighteen-year-old ruled alone. He made peace on the Danube and went back to Rome.

The rest is Dio’s eyewitness record of a bad reign. Commodus fought in the arena as a gladiator and shot wild animals before the Senate, with Dio sitting among the senators. He did not die in the arena, as in the film. On the last day of 192 an athlete named Narcissus strangled him in his bath. Dio’s judgment on the moment Marcus died has stuck ever since: his history, he says, now descends “from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.” For what came after, see why the Roman Empire fell; for the father himself, who Marcus Aurelius was.