CAR'ACAL'LA (18S-217). Emperor of Rome from 211 to 217. His real name was Bassianus. He was the son of Septimius Severus and .Tulia Donna, and was born at Lugdunum (Lyons), April 4, A.D. 188. His father playfully nicknamed him Caracalla, because he was found of wearing a long, hooded mantle, so called in the Gallic lan guage. In 193 his father became Emperor, and three years later, on the overthrow of A Minus, the last of the rivals to the throne, Caracalla was declared r(rsar, or heir presumptive. In 197 he was made pontifcy and co-Emperor in 198, at the age of ten years, taking the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. At this early pe riod of his life Caracalla showed no signs of that reckless and brutal nature which characterized his later years. He married Plantilla, daughter of the pretorian prefect l'lantinus, in 202, and during the rest of his father's reign Caraealla ac companied him on his expeditions. notoldy to Britain, where Sererus (lied at Eboracum (York) in 211. Caracalla now returned to Rome and associated his younger brother, Geta, in the government; but, unable to endure an equal, he killed Geta in the very arms of their mother on February 27, 212. and ordered his name to be
erased from all public monuments. Caracalla now vented his mad rage on all the friends and adherents of his brother by a wholesale butch ery, in which the great jurist Papinianus per ished. At the same time he ordered the death. of his wife, the Empress I'lantilla.
The rest of his reign as sole Emperor was oc cupied largely with military campaigns on the frontiers; against the Chatti and Alemanni in Germany (213), the Iazyges in Thrace (214), and in the farther East. He was killed on the road to Carrhx, in 'Mesopotamia, April 8, A.D. 217, at the instigation of Macrinus, the prefect, who succeeded to the throne. The great Baths of Caracalla—Thcrnur Antoninianw—in Rome. of which extensive ruins stand to-day on the Appian Way, were built during his reign.