COM'MODUS, .1;:mus AURELIUS. A Roman Emperor (A.D. 180-192). He was born in A.D. 161, and was the son of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Great pains were taken with his education. But the solicitude of his father was all to no purpose. Commodus waited only for an opportunity to exhibit as startling and de testable a mixture of sensuality, cruelty, and meanness as had ever been witnessed in Rome. When he was summoned to the throne on his father's death (March 17, 180), he plunged into the dissipations of Rome. At that period he was successfully fighting the Mareomanni and other tribes on the Upper Danube, but he hastily con cluded a treaty with the barbarians, and reached the capital in the beginning of the autumn. The cruelty to which he was always prone was espe cially exhibited after a conspiracy by his sister Lucilla against his life had been discovered in the year 183. Nearly all who had risen to honor during his father's lifetime were sacrificed to appease his jealousy of the good and the great.
Gross prodigality also marked his reign. He was proud of his own physical strength, and exhibited it in gladiatorial combats. For each of these exhibitions he charged the State an enormous sum. He used also to sing, dance, play, act the buffoon, the peddler, or the horse-dealer, and engage in all the filthy and horrible orgies of Egyptian sacrifice. A glutton, a debauchee, who wallowed in the most sensual abominations, he yet demanded to be worshiped as a god, and as sumed the title of Hercules Bomanns. Many plots were devised against his life, and at last one of them succeeded. His mistress, in concert with the prefect Lstus and the Imperial chamberlain, Eclectus, after they had failed in an attempt to poison him, caused him to be strangled by Narcissus, a famous athlete. The life of Commodus, written by Lampridius, is to be found in the so-called Augusta Historia.