The Importance of Commodus

Commodus spent nearly everyday fighting as a gladiator or enjoying the races and his only real concern was making sure that he had enough money to pay for it all. By 191 Commodus was beginning to lose touch even with the masses who had always supported an emperor as obsessed with the games as they were. In early 192 he fully embraced his own outsized megalomania and declared that henceforth Rome would no longer be called Rome but instead the colonial Aenia-comodiana. This meant that if Commodus was literally an incarnation of Hercules that his true father was not Marcus Aurelius but Jupiter himself.