Caracalla and his late-antique biographer: A historical commentary on the Vita Caracalli in the Historia Augusta.

Abstract

The Roman emperor Caracalla (sole reign A.D. 211-217) presided over important transformations in the military, political and social organization of the Mediterranean world: Roman citizenship was made universal, intellectuals and bureaucrats played leading roles in the imperial court, soldiers received greater pay and privileges as Roman armies extended their control of Near Eastern communities in the shadow of the Parthian realm. The biography of Caracalla in the late-antique collection known as the Historia Augusta provides a significant amount of reliable information about the emperor, though scholars have been reluctant to use the biography because of its pseudepigraphic nature and because the work contains several obviously fictitious episodes. This commentary determines which passages in the biography seem to derive from an earlier lost biography by Marius Maximus, a contemporary of Caracalla. The information from those passages is compared with information in the other contemporary historians Dio and Herodian, as well as with other literary, epigraphic, numismatic and papyrological evidence to determine events in Caracalla's life.