Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)

Assembled from 27 blocks · 3 evidence · 35 related

1. Story
2. Emperor 198-217 CE, who issued the Antonine Constitution granting citizenship to almost all free inhabitants of the empire. He is a genuinely awkward figure for a triumphal reading of Roman citizenship: the same emperor murdered his brother Geta, raised army pay sharply, debased the coinage with the introduction of the antoninianus, and was remembered with open hostility by the senatorial historian Cassius Dio, who supplies the fiscal explanation of the edict.
3. Knowledge
4. The Roman Legion
5. Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)
6. Connections
7. The Roman Legion
8. The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
9. Rome
10. Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)
11. The Roman Road Network
12. Hadrian's Wall
13. Augustus (Gaius Octavius / Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus)
14. Gaius Julius Caesar
15. Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)
16. The Punic Wars
17. Caesar crosses the Rubicon
18. The Augustan settlement: Octavian becomes Augustus
19. Construction of Hadrian's Wall begins
20. The empire reaches its greatest territorial extent
21. The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
22. Alaric's Goths sack Rome
23. Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
24. Evidence
25. Dio states that Caracalla made all inhabitants of the empire Roman citizens in order to increase revenue, since the 5% inheritance and manumission taxes fell on citizens only, and that he had doubled those taxes. Dio is a senator personally hostile to Caracalla, and this passage survives mainly in Byzantine epitome rather than in Dio's own words.
26. The only near-contemporary text of the edict, in Greek, badly damaged at the top left. It presents the grant of citizenship in providential and religious terms - thanksgiving to the gods for the emperor's preservation - and contains an exclusion clause whose reading (the dediticii) is disputed because the papyrus is broken there.
27. Caracalla introduced the antoninianus, tariffed at two denarii but containing substantially less than twice the silver, and raised legionary pay. The numismatic record supplies independent physical support for the fiscal pressure that Cassius Dio says motivated the citizenship edict - though pressure is a context, not a proof of motive.