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Notes -
Am I the only one who thinks it's no accident that Marcus Aurelius was literally the last of both the five good emperors AND the Pax Romana? He was the Merkel of Rome, a compelling and competent but fundamentally short-termist manager. He completely failed at imparting his ideology on his own son, who became an indisputably bad emperor. His reforms were largely centered around welfare and disadvantaged groups, a laudable goal, but not conducive to the long-term functioning of the state.
Commodus was the first of the Nerva-Antonine emperors to succeed his biological father. Up to that point the emperors managed succession by adopting known-suitable heirs. I don't think "raise any son to be a potential Good Emperor" was possible, or widely believed to be possible at the time.
There were a few familial heirs groomed from childhood for the throne who either were good emperors (Marcus Aurelius himself was one of Hadrian's closest male relatives and hand picked as his eventual successor while still a child) or probably would have been (Germanicus and Augustus's grandsons seemed to be decent emperors in the making before their untimely deaths). Pretty much everyone assumed you could raise an heir to be a good emperor, and several such cases actually turned out pretty well. The only reason Nerva through Antoninus Pius adopted successors instead of naming their sons was because they were old men in a low fertility society who didn't have any. I'm not aware of a single Roman emperor who ever chose someone from outside their bloodline to succeed them if they had a choice. Trajan or Hadrian passing over their own son in favor of some competent general or administrator would have been utterly unthinkable.
We had 1500 years of diving right monarchies in Europe, and longer elsewhere. To bolster your point: if there was a consistent way to get good heirs, we would’ve found it by now. You always have a high risk of reversion to the mean.
I think the theory that Marcus’ wife cheated on him and sired Commodus from the affair is possible, but unadjucatable at this point. Either way, you still have other good emperors with awful sons like Septimius Severus and Caracalla/Geta and arguably Vespasian/Dominitian. I don’t blame Marcus too much for Commodus.
Cthulu always swims left, monarchies dive right to avoid him.
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