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Notes -
So, a fun little kidding/not kidding hypothetical.
What if Marcus Aurelius was not a cuck?
I've been reading Gibbon lately, and this immediately jumped out at me from the text.
To summarize, Marcus' wife fucked around a lot, Marcus' "son" was nothing like him at all, and he was so soft hearted that he was oblivious to all this, despite literally the entire empire knowing. To add insult to injury, Marcus had such affection for his "son" that he bequeathed the empire to him, arguably damning it to 100 years of civil war, invasion, famine, and plague.
Now sure, Roman families were different. The last several Emperors had "adopted" whole ass adult "sons" to bequeath the purple to. They divorced and remarried to seal alliances at the drop of the hat. It's debatable how much family meant to them at all. All the same, had Marcus at least kept up that pragmatic tradition, he would have chosen a more worthy successor from the Roman Senate.
Gibbon really puts all the ills that eventually end the Roman Empire on Commodus. Rome's own military industrial complex is birthed under him. He showers the armies in the wealth of the empire to purchase their loyalty, a tradition every succeeding military dictator will have to keep up after him. It results in such rapacious taxes over the next 100 years that famine and disease roar through the empire. Gibbon estimates that over the course of the third century crisis the population of the Roman Empire may have fallen by as much as a half! And when war and disease isn't reducing the population, apparently the taxes are so burdensome that the workers of the empire refused to have families! I can't find the text at the moment, but a later emperor tried to decree tax exemptions for families to encourage them not to just commit infanticide on children they couldn't afford the taxes on. But apparently the system was merely gamed and did little to raise the fertility of the Roman Empire.
So let that be a lesson. Invisible and inevitable, like a cuck that beats his meat in one corner of the globe and with that single action changes the prosperity across the whole of an empire.
I suspect there are a lot of roads that lead to paying off the local military. Most of which the Roman Empire was determined to tread. Keep in mind that the first of those last Five Good Emperors probably got the job by couping Domitian.
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