Spartianus tells us that when Caracalla emerged from boyhood, before his accession, he was so changed, so stern, that no one would have known him; whereas his brother Geta, who had been an unpleasing child, was very much improved as he grew up. His narrative, and the abridgment of Dion, afford no clue to the enmity that sprang up between the brothers, and deeper principles seem to have been involved than mere fraternal jealousy. Caracalla's early life was such as to teach him heart-hardening dissimulation; Tertullian, while the brothers yet ruled jointly, urges at once the uncertainty of human life, and the probability that Caracalla would favour the Christians; and it is the fact that his victory coincided with a general and prolonged cessation of a long and cruel persecution.
We cannot tell whether he had any higher motives than a mean malice and uneasy envy in his murder of his brother, and whether the mother, for whose sake he claimed to have done it and whom he would not allow to utter or even listen to a complaint, ever forgave him. The incredible charge of incest was afterwards brought against them. But there is little doubt as to the results of the deed. He did not become a Christian, and the ancient gods of the state were the last to whom he had recourse. He patronised Philostratus, who wrote for his mother and for him the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. He thus fostered one of the chief counterfeits of Christianity. He gathered round him all who professed to read the future, and he worshipped the spirits of the dead. But they could not rid his ears of his brother's dying cry, μῆτερ, μῆτερ, τεκοῦσα, τεκοῦσα, βοήθει, σφάζομαι. He continued to court the city populace, and enriched Rome with magnificent baths, which even in ruins are the most superb monuments of refined luxury. But his fits of savagery must have made it hard for him to continue a favourite of the populace. Henceforth he relied mainly on his army, and sought ease of mind in excitement. Both necessities involved expense. Whatever impulse he gave to the corruption of the capital, he himself contentedly shared the roughest privileges of the soldiers. But that alone could not secure their affection. In the first day of his crime he had lavished the wealth his father had been eighteen years in acquiring. New sources of revenue were needed.
It is the method that Caracalla adopted to raise a revenue that gives him his main claim to a place in the catalogue of men whose lives affected the Christian church. His act, as Gibbon has shewn, marked an era in the decline of the empire. But more than that, it affected very greatly the position of Christians in all future persecutions. It is this indeed mainly that enables us to pronounce with certainty that the act was his, and belonged to no earlier date. "All who are in the Roman world," says Ulpian, "have been made citizens of Rome by an institution of the emperor Antoninus." "A most grateful and humane deed!" exclaims Augustine (de Civ. Dei, v. 17, vol. vii. 161), and immediately subjoins the proviso that made the boon so equivocal. At a stroke the Roman world was pauperized. Every citizen resident in the capital was entitled to receive every month, at a cheap rate—the indigent quite gratuitously—a certain amount of corn or bread. This was one of the chief drains upon the revenue, and one of the main causes of extortion in the provinces. But Augustus laid a tax on citizens from which aliens were exempt, a tax which made the franchise in many cases a burden to be declined rather than a boon to be coveted, a duty of five per cent. on all bequests. Nerva and Trajan, however, exempted the passage of moderate inheritances from parent to child, or vice versâ (Plin. Paneg. 37, 38). Caracalla, by raising the provincials to the franchise, did not free them from the tribute they owed before, but imposed this additional burden, which he doubled in amount, and which involved the odious intrusion of the tax-gatherer in seasons of domestic bereavement. The act seems to synchronize with a congiarium or largess to the populace in A.D. 214. Thenceforward Caracalla's laws, wherever promulgated, seemed to be dated at Rome. Oppressive as were the effects of the act, it seems yet to have been welcomed. It was but fair, thought Augustine, that rustics who had lands should give food to citizens who had none, so long as it was granted as a boon and not extorted as a right.
But besides its effects as a financial measure, Caracalla's act broke down the barriers of society; annulled, as far as any imperial institution could, the proud old sovereign commonwealth, the queen of nations, whose servants and ministers the emperors had ever professed to be; opened the command of armies to unlettered barbarians; removed the bars to the influx of Greek and Syrian and Egyptian corruption into Rome; reduced the subjects to a level, above which only the emperor, the minion of the army, towered supreme.
In earlier times St. Paul's Roman citizenship had stood him in good stead; and in the story of the martyrs in Gaul under M. Aurelius the Roman citizens had been reserved till the emperor's will was known. A boon now so widely diffused could scarcely retain the same value. But we hear no more of Christians being crucified, unless they were slaves, or first reduced to slavery. Unutterably horrible as the tortures devised against them were, they were no longer commonly thrown to the beasts as a show. They suffered by the sword at last, and all their tortures were such as might befall any citizen of Rome who transgressed the mandate of the emperor. [D. C. A. Persecution; Torture.] Thus martyrdom, instead of the obstinacy of an abject alien superstition, became the bold and cheerful resistance of free citizens to the arbitrary will of one who, when he began to torture, became a barbarous tyrant.
Caritas. Charity with her virgin sisters, Faith and Hope, and their mother Wisdom, seem to have been the names of real martyrs. The names were very natural ones for Christians to give to their children. On the Aurelian Way, in the church of St. Pancras, lay Sophia with her three daughters: Sapientia, with her daughters Fides, Spes, and Charitas, as William of Malmesbury calls them; but the Latin names nowhere else occur in this order, the Greek names, when given in full, always do.
