The Praetorian Guard: Man, These Guys Sucked

One of the fascinating (if perverse) aspects of history is how often institutions end up having the exact opposite outcome of what they were intended to do. You can no doubt think of many examples – schools that make their students dumber, military organizations that fail to defend, hospitals that make people sicker, bureaucracies that exacerbate the problems they were created to solve, and so forth. This can apply to social movements as well. Prohibition in American is one of the best examples of that. The temperance movement achieved its goal of banning alcohol in the United States during the Prohibition period, but the backlash and the consequences made it unpopular, and today the idea of nationally banning alcohol in the United States is implausible.

The Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome, the personal bodyguards of the emperor, might be another example of such an institution.

For over a thousand years, people have been asking why the Roman Empire fell. I think that might actually be the wrong question.

The better question is why did the Roman Empire last as long as it did, because it sure almost didn’t.

At the height of its power, the Empire controlled land on three different continents in an area larger than many modern states, and it had to maintain that control without anything resembling modern technology and organization. Travel was difficult and dangerous, even with the Roman road system. The account of St. Paul’s shipwreck in the book of Acts must have been an all too common experience in the Roman Empire, given the number of Roman wrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Messages could take weeks to reach their recipients, and there was no division between civilian and military authority. If the emperors wanted to do anything, they had to use the army to do it, because the army was the only pool of skilled men loyal to the state. Since the Empire never really solved the problem of succession and the transfer of power, it didn’t take long before ambitious men figured out that the man with the largest army could declare himself emperor, and the Roman Empire actually broke into three competing mini-empires and almost fell apart entirely in the middle of the 200s AD.

So there were a lot of reasons the Roman Empire fell apart, and the Praetorian Guard, the bodyguard of the emperors, was one of them. The Praetorian Guard certainly wasn’t the sole reason the Roman Empire collapsed, but the Guard most definitely didn’t help.

In the last century of the Roman Republic, one of the growing problems was that armies were less loyal to Rome and more loyal to their general, who made sure they got paid and received grants of land. To show their prestige and to guard against the danger of assassination from rivals, general began collecting personal bodyguards. Since a Roman general commanded from a tent in a legionary camp called a “praetorium”, the general’s private guards became called “praetorians.” Obviously, the general wanted his best troops as his bodyguards, so becoming a praetorian was a privileged position with higher pay and perks. This practice continued as the Roman Republic split apart into civil wars between the ambitious generals of the First and Second Triumvirates.

The civil wars of the Roman Republic ended with Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus, as the last man standing and sole control of what we now think of as the Roman Empire. Augustus is remembered as the first Roman emperor, but the office of “emperor” didn’t really exist at the time, not the way we think of it now. Rather, Augustus was essentially a military dictator, but after he won, he went to great lengths to conceal his power under a cloak of legality by having the Senate invest him with various official powers. In modern terms, it would be like if the US was ruled by a military dictator who simultaneously held the offices of President, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, the governorships of the five most populous states, all while claiming only to be the first citizen among equals. Essentially, Augustus invented the powers of the Roman emperor on the fly, and his successors followed suit.

Julius Caesar famously pardoned his enemies and went around without a bodyguard to show his courage, which ended up getting him assassinated. Augustus was determined not to repeat that mistake, and so after annihilating his enemies he founded a personal bodyguard in what we know today as the Praetorian Guard. That’s a modern term – the praetorians themselves always referred to themselves as the praetorians of whichever emperor they happened to be serving. Augustus seems to have seen some of the potential danger in the Praetorian Guard, and during his reign they were scattered around Italy, with the ones guarding him rotated out every so often. (The praetorians in Italy, when not guarding the emperor, tended to do odd jobs for the government, like policing, construction, surveying, and so forth.) However, Augustus’s successor Tiberius concentrated the Guard in Rome, which made it even more dangerous.

Another problem with the Roman Empire, one that it never quite managed to solve, was the succession problem. Augustus was a military dictator who assembled a sort of ad hoc legality around his position with his various offices and powers. But how would he pass that on to a successor? What if someone else decided that they were the proper successor? Augustus had taken his office by force, so why shouldn’t anyone else?

The Praetorian Guard exacerbated this problem further. Was their loyalty to the office of the emperor, which was tricky because that office didn’t technically exist? Was it to the man himself, or to his heirs? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Guard eventually settled on the most practical answer to the question – their loyalty belonged to whoever paid them the most.

There’s a very high chance that Tiberius was murdered by the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, which means that the imperial bodyguard only made it two emperors before it started killing them. Tiberius’s successor Caligula was famously insane, and the Guard eventually got sick of him and participated in his murder. After Caligula’s death, the Guard declared Claudius as the new emperor, who repaid them by giving lavish donatives. That meant the Guard had gone from protecting the emperors to killing ones it didn’t like and then installing new ones.

After the Senate turned against Nero and he committed suicide in 69 AD, the Roman Empire had its Year of Four Emperors – Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian, who won the civil war and became the new emperor. Each of the potential claimants had their own praetorians who fought against other praetorians. The original Praetorian Guard did not cover itself in glory, as their comfortable life in Rome did not make them effective as field soldiers, and they lost against the toughened legionaries from the frontier armies who came to fight in the civil war.

That said, during the reigns of the Five Good Emperors (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius) from 96 to 180 AD, we don’t hear much about the Praetorian Guard. The most likely explanation is that these emperors were strong and capable rulers, so the Guard had no reason to turn against them, and therefore any potential conspiracies that would have involved the Guard couldn’t get off the ground.

However, part of the reason the 100s AD were the apex of the Roman Empire is that Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius did not have sons, so they adopted a capable leader as their son and heir, thereby creating continuity of rule. Marcus Aurelius, unfortunately, had a natural son named Commodus, and after he died Commodus became emperor. Commodus was a spectacularly incompetent narcissist, nowadays known as the villain from the movie GLADIATOR. If anything, GLADIATOR toned down Commodus’s brutality, though to be fair to Commodus he didn’t murder his father like the fictional version did in the movie.

Commodus was eventually assassinated, and the Praetorian Guard hit its lowest point soon after. Pertinax became emperor after Commodus, and there was hope he would be a Nerva-type figure, a respected elderly Senator who would adopt a capable heir the way Nerva did with Trajan. However, Commodus had used the Guard as his privileged force of personal thugs, and Pertinax tried to impose discipline upon them. The Guard did not care for that, so they murdered Pertinax and then auctioned off the title of emperor to whoever would pay them the most. Soon after Septimius Severus seized control of the Empire, and he summarily fired all the praetorians and put his own veteran legionaries in their place.

So the Praetorian Guard, which had been intended to guard the emperors, ended up murdering the emperor on a regular basis and sometimes choosing his successor, and even auctioning off the title to the highest bidder.

Septimius Severus was a brutal ruler and held the Empire together long enough to die of natural causes. His sons Caracalla and Geta were his successors, and Caracalla murdered Geta before he was assassinated himself by yet another plot from disgruntled praetorians.

After that the Empire and the Guard declined precipitously. This was the period later historians would call the Crisis of the Third Century, when the Roman Empire fractured into the three competing mini-empires I mentioned above. A depressing pattern rapidly emerged. The Praetorian Guard or the army would kill an emperor and proclaim a new one. The emperor would last until he tried to do something the army didn’t like, such as imposing new discipline, and the pattern would repeat.

The Praetorian Guard was never really reformed, but like so many failed institutions, it gradually became obsolete. Part of the reason was that the Empire was subject to frequent barbarian invasions throughout the 200s. The emperor was required constantly on the frontiers to supervise the defense with the field armies. The emperors developed a different kind of bodyguard called the “scholae palatinae”, a mounted group of soldiers that would accompany him in the field as he moved around the Empire. The constant defensive warfare also resulted in a subtle shift. Rome was no longer the center of power in the Empire, the center of power was wherever the emperor happened to be at the moment. The city of Rome had become in many ways an expensive vestigial relic of another age. Some of the emperors only visited Rome once, some of the shorter-lived ones never even made it there at all, and the emperors certainly did not rule from Rome.

Because of these changes, the idea of the Praetorian Guard, a permanent bodyguard force based in Rome, had become obsolete.

The actual end of the Praetorian Guard came after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, the battle where the Emperor Constantine famously had the vision that led him to convert to Christianity. The Praetorian Guard sided with Constantine’s opponent Maxentius, and since Constantine had no use for the Praetorian Guard and indeed would move his capital to the new city of Constantinople, he simply had the Guard disbanded and continued to rely on mounted cavalry units for his personal bodyguard.

So the Praetorian Guard, after three centuries of frequent treachery and corruption, had come to an end. Amusingly, while the Guard was gone, the title of “praetorian prefect” remained in use in the Empire for the rest of its history, which came to show just how powerful the commander of the Guard could become.

In the end, Praetorian Guard is yet another example of an institution that became a hindrance to the very goals it was founded to advance. That seems to be a curse of any organization, and the only cure is constant vigilance and strong leadership. Two qualities, alas, that are all too rare in any age of history.

Yet you can definitely see why I say history is the best source of material for fantasy writers. You could get like twenty different novels out of the events described above. 🙂

-JM