The Chiseled Face

Emperor Caracalla, the Severan Tondo, and the Paradox of Damnatio Memoriae

Visitors walking past the sixth-century church of San Giorgio in Velabro in Rome's ancient cattle market, the Forum Boarium, encounter a rectangular marble gateway built in 204 CE by the city's guild of livestock merchants and moneychangers, the Arch of the Argentarii. Across the upper lintel, where the Latin dedicatory inscription originally honored the ruling imperial family of Septimius Severus, deep, rough-hewn troughs gouge the travertine stone, their chisel marks left deliberately unsmoothed. Directly below, on the inner pier reliefs showing the imperial family pouring libations over a sacrificial tripod, two figures stand intact while the space beside them is an eerie, hacked-out stone silhouette where a third human body once stood.

That missing silhouette belonged to Publius Septimius Geta, co-emperor of the Roman Empire alongside his older brother Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus, known to history as Caracalla. When their father Septimius Severus died on campaign at York in Britain in February 211 CE, his final terse instruction to his two sons had been to remain in harmony with one another, enrich the legionaries, and disregard everyone else. Instead, the brothers hated each other with such ferocity that upon returning to Rome they partitioned the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill down the middle, bricking up every connecting corridor and posting separate Praetorian guard detachments at every door while their cooks tested every dish for poison.

On December 26, 211 CE, Caracalla persuaded their mother, Empress Julia Domna, to summon both brothers to her private apartments for a Christmas-week reconciliation. The moment Geta stepped inside the room unguarded, Caracalla's centurions burst through the doors with drawn swords. Geta threw himself onto his mother's chest begging her to save him; the soldiers hacked him to death in her arms, slicing Julia Domna's hand in the process and soaking her robes in her younger son's blood. Caracalla immediately rode to the Praetorian camp on the edge of Rome, announced that he had barely escaped an assassination plot by his brother, doubled the legionaries' daily rations, and raised their annual pay by fifty percent.

Ordinary enmity ends with the physical death of the rival. Total enmity demands a second murder: the retrospective extermination of the enemy's existence so that they never lived in the historical record at all. Through a sweeping decree of the Roman Senate known in modern scholarship as damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory), Caracalla ordered the systematic erasure of Geta across three continents:

• Epigraphic Chiseling in Stone: From the triumphal arches of Rome and North Africa to milestone markers along the Danube and the Euphrates, military mason squads climbed scaffolds and chiseled the name Publius Septimius Geta* out of thousands of marble and limestone inscriptions, often replacing the void with lengthened honorific titles for Caracalla.
• * Sculptural Decapitation and Recarving: Portrait busts of Geta were toppled in public squares, smashed with hammers, or sent back to imperial workshops to have their marble curls and cheeks recut into portraits of Caracalla himself.
• * Numismatic Smelting: According to the contemporary Roman senator and historian Cassius Dio, Caracalla ordered the melting down of gold, silver, and bronze coins bearing Geta's image throughout the provincial mints, while local magistrates in Asia Minor hastily hammered countermarks directly over Geta's face on circulating bronze currency so merchants could still use the metal without committing treason.
• * Papyrus Cancellation and Domestic Policing: In Roman Egypt, clerks drew ink strike-through lines across Geta's name on tax receipts and census rolls. Speaking or writing Geta's name—even by comic playwrights using the traditional slave name Geta on stage, or by Julia Domna weeping in private over her son's death—became a capital crime that resulted in the execution of roughly twenty thousand officials, servants, and guards suspected of loyalty to the dead prince.

Yet the physical mechanics of Roman erasure contained an inescapable semiotic trap. Unlike a modern digital database where a record can be deleted without leaving a byte footprint, stone, bronze, and painted wood resist clean subtraction. Every chiseled trough on the Arch of the Argentarii and every countermarked coin announced to every passerby that someone had been violently removed. Nowhere is this paradox of the negative monument more visible than on the Severan Tondo, a twelve-inch circular tempera-on-wood panel painted in Egypt around 199 CE. Preserved today in the Altes Museum in Berlin, the painted Severan family portrait shows Emperor Septimius Severus, Julia Domna, and young Caracalla beside a rough, circular smear of gray plaster smeared with excrement—making the erased Geta the first face every visitor looks at.