[00:00] One of the most wicked emperors in ancient Roman history was a man named Cometus. Now most of us actually know him as the villain from the movie Gladiator, but by many historical accounts, the real Cometus was even worse.
[00:12] And instead of the gladiatorial death they gave him in the movie, the real Cometus was strangled in the bathtub after having his mistress poison his dinner of beef. Perhaps a dish like this beef with sweet and sour sauce from the ancient Roman cookbook Apequeus.
[00:25] So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as we make the last meal of the Emperor Cometus. This time on Tasting History.
[00:38] The Emperor Cometus was the constant target of assassination attempts. Pretty much every year someone wanted this guy dead. But in the end it was actually two of his closest advisors and his mistress who did get the job done.
[00:51] On the last day of the year at night, when people were busy with the holiday, Marquia administered poison to him in some beef. Then they sent Narcusus an athlete to strangle him while he was taking a bath. Turns out that the poison just wasn't enough, hence the additional strangling.
[01:06] Now I'm actually going to play it safe and add zero poison to the dish that I'm going to be making, which comes from the ancient Roman cookbook attributed to Apequeus. It's a recipe for sauce for a bowl of meat, pepper,
[01:19] parsley, a little onion, toasted almond, date honey, vinegar, garum, de frutum, oil. So as is with most ancient recipes, this is less a recipe and more just a list of ingredients.
[01:31] There are no quantities, there are no descriptions of exactly what you do with the ingredients. So five different people could make this dish and they're all going to be slightly different. So for the version that I am making, what you'll need is two pounds or 900 grams of stew beef,
[01:46] two tablespoons of olive oil, one onion, two tablespoons of honey, a half cup or 120 milliliters of red wine vinegar, two teaspoons of garum or other fish sauce, two tablespoons of de frutum or mostocoto. I'll put links in the description to where you can get both garum and the de frutum
[02:02] online. Essentially, garum is a fermented fish sauce or liquaman is just the golden liquid from it, and de frutum is grape mass that has been reduced down into a syrup and it's delicious.
[02:15] Then one teaspoon of pepper, one tablespoon of lovage seeds, a half cup of shelled almonds, two large dates and some parsley for garnish. So start by chopping the onions into strips and then heat the olive oil in a pot and add the onions. Coat them in the hot oil and then let them cook for
[02:30] three or four minutes just long enough so they get some color on them. Then you can add in the beef. And you want to let the beef sear on all sides, moving it around for several minutes. This is really where you're going to get a chance to color the meat. And as it cooks, it should start to let off
[02:44] a good amount of juice as well. Then add in the red wine vinegar and scrape the bottom of the pot to get any bits off that have stuck to the bottom. And then once it starts to simmer, you can add in the garum, the de frutum and the honey. This combination of the sweet honey and de frutum plus the sour
[03:00] acid from the vinegar plus that really savory umami-ness of the garum is such a quintessentially ancient Roman flavor profile. It comes up a lot. But since there are no specific quantities for
[03:15] any of the ingredients given, you can vary them. You can add more or less of anything so it really suits your flavor profile. So mix everything together and then set the lid on the pot and reduce the heat and let it simmer for at least an hour up to three hours really kind of just depends on what cut
[03:31] of meat that you are using because you want it to pretty much be fully cooked and nice and tender at the end of the simmering. Now you might not need to add any more liquid into the pot, but you do
[03:43] want to check it every once in a while. And if it really does need some liquid else, it's going to burn, just add some more either water or some wine or some of the vinegar. It's really up to you. Now as
[03:56] the meat cooks, we can start to prepare all of the dry ingredients. And you're going to do that by starting to grind the pepper in a mortar and then add in the lovage seeds and grind those to a powder. Then toast the almonds in a dry pan. You don't want them to burn just toasted until they're
[04:10] nice and fragrant and then add those to the mortar and grind them up with the pepper and the lovage. Then remove the pits from the dates and chop those up into little pieces and add those to the mortar and grind them as well as you can with all of the other ingredients. Then once the meat is nearly
[04:25] done cooking, you can add in everything from the mortar and stir it into the sauce. And this will really help thicken up the sauce. And then it only needs about another 10 minutes of cooking and then it is going to be ready. And during that 10 minutes, I want you to let me know in the comments
[04:40] what other ancient Roman emperors or leaders in general you would like to see me make videos on as I go back and look at the Emperor Commodus and determine whether or not in the words of Chicago
[04:52] he had it coming. Just a quick disclaimer that really applies to every video about an ancient Roman Emperor. Most of what we know about the Emperor Commodus comes from only a handful of ancient sources
[05:07] and all those sources are relatively biased against him. Now that doesn't mean that they're not correct for the most part. Maybe he was just misunderstood but probably not. But we do only get
[05:21] one side of the story. Because as I always say, history is not written by the victors, history is written by the people who write stuff down. So Commodus was born in the year 161 on August 31st,
[05:33] which also happens to be the birth date of the Emperor Caligula. So maybe it was just faded that Commodus turned out the way that he did because of something wrong with that birthday. I'm sure if your birthday is August 31st, you're a perfectly lovely person and not a wicked Roman Emperor.
[05:48] Now what made Commodus's birth unique was that he was the first Roman Emperor to be Portfiro genitus or born in the purple. This means that when he was born, his father was already Emperor. He was
[06:01] a true ancient Roman Nepo baby. Because the more common practice before him was that the Emperor would kind of pick his heir and then adopt him as a son. But it wasn't necessarily the person who was
[06:16] born to him. It did happen, but it was far less frequent before Marcus Aurelius, who was Commodus's father. But Marcus Aurelius decided that his two biological sons should be next in line. Originally,
[06:28] they were meant to be co-rulers, but the younger brother died, leaving Commodus as sole heir. Now, Cassius Dio, who was a contemporary of Commodus, says that there was nothing in his childhood that would
[06:40] have clued Marcus Aurelius into know what his son would be like when he became an adult. But a later source, which is far less reputable, says, no, Commodus was bad news even as a kid. In the 12th
[06:54] year of his life, when it happened that his bath was drawn to cool, he ordered the bathkeeper to be cast into the furnace. Now the poor guy was not actually tossed into the furnace. They threw a sheepskin in there and just told young Commodus that that smell was the bathkeeper burning. Now,
[07:11] did this story actually happen probably not? Wasn't written down until two centuries after Commodus had died, but it does illustrate what his legacy with later Romans was like. Anyway, when Commodus was
[07:25] 16 years old, his father made him co-emperor with himself, and he followed his father on many of his military campaigns during the Marcomonic Wars against various Germanic tribes. And it was on one
[07:37] of these campaigns on the Danube River in 180 where Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors, died, leaving Commodus as sole emperor of Rome. Now these wars had been going on for about
[07:49] 14 years, for most of Marcus Aurelius's reign. And Commodus did not want to spend his emperorship at war. So he very quickly went against what his father was doing and had a treaty signed with the
[08:04] Germanic tribes so he could head back to Rome. Because he hated all exertion and craved the comfortable life of the city. And who could blame him? Actually, his rule was one of relative peace. There were some wars, but not like what had come before him and not like what would come after him. Now, there are
[08:22] many historians who say that if he had pressed the war on just a little bit longer, it would have actually ended up having a longer lasting peace, but who knows. Now at first, Commodus inherited many
[08:34] of his father's advisors who tried to mold him into the kind of emperor that Marcus Aurelius had been. But Commodus was not his father. Unlike Marcus Aurelius or the emperors who preceded him,
[08:47] emperors like Trajan and Hadrian, Commodus had no real desire to rule Rome. He wanted to be emperor, but he didn't want to have to actually do the work of being emperor. So instead, he raised up a
[09:00] series of favorites, mostly who had either been soldiers or were freedmen, former slaves, to do the ruling of Rome on his behalf. And these people who were not part of the senatorial class didn't have
[09:15] as much loyalty to the senate and to Rome itself as they did to Commodus. And that's how Commodus liked it. That way they could do the boring parts of ruling and he could spend most of his time partying
[09:29] and gaming and taking baths. He took a lot of baths. In addition, he also didn't have any respect, it seems, for the senate like his father did. And so all of this combined led the senate to really
[09:42] not like him. So this led to one of his father's former advisors, Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus, and Commodus's older sister, Lucila or Lucilla, to team up and try to get Commodus assassinated. And they actually did this by convincing two of her lovers to do the job. And it would have worked
[10:00] had one of the assassins not pull the James Bond villain moment and kind of like had to monologue about what he was going to do before he actually did the deed. As Commodus is coming into a theater,
[10:15] this guy jumps out with a sword and says, see this is what the senate has sent to you. And at the time that it took him to say that line, which I'm sure he didn't practicing all night, Commodus turned and ran away and his guards tackled the assassin. And both of the assassins were put
[10:31] to death and Pompeianus was too popular with the people to execute so he was just allowed to retire from public life. And his sister, he sent away to Capri and then had her killed about a year later.
[10:44] This is a major departure from her portrayal in the movie Gladiator where she survives until the second film. But it was this first of many assassination attempts that turned Commodus at least according to the ancient sources from being merely a bad emperor into a tyrannical bloodthirsty
[11:00] paranoid emperor. And he was so paranoid of being killed rightly so that he spent a lot of time actually outside of Rome at other palaces leaving most of the day to day work to his favorites,
[11:13] his Chamberlain, who he had raised up. And when an issue did arise that required Commodus's attention, it usually just ended in him executing people. As Cassius Dio put it, I should render my
[11:27] narrative very tedious where I to give a detailed report of all the persons put to death by Commodus. He says that many were put to death over false accusations or just because Commodus was paranoid,
[11:39] rightly so, as I said. But many of them were also killed because they were wealthy. If they were part of the senatorial class and he killed them because of treason, then he got to confiscate all of
[11:54] their wealth. And he needed that wealth because he was a fan of lavish living. Commodus lived riding in the palace amid banquets and in baths along with 300 concubines gathered together for
[12:06] their beauty. Those bads were actually one of the ways that he spent a lot of his ill-gotten gains. He was said to have built a massive bathing complex in Rome called the Bads of Commodus. And he
[12:18] would spend a lot of time there, according to one fourth-century source, he used to bathe seven and eight times a day and was in the habit of eating while in the bads. Now that's source. The Historia Agusta is less than reliable. It definitely takes liberties with the facts. But even if it's
[12:35] only half correct, that is still a lot of time and money spent on bathing. And it was this excessive bath time that let Commodus' Chamberlain's kind of take over the government often with
[12:49] disastrous results. Perhaps his most infamous Chamberlain was a freedman named Clionter who had murdered one of the previous Chamberlains. He, in the name of the emperor, would sell senate seats and other public offices to the highest bidder even when there were no offices to actually sell. In the year 190,
[13:07] he sold the office of console 25 times. So there were 25 consoles in one year. It was the most in the thousand-year history of that position. But perhaps Clander's worst act was when he quite
[13:21] purposefully caused a massive grain shortage for Rome. Now his direct involvement is questioned, but he definitely took all of the blame for it. Essentially what happened was he and or a man
[13:33] named Papyrius the Onesius confiscated all of the grain which left the people to starve. The goal was to let it get just bad enough that then he could come out with all the grain and distribute it and
[13:46] be the hero to the people. But unfortunately for him, before that happened, the people rioted and they accosted him outside of the circus Maximus, wanting him to die. And so he fled to Comedis to
[14:01] to get help, but Comedis's mistress, Marquia, basically convinced him, no, you should just kill him. And so he ended up beheading him along with his kids and all of his friends and a lot of other people
[14:15] who were high up in the government. So now with Clander gone, it was time for Comedis to finally step up and actually do the work of Emperor. And he still had his favorites like Marquia, his mistress, but he really stepped up and took over control and it did not go well. See before that, he was
[14:35] removed and so people never actually had to deal with him as a person. He was always off partying and drinking, bathing, and when he was in Rome and making himself known, it was usually to throw big
[14:50] festivals or games. And so the people actually loved him. But now with him there and participating, people got to see what a psychopathic megalomaniac he really was, at least according to the ancient
[15:05] sources. Comedis taking a respite from his amusements and sports turned to murder and was killing off the prominent men. Shortly after this happened, there was a series of calamities in Rome, which included
[15:18] a horrible thunderstorm and an earthquake that happened at the same time. And one of those two things caused a fire that burned down much of the city, including some of the temples and people kind of
[15:30] saw it as retribution for what Comedis was doing. And so his popularity amongst pretty much everyone started to wane, but especially amongst the elites. So as his popularity waned, his reaction was
[15:45] not one of humility, but rather to tell people that he was actually the son of Jupiter because he was the reincarnation of Hercules. And he even made the Senate deify him as a living god. He had statues
[16:03] torn down, which had been standing for centuries, and had new ones put up with him donning the club and lion mane of Hercules. And the author Herodian even said that he would walk around, wearing the lion mane and holding the club. But at the same time, he wore purple robes embroidered with gold,
[16:20] making himself an object of ridicule. By combining in one set of garments, the frailty of a woman and the might of a Superman. His megalomaniac hit its zenith when he became obsessed with renaming
[16:32] things after himself. He wanted his name on absolutely everything. Different buildings, government buildings, private buildings, different institutions, even the military, even Rome itself. After the fires,
[16:47] they rebuilt much of the city, and he refounded it as Colonia Komodiana, or the colony of Comedis. And Romans would now be Komodians. He even renamed the months of the year after himself,
[17:01] and his titles, which associated with Hercules, were now bestowed upon him. This is also when his obsession with gladiatorial games really came into light. And this is why I think he was chosen
[17:14] as the emperor for the movie gladiator, because in real life he did participate in the gladiatorial games, though it probably was not always fair. He once gathered all the men in the city who had lost
[17:27] their feet as the result of disease or some accident, and then after tying their knees together, and giving them sponges to throw instead of stones, Komodis killed them with blows of a club, pretending that they were giants. When fighting other gladiators, he was said to use real weapons,
[17:42] while the others were using wood. Though Cassius Dio, who was actually present at some of these games, claims that the fights were fairer than that, and it was simply that nobody was willing to strike him
[17:54] that allowed him to win. But one of his favorite games to participate in in the arena was not gladiatorial, but it was against animals. He loved to fight wild beasts like bears, lions, elephants, tigers,
[18:07] and even a hippo, though he would fight or rather hunt from a top of platform so it's not like he was actually in any real danger. Though it does seem that at least for one time he was on the ground when he killed an ostrich, because after he did so he walked over to where all of the senators were seated,
[18:25] holding the head in his left hand, and in his right hand raising a loft his bloody sword, and though he spoke not a word yet he wagged his head with a grin indicating that he would treat us in the same way. And since he had killed a number of senators by this point, the threat was not
[18:41] an empty one, but Cassius Dio, who was a senator there at the time, says that fear was not really the reaction that they had to him in this situation. It was more that they wanted to laugh because he was
[18:54] ridiculous. But if they laughed that would actually get them killed. He was very insecure and you did not ridicule him at all, lest you end up beheaded. So he said that he instructed his fellow senators to chew
[19:10] on laurel leaves from their crowns because that would either stop them from laughing or at least hide the fact that they were laughing on the inside. Now by this time, most people were against
[19:22] comedies, especially since for each of these gladiatorial games that he participated in, he charged the city a million cistercies, at least according to some of the sources, which is an awful lot of money
[19:36] for an appearance. And so the only people who were really still supporting him were the people who were benefiting from all of this corruption. People like Marquilla, who was his mistress, the prefect
[19:49] Laetus and his Chamberlain Eclectus. But even they had to be honest with him when on New Year's Eve, he told them what he was planning to do the next day. The next day, New Year's Day, there would be a big
[20:03] senatorial kind of meeting where everybody got together. It was a big ceremony and he would usually come from the palace in his purple robes to, you know, kind of kick the whole thing off.
[20:15] But he said no, I'm going to come from the barracks of the gladiators and I'm going to be dressed as a gladiator. And his closest friends were like, don't, don't do that, that you're going to
[20:28] embarrass yourself. They're all going to laugh at you. But not accustomed to being told no, Cometus was furious and he runs up to his room in a huff. First, he took a waxed tablet and wrote down the names of those who were to be put to death that night. Marquilla's name was
[20:44] at the top of the list, followed by Laetus and Eclectus and a large number of the foremost senators. I totally picture him screaming this entire time like Regina George writing in the burn book.
[20:56] That is what I'm picturing Cometus doing. Anyway, after he writes all these names down, he sets the waxed tablet to his side and takes a nap. But a little boy who worked in the palace and was accustomed to coming in and out of the emperor's room came in and saw the waxed tablet and
[21:13] was like, oh, I'm going to play with this. So then he takes it elsewhere, starts playing with it. But Marquilla comes up to him and sees the handwriting and is like, wait, that's the emperor's handwriting and reads it and sees her name at the top of the list. Then in a bit of dramatic license,
[21:29] the ancient Roman author Herodian actually gives her a monologue. So Cometus, this is my reward for my love and devotion. After I have put up with your arrogance and your madness for so many years,
[21:43] but you drunken sought, you shall not outwit a woman deadly sober. She takes this kill list to Eclectus and Laetus and they decide together that it's time for Cometus to go. And so Marquilla puts
[21:57] some poison according to Herodian in his wine and according to Cassius Dio, Marquilla administered poison to him in some beef. And as he's taking a bath, she brings whatever the poison was into him
[22:09] and he ingests it and does not die. He just gets really sick and starts throwing it up and he's like, laying there weak and he figures out what is going on and he is not happy. So they rush to go get this
[22:23] athlete who might have been one of Cometus's trainers to come finish the job. And so he comes in and strangles him to death in the bathtub. It was the end of Cometus, the end of a hundred year dynasty
[22:36] and the end of the Pax Romana. Because after this period, Rome would not really see another time of such stability really ever again, at least not such a long period of stability as it had
[22:51] enjoyed. As Cassius Dio put it, Cometus took Rome from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust. Now he is one of many Roman emperors to be assassinated and he wasn't even the only one to be poisoned
[23:03] because a couple years ago, I did a video on Claudius and his being killed by poisoned mushrooms. But he is, at least to my knowledge, the only one that was killed by eating some poisoned beef,
[23:17] a type of beef that is probably like the one that I'm about to eat right now. So once the beef is fully cooked, garnish with a bit of parsley and serve. And here we are, the last meal of the Roman emperor, Cometus. I love the smell of it. It is all of those different
[23:35] sweet and savory kind of smells altogether, especially the sweet, which is definitely what I enjoy. Here we go.
[23:53] Hmm. That's really good. There is so much that I love about this. The texture, you get this like, because the beef is like a slow simmer kind of beef, it's like kind of
[24:09] pulls apart and falls apart in your mouth. But then not all of the almonds were fully crushed up, you could. But there are still some big pieces in mine. And so it gives it some nice texture,
[24:23] which is I think a good thing. But it's the flavors. The amount of the quantities of the ingredients that I used really give you this sweet and sour flavor, it almost reminds me of like
[24:40] like the orange chicken from Panda Express, that kind of like where it's sweet, but then there's also a little bit. It's not as sweet as that. But it's that wonderful combination of flavors that that ancient Rome was known for and medieval cooking as well. That combination is very,
[24:57] very popular. But then the garum gives it this extra little depth without being pungent. It's not, it's not unpleasant. This maybe, it is definitely one of the best Roman quizzines, Roman dishes that I've
[25:13] made, I think. Definitely top three. So yeah. I think it's, you know, and it's not that hard to make. I think the hardest part is simply watching and making sure that it doesn't burn.
[25:27] So you know, just making sure that you're adding enough liquid or that it's letting off enough liquid that it is truly simmering and not burning to the bottom of the pot because I did get a little burn to the bottom of the pot, but it doesn't affect the flavor. So I definitely suggest making this.
[25:40] Definitely do not add poison to it. That is, that's a major no-no, but as it is, you should definitely try this recipe and I will, as always, put it up on the Tacing History website, a website which I
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