HW1#: How Evil was Commodus? – by Garnet Garcia

It was rather difficult to make it through most of the article, mainly because the things this man did was so unfathomably gruesome that I had to stop every now and then just to stomach what I had read. Is it the worst behavior I’ve ever seen? Probably not; I’ve seen similar displayed in movies and shows that aim to either reflect or exaggerate behaviors such as this one. However, there is something jarring about reading this as the behavior of an actual human being who lived as opposed to just watching some actor play out a character in Game of Thrones or Gladiator.

Vile is an accurate description, but the word that came to mind for me more often was deranged. It was said in class that he was not the worst of the emperors. That’s actually terrifying. There’s something exceedingly childish about his behavior; it’s as if someone gave a sociopathic 10-year-old all the power in the world and let him do what he pleased. The child has no conscious and only knows his selfish desires no matter how inhumane or insane. It says there was no respect for anyone no matter the ability or status, which means no matter who you were or what you did, you could easily be his next victim.