April 8

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Septimius Bassianus Antoninus -- known to the Roman world as Caracalla -- ascended to power in the year 211 upon the death his father, Septimus Severus. For a few months he shared the imperial duties with his brother Geta, but in December of that year, Caracalla decided to dispose of his fraternal rival. He arranged a meeting with Geta in his mother’s apartment, where a group of centurions hacked the unfortunate brother to bits.

After Geta had been assassinated and his body burnt to a crisp, Caracalla began a killing spree that solidified his reputation as one of the more bloodthirsty Roman leaders. He ordered his counselor Laetus -- with whom he had originally discussed the assassination plot -- to commit suicide, taking care to send him the poison himself. Other plotters and advisers met similar ends. One victim threw himself from a window to avoid his assassins; when he merely suffered a broken leg and tried to crawl away, his pursuers mocked him in the streets before finishing him off. As the Historia Augusta explains,

[d]uring this same time there were slain men without number, all of whom had favoured the cause of Geta, and even the freedmen were slain who had managed Geta's affairs. Then there was a slaughtering in all manner of places. Even in the public baths there was slaughter, and some too were killed while dining, among them Sammonicus Serenus, many of whose books dealing with learned subjects are still in circulation.... After this he committed many further murders in the city, causing many persons far and wide to be seized by soldiers and killed, as though he were punishing a rebellion.

Over the next four years, Caracalla presided over massacres in Gaul, in Germany, and in Egypt, where thousands of Alexandrians were put to death for little reason other than to remind the rest of the city of its subordinate relationship to Rome.

Loathed by apparently everyone, Caracalla died on this date in the year 217; he was assassinated will taking a piss on the side of the road hear Harran, a city on the edge of the Parthian Empire, which included all of modern-day Iran and much of modern-day Iraq.

March 15

The middle of March, 44 BCE was not looking so good for Gaius Julius Caesar. Though he had recently been appointed dictator for life over Rome and was positively drowning in formal honors bestowed on him by the Senate, Caesar had reason for concern. Rumors abounded of plots against him, and a series of bizarre events foretold great unpleasantness to come. A bronze tablet, for instance, had recently been excavated from the tomb of Capys, founder of Capua, warning that its discovery would be followed by a terrible murder of great significance to the Roman people. More strangely, the herd of horses Caesar had brought with him across the Rubicon had suddenly refused to graze and were observed actually weeping in the fields. A soothsayer named Spurrina had also given warning to the dictator that peril was afoot, and on March 14 a king bird flew into the Hall of Pompey (named for Caesar’s vanquished foe) and was torn to pieces by various other birds in pursuit from a nearby grove. Finally, on the night before his death, both Caesar and his wife Calpurnia each experienced strange dreams -- Casear saw himself flying through the air, while Calpurnia dreamed of clutching her husband’s murdered body. During Calpurnia’s dream, the door of their bedroom suddenly flew open.

The following day, Caesar -- undeterred by the mountain of evidence that he was about to perish -- took to the forum on the invitation of numerous senators, who claimed to have a petition for him to examine. The first century Roman historian Seutonius explains what transpired:

As he took his seat, the conspirators gathered about him as if to pay their respects, and straightway Tillius Cimber, who had assumed the lead, came nearer as though to ask something; and when Caesar with a gesture put him off to another time, Cimber caught his toga by both shoulders; then as Caesar cried, “Why, this is violence!” one of the Cascas stabbed him from one side just below the throat. Caesar caught Casca’s arm and ran it through with his stylus, but as he tried to leap to his feet, he was stopped by another wound. When he saw that he was beset on every side by drawn daggers, he muffled his head in his robe, and at the same time drew down its lap to his feet with his left hand, in order to fall more decently, with the lower part of his body also covered. And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, “You too, my child?” All the conspirators made off, and he lay there lifeless for some time, and finally three common slaves put him on a litter and carried him home, with one arm hanging down. And of so many wounds none turned out to be mortal, in the opinion of the physician Antistius, except the second one in the breast.

The common people of Rome rampaged through the streets after Caesar’s death, setting fires and seeking out the conspirators, whom they intended to destroy. The conspirators were spared, though few of them came to good ends. During the civil war that followed Caesar’s death, Brutus committed suicide and Cassius ordered his own freed slave to kill him.

February 24

The Roman persecution of Christians began in earnest on this date in a.d. 303, as the Roman Emperor Diocletian issued an edict that commanded the demolition of Christian churches throughout the empire; confiscated church property for auction; and exiled Christians from the protections of the law.

The edict is widely credited to Galerius, who served in the office of Caesar (junior emperor) under Diocletian until 305, when he ascended to the office of Augustus (senior emperor).

As Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

This edict was scarcely exhibited to the public view, in the most conspicuous place of Nicomedia, before it was torn down by the hands of a Christian, who expressed at the same time, by the bitterest invectives, his contempt as well as abhorrence for such impious and tyrannical governors. His offence, according to the mildest laws, amounted to treason, and deserved death. And if it be true that he was a person of rank and education, those circumstances could serve only to aggravate his guilt. He was burnt, or rather roasted, by a slow fire; and his executioners, zealous to revenge the personal insult which had been offered to the emperors, exhausted every refinement of cruelty, without being able to subdue his patience, or to alter the steady and insulting smile which, in his dying agonies, he still preserved in his countenance.

The persecutions continued for another eight years. In 311, Galerius issued an edict of religious toleration a few weeks before he endured an excruciating death. Lactantius, a North African Christian who lived at the time of Galerius, described with delight the emperor’s passing in his study De Mortibus Persecutorum (“On the Deaths of the Persecutors”):

He grew emaciated, pallid, and feeble, and the bleeding then stanched. The ulcer began to be insensible to the remedies applied, and a gangrene seized all the neighbouring parts. It diffused itself the wider the more the corrupted flesh was cut away, and everything employed as the means of cure served but to aggravate the disease.

. . . Already approaching to its deadly crisis, it had occupied the lower regions of his body: his bowels came out, and his whole seat putrefied. The luckless physicians, although without hope of overcoming the malady, ceased not to apply fomentations and administer medicines. The humours having been repelled, the distemper attacked his intestines, anti worms were generated in his body. The stench was so foul as to pervade not only the palace, but even the whole city; and no wonder, for by that time the passages from his bladder and bowels, having been devoured by the worms, became indiscriminate, and his body, with intolerable anguish, was dissolved into one mass of corruption.