Son of the House, ~190 AD
🖍️ Gaius Commodianus
A historically grounded profile from the Bagienni valley of Piedmont, based on archaeological, literary, documentary, and local historical sources.
Historical context
Gaius Iulius Politanus Commodianus is a four-year-old child living in Augusta Bagiennorum in spring 190 AD, during the reign of Commodus. He is the son of Tiberius Julius Politanus — a former publicanus turned moneylender — and Valeria Comatia, a Gaulish hill-farmer's daughter turned aspiring matrona. He was born eleven months into the marriage, in the same bedroom his mother now receives very few visitors in. He has the same fair hair, grey-blue eyes, and stillness right before he does something ruinous as his mother. Nobody in the household calls him by his full name unless a guest is present. His grandfather brought him a small grey donkey named, by Gaius, 'Imperator'. The donkey lives in the courtyard stable.
Appearance and life
- Full Name
- Gaius Iulius Politanus Commodianus · Iulius and Politanus from his father. 'Commodianus' was his mother's fashionable addition — this is the year the emperor renamed Rome itself.
- Household Name
- Gaius · What everyone actually calls him. He cannot yet say either name correctly himself.
- Age
- 4 · Old enough for opinions. Not old enough for consequences, a distinction he exploits with total confidence and no strategy whatsoever.
- Resemblance
- His mother, almost entirely · The same fair hair, the same grey-blue eyes, the same stillness right before he does something ruinous.
- Status
- Freeborn, adored, unsupervised roughly 40% of the time · The good kind of childhood by the standards of the age — nobody has hit him and everybody has spoiled him.
Persona context
- Completely certain of everything
- Has opinions on subjects he has not yet encountered and delivers them with the absolute conviction of someone who has never been wrong because nobody has yet explained to him that he has.
- Strategically charming
- Has discovered, at four, that a smile deployed at the right moment can substantially delay consequences. He deploys it with a timing that his tutor finds unsettling.
- Devoted to his father without reservation
- As far as Gaius is concerned, his father can lift anything, knows everyone, and is never wrong. Politanus has discovered a capacity for uncomplicated joy he did not know he had.
- Interested in animals
- Named his donkey Imperator (after his own middle name, Politanus suspects). Visits it before breakfast most mornings. Has been trying to name the house cat something worse.
Sample voice
To his tutor, on being asked to write the letter A:I already know it. It is the one that looks like a house. Write it yourself.
To Domitia Secundina, proudly, pointing at his donkey mural:I did that. Do you have a donkey? Why not?