The Emperor Erased From Every Portrait

On 26th December 211 AD, the Roman emperor Caracalla lured his younger brother Geta to their mother Julia Domna’s private apartments in the imperial palace under the pretext of a reconciliation meeting. Since their father Septimius Severus’s death ten months earlier, the brothers had ruled as co‑emperors and hated one another so much that the palace was physically divided; they avoided being in the same room without heavy guards.

When Geta entered his mother’s chamber, armed centurions loyal to Caracalla rushed in and stabbed him repeatedly. Ancient sources describe Geta dying in Julia Domna’s arms, his blood soaking her clothing.

Then Caracalla did something worse than murder.

The Horror

To eliminate his brother not just physically but historically, Caracalla ordered a damnatio memoriae — a “condemnation of memory”. Statues of Geta throughout the empire were to be destroyed or reworked, his portraits defaced, his name erased from inscriptions and official documents.

In Rome and the provinces, stonemasons chiseled Geta’s name off arches and altars. On the Arch of the Argentarii in Rome, a commercial monument originally dedicated to the Severan family, both the inscription naming Geta and his carved figure in the reliefs were hacked away, leaving awkward gaps where he had stood beside his parents. Similar erasures targeted images of his wife Plautilla and her father after their own falls from favour.

According to Cassius Dio and later summaries, Caracalla also banned public mention of Geta’s name; speaking it could be treated as a capital offense. In the purge that followed, an estimated 20,000 people — senators, equestrians, soldiers, freedmen, even servants and friends — were executed or proscribed simply for having been associated with Geta or showing sympathy for him. The exact figure can’t be verified, but ancient writers agree the bloodletting was vast.

Caracalla wanted his brother to have not only no future, but no past.

Across three continents, images and inscriptions were altered. Yet a few objects preserve the absence itself.

The Arch of the Argentarii still stands near San Giorgio in Velabro in Rome. Inside the arch, the relief grouping of Septimius Severus and Julia Domna shows an empty space between them where Geta once appeared; a floating staff and awkward negative space mark where his figure was cut away. The stone remembers the shape of what was taken.

And one painted family portrait survives with the erasure still visible.

The so‑called Severan Tondo (Septimius‑Severus‑Tondo) is a circular wooden panel painting from Egypt, showing Septimius Severus, Julia Domna, and a young Caracalla; the area where Geta’s head once was has been scraped back to the ground layer. The tempera paint has been abraded down to bare or primed wood; only faint traces, such as the outline of a wreath, hint at the missing figure.

The result is unnerving: the emperor and empress stare out, their surviving son beside them, and in the corner a human‑shaped void gapes where the younger brother’s face used to be. The family that ordered his death and erasure remains. The murdered son is present only as a wound in the paint.

The Modern Relic

The Severan Tondo is now in the Antikensammlung at the Altes Museum in Berlin. It is about 30.5 centimetres in diameter. Standing in front of it, you can see the rough scrape marks where Geta’s facial features, hair and clothing were removed; the background colour and underlayer show through like scar tissue.

The Arch of the Argentarii still stands in Rome. Guides and plaques point out the mutilated reliefs where Geta, Plautilla and Plautianus were chiselled away under damnatio memoriae. The gaps in the carving, and the uneven patches in the inscription, are as eloquent as any intact portrait.

An emperor spent years trying to erase his brother from stone, metal and memory. A wooden panel in Egypt and a battered arch in Rome show exactly where that deletion failed — in the spaces that remain empty yet impossible not to see.

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