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 died at Eboracum on 4th February that year, 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 his erasure from the public record — the practice modern scholars call damnatio memoriae, a phrase the Romans themselves never used. 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 chiselled 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. The same arch carries two earlier erasures: Caracalla’s father-in-law Plautianus, who fell in 205, and Caracalla’s wife Plautilla, killed in 211.
According to Cassius Dio, Caracalla also banned public mention of Geta’s name; speaking it could be treated as a capital offence. In the purge that followed, Dio puts the dead at some twenty thousand, men and women alike, cut down wherever in the palace they happened to be, for having been associated with Geta or shown sympathy for him. The figure cannot be checked against any other record.
Caracalla wanted his brother to have not only no future, but no past.
Across the provinces, 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 east panel shows Septimius Severus and Julia Domna pouring a libation, and to their right a blank stretch of stone where Geta once stood. The stone keeps the space he occupied and nothing else.
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 their two sons; the face of one son 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 look out from behind, one son intact beside them, and in the foreground a scraped hollow where the other boy’s face was. Neck, shoulders and drapery survive; only the face is gone. Most scholars take the ruined figure for Geta, though some argue the younger son is the smaller boy and that it is Caracalla’s face that was destroyed. Either way, the family that ordered the killing remains, and the erased 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 the face and hair were taken back to the ground layer; the background colour and underlayer show through like scar tissue.
The Arch of the Argentarii still stands in Rome. The mutilated reliefs, where Geta, Plautilla and Plautianus were chiselled away, remain legible from the street. 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 from Egypt and a battered arch in Rome show exactly where that deletion failed — in the spaces that remain empty yet impossible not to see.
