Bust Of Commodus In The Guise Of Hercules. The foppish face of the last Antonine Emperor (A.D. 180-92) contrasts bizarrely with the muscular torso,
knotted club, and lion's head helmet of the great Greek hero; but Commodus was merely reviving a Hellenistic tradition of equating rulers with Heracles.
The disasters of the third century were the product of a set of coincidences. The homogeneous Empire was an ephemeral creation. The provinces, having
been raised to a similar high level of importance and prosperity, began to drift apart and to behave independently. Their armies, recruited locally to an ever
greater extent, became loyal to the regions, not to Rome. The soldiers became distanced socially and culturally from the new elite of the Graeco-Roman
Empire. Chronic political instability cut short the reign of Emperor after Emperor. And all this at a time when the pressures of available manpower beyond
the Empire, prevented by hard frontiers from entering the Empire unobtrusively to fill the vacancies of its perpetually falling population, posed a military