Rome's emperor Geta was erased from marble but survived on coins
After Geta was killed in December 211, his brother Caracalla ordered his memory wiped out, and the job was done so thoroughly that hardly any marble portraits of him remain. His face endured anyway, on plentiful Roman coins and in a family painting where it has been scraped away.
Publius Septimius Geta was born on 7 March 189, either in Rome or Mediolanum, the younger son of Septimius Severus and his second wife Julia Domna. His father was then merely a provincial governor under Commodus. Severus later seized the throne, named Geta caesar, or heir, on 28 January 198, and raised him to augustus in late 209, so that father and both sons shared the imperial title.
Official imagery sold a happy family sharing power, with Caracalla as second in command on the British campaign and Geta handling administration. The brothers loathed each other. When Severus died at Eboracum, today's York, on 4 February 211, they became joint emperors and travelled back to Rome without once sleeping under the same roof or eating together. In Rome they split the palace in two, barred each other's servants, and met only in their mother's presence under heavy guard. Herodian says a plan to divide the empire itself was dropped because Julia Domna fought it.
The arrangement collapsed within the year. After a failed attempt during the Saturnalia festival, Caracalla had his mother call a peace meeting in her rooms, where Geta arrived without his bodyguards and was killed by centurions. Cassius Dio put the number of his supporters killed or proscribed afterwards at around 20,000.
The coins tell the rivalry in miniature. Caracalla, augustus since 198, wore a laurel wreath while Geta stayed bareheaded until 209. From then until their father's death both appeared as equally grown young men with short beards. In the brief months of joint rule Caracalla's portrait stayed the same, but Geta began to appear with a long, straggly beard just like his father's, a sign he wanted to be seen as the true heir. The Severan Tondo, a painted panel of the family, shows one face blotted out, thought to be his.
Source: Geta (emperor)
