How Tall Was Maximinus Thrax? The Evidence for Rome's Giant Emperor

Most Roman emperors are remembered for what they built, won or wrecked. Maximinus, the soldier acclaimed emperor in 235 CE and killed by his own troops in 238, is remembered chiefly for his body. A late Roman biography gives him a precise height of more than eight Roman feet, a thumb that wore his wife’s bracelet as a ring, and an appetite measured in amphoras. Modern physicians have asked whether a pituitary disorder lay behind the stories. Sorting the evidence means asking, for each detail, who first reported it and how much that witness can be trusted.

A soldier from Thrace

The outline of his career comes from two ancient narratives. The Greek historian Herodian, who lived through these years, says that Maximinus came from a half-barbarian family in a remote village of Thrace, was a shepherd as a boy, and was drafted into the cavalry because of his size and strength.¹ Under Severus Alexander he was put in charge of training recruits, and in 235 those recruits robed him in purple and proclaimed him emperor; Alexander and his mother were killed soon after.¹ Herodian calls him the first man to rise from a lowly station to the highest office.¹ The Latin biography in the Historia Augusta says he was the first man from the ranks, not yet a senator, to be acclaimed Augustus by the army without a decree of the senate.² A Byzantine chronicler, Zonaras, gives his age at death as sixty-five, which would put his birth around 173.²

His three years were spent largely on campaign. Herodian describes him plunging on horseback into a German marsh deeper than his horse’s belly to lead the attack.¹ Coins confirm the military self-presentation: a silver denarius of 236 to 238 in the Hallie Ford Museum of Art carries the legend IMP MAXIMINVS PIVS AVG with a Victory on the reverse,³ and Magie’s notes to the Loeb translation point to coins with the legend Victoria Germanica and inscriptions giving him the title Germanicus Maximus.² In 238 the senate backed rival emperors, and while Maximinus besieged Aquileia in northern Italy, soldiers of the Second Parthian legion killed him and his son outside his tent and sent their heads to Rome.¹

Two witnesses of very different quality

Herodian wrote in Greek and carried his history down to 238, so he is a contemporary source. He is also hostile. He calls Maximinus barbarous by nature and describes a reign of fear.¹ On the body, he is emphatic but unspecific. He writes that “Everyone knew and spread the story” that the shepherd had enlisted “because of his huge size and great strength,” and that the army chose him in part for his “great size.”¹ His fullest description comes at the end of Book 7, chapter 1: “The emperor’s appearance was frightening and his body was huge; not easily would any of the skilled Greek athletes or the best-trained warriors among the barbarians prove his equal.”¹ In Books 6 to 8 there is no number: no height, no weight, no menu.

The Historia Augusta is another matter. It presents itself as the work of six biographers writing under Diocletian and Constantine, and its “Two Maximini” opens with an address to Constantine.⁴² In 1889 the German scholar Hermann Dessau argued in the journal Hermes that the whole collection was the work of one author,⁴ and as David Rohrbacher puts it, Dessau showed that a work claiming six authors of the early fourth century is “the product of a single author writing decades later.”⁵ Theodor Mommsen resisted the conclusion at once, and doubts lingered as late as Arnaldo Momigliano, but Rohrbacher treats Dessau’s case as demonstrated.⁵ Livius.org adds that later computer-assisted stylistic analysis supports it.⁴ Ronald Syme, quoted by Rohrbacher, called the collection “the most enigmatic work that Antiquity has transmitted.”⁵

For the Maximini, the author’s main source was Herodian, which we still have, so his methods can be watched at work. Rohrbacher shows him supplementing Herodian with invented letters and precise numbers, such as an exact count of executed conspirators where Herodian gives none.⁵ Magie, writing in 1924, already noted that “the modern tendency” was “to discard as unhistoric all that is not contained in Herodian,” and he labels the dispatch quoted in the Life as fictitious.²

What the biography claims, and on whose authority

Several of the most famous physical details are tied to an authority the biography calls Cordus. In Magie’s translation the key sentence reads: “He was of such size, so Cordus reports, that men said he was six inches over eight feet in height; and his thumb was so huge that he used his wife’s bracelet for a ring.”² The next sentence adds stories “reported almost as common talk”: that he dragged wagons with his hands, moved a laden cart alone, loosened a horse’s teeth with his fist and broke its legs with a kick.² Earlier the Life says he surpassed everyone “in height and size and proportions, in his great eyes, and in whiteness of skin.”²

Cordus is the problem. Rohrbacher concludes that “almost every single one of the twenty-seven citations to Cordus in the HA is to a fabrication,” and that Cordus appears almost entirely in the Lives built on Herodian, vanishing when Herodian is left behind.⁵ In other words, Cordus is most likely a name the author attached to his own additions to Herodian.

The appetite passage shows the same layering. “It is agreed, moreover, that often in a single day he drank a Capitoline amphora of wine, and ate forty pounds of meat, or, according to Cordus, no less than sixty.”² Magie’s note puts the amphora at about 26.2 liters.² The Latin presents the forty-pound figure as agreed (constat), and only the larger figure is pinned on Cordus.⁶ The Life goes on to say that he caught his sweat in cups and could show two or three pints of it.²

The biography returns to his size near its end. In the section on his son, the author says that “Maximinus was almost eight and a half feet tall,” and that one of his boots, displayed in a grove near Aquileia, was a foot longer than any human foot, which gave rise to the saying “Maximinus’ boot” for lanky, awkward men.² He adds that he records this so that no reader of Cordus would think he had left anything out.² The son, he claims, might have reached his father’s stature had he lived.²

The Latin and what it converts to

The Latin text of the height passage, as printed in the Loeb edition, reads octo pedes digitis sex diceretur egressus: he was said to have exceeded eight feet by six fingers.⁶ The critical apparatus reports that the manuscript known as P reads digito uideretur instead, which would mean he “seemed” to exceed eight feet by a single finger.⁶ The later passage reads pedum, ut diximus, octo et prope semis, “of eight feet and nearly a half, as we have said.”⁶ So the text itself is not secure, and the two passages disagree slightly with each other.

A Roman foot was divided into sixteen digiti, or finger-breadths.⁷ Bill Thayer, in a note on LacusCurtius, converts eight and a half Roman feet to 2.51 m, which implies a foot of about 29.5 cm.² Using that figure:

Reading	Roman measure	Approximate metric	Approximate U.S.
Manuscript P	8 feet + 1 finger	2.38 m	7 ft 10 in
Loeb text	8 feet + 6 fingers	2.47 m	8 ft 1 in
Chapter 28	nearly 8.5 feet	up to 2.51 m	up to 8 ft 3 in

Retellings that make him “eight feet six inches” in modern feet inflate the figure to about 2.59 m, because they combine the Latin number with the longer modern foot.

For scale: Robert Wadlow, the tallest man for whom Guinness World Records accepts irrefutable evidence, was 2.72 m when last measured in 1940.⁸ A skeleton of a young man with gigantism from a third-century necropolis at Fidenae, near Rome, stood about 2.02 m, at a time when Roman men averaged about 1.67 m.⁹ Even the smallest reading of the biography would make Maximinus about 36 cm taller than that diagnosed Roman giant. The figure is not impossible for a human being, but it is an extraordinary claim, made a century or more after his death, by an author who invents sources, and attributed to one of those inventions.

The acromegaly hypothesis

Acromegaly is caused by excess growth hormone, produced mainly in the pituitary gland. When the excess begins in childhood, before the growth plates close, the result is gigantism and great height; in adults it enlarges the hands and feet, changes ring and shoe size, makes the brow and lower jaw jut forward, and increases sweating.¹⁰ Read against that list, the Historia Augusta’s details look suggestive: the extreme height, the huge thumb and bracelet-ring, the outsized boot, the sweat collected in cups.

In 2020 a group of researchers from Italian, British, French, Dutch and Australian institutions, including an endocrinologist at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, published a paper in Medical Hypotheses titled “Hereditary acromegalic gigantism in the family of Roman Emperor Maximinus Thrax.”¹¹ As its title says, it proposes that the condition ran in his family. We were able to read only its bibliographic records and keywords, not its argument.¹¹

The difficulty is the evidence base. No remains of Maximinus are known, and Herodian says his head was sent to Rome and his body left to be mutilated.¹ The Fidenae skeleton was diagnosed from the bones themselves, including skull changes consistent with a pituitary tumor.⁹ For Maximinus there are only texts, and the most specific of them are the least reliable. The sweat and bracelet anecdotes could reflect a real medical condition, or they could be the kind of vivid detail the Historia Augusta’s author liked to invent; the evidence does not let us choose. Coin portraits do not settle it either, since a coin cannot record height and die engravers worked within conventions. His exact height has not been established by any scientific method, and acromegaly remains a plausible hypothesis rather than a diagnosis.

Sorting fact from legend

Documented by a contemporary. Maximinus was a Thracian soldier of humble origin, proclaimed emperor by recruits in 235 and killed by his troops at Aquileia in 238. Herodian, writing in his own lifetime, describes him as huge, strong and frightening to look at.¹

Plausible but unproven. That he was exceptionally tall, and that a growth-hormone disorder explains it. Specialists have proposed this in print,¹¹ but with no known remains, any such diagnosis can only rest on ancient descriptions.

Literary embellishment. The precise figures of eight feet and six fingers, or nearly eight and a half feet; the bracelet worn as a ring; the sixty pounds of meat; the cups of sweat; the horse’s teeth; the boot in the grove. All come from the Historia Augusta, most through its invented “Cordus,” and none appears in Herodian.²⁵

The most defensible conclusion is the modest one. A very large, very strong frontier soldier became emperor, and his size was part of his reputation even in his own day. The numbers that made him famous were added later, by a writer who treated history as an occasion for invention.

Footnotes

1. Herodian 6.8.1-5, 7.1.1-2, 7.1.6, 7.1.12, 7.2.6, 8.5.8-9, trans. Echols, on Livius.org. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. Historia Augusta, Two Maximini 1.5, 3.6, 4.1-3, 6.8-9, 8.1, 27.2, 28.8-10, trans. Magie, with Magie’s notes 2, 3, 8, 40, 41 and Thayer’s note 16, on LacusCurtius. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

3. Hallie Ford Museum of Art, denarius 2006.010.052. ↩

4. Livius.org, “Historia Augusta.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Rohrbacher 2013, introduction and the sections on Marius Maximus (on Cordus) and on Herodian. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Historia Augusta, Maximini Duo 4.1, 6.8 (with apparatus note 10), 28.8, Latin text on LacusCurtius. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, s.v. “Pes.” ↩

8. Guinness World Records, “Tallest man ever.” ↩

9. National Geographic, 10 November 2012. ↩ ↩²

10. NIDDK, “Acromegaly.” ↩

11. Armocida et al. 2020, Medical Hypotheses 136, 109525 (bibliographic record). ↩ ↩² ↩³