5

SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS AND HIS RIVALS

Septimius Severus came from Leptis Magna in Tripolitania, near modern al-Khums in Libya. Leptis was an ancient Punic foundation which remained a different sort of place from the urban centres of Numidia and Africa Proconsularis, with their orientation towards Italy and closer integration into its economy. The Jebel desert lay a mere handful of miles away from Leptis’s coastal greenery, and in the countryside Neo-Punic remained the language of many people right through the imperial period. Leptis itself had enjoyed a relationship with Rome since the days of the middle republic, becoming a federated city when Rome was fighting against the Numidian kingdom of Jugurtha. It continued to enjoy the status that came with this very early Roman connection even after it was laid to waste for supporting the Pompeians against Julius Caesar during the African phase of their civil war in the 40s BC.

But then the rich families of Leptis threw themselves wholeheartedly into the new Augustan world. They embraced the imperial cult and, from the time of Claudius, many received Roman citizenship, so that important families like the Marcii and the Annaei traced their enfranchisement back to proconsuls of the Claudian era. By the end of the Julio-Claudian period, the urban elites had stopped using Punic names. Finally, in the late 70s, the town was honoured with the status of a municipium ius Latii, with the special privilege that its pair of chief local magistrates could retain their old Punic title, sufetes, rather than Latinising it to duoviri, as most municipia would have been expected to do. The granting of municipal status and the Latin right meant that local magistrates automatically became citizens of Rome by virtue of holding local office. That in turn meant that the richer among them would enter the equestrian order at the same time as they gained their citizenship. The first Lepcitanians in the ordo equester appear under Trajan, who promoted the municipality to the rank of colonia, known as Ulpia Traiana fidelis; that meant that its whole population was now enfranchised and the Punic sufetes were finally replaced with Roman duoviri. Told in isolation, the success of Leptis seems very impressive, but the city was in fact an outlying latecomer to the Romanisation of the western provinces, long after places like Africa Proconsularis, let alone the Spanish provinces and Gallia Narbonensis, had begun to produce not just Roman equestrians but even senators. The mark of their provincial origin remained clearly visible on generations of Tripolitanians who joined Roman government, among them the future emperor Septimius Severus.

By the end of the second century, most of the important families of Leptis owned property in Italy as well, the Septimii Severi among them. The precise ancestry of the future emperor has some hypothetical stages, but we know that the family had Italian estates in the region of Veii and elsewhere north of Rome. Severus’s grandfather, after whom he was named, came to Italy in the reign of Titus or Domitian, and there studied with the famous rhetorician Quintilian. In Italy, this first of the Lepcitanian Septimii Severi entered the ordo equester. The next generation of the family, which included the emperor’s father Geta, came of age under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and also witnessed the first senators to come from Leptis – two uncles or fraternal cousins of the emperor advanced as far as a consulship. The future emperor himself was born on 11 April 146. By the time Pius died in 161, Severus had followed his brother to Italy for further education and perhaps an entrée into the imperial service. He, and indeed the family as a whole, were models of a kind of provincial notable on the make that could be found in any corner of the empire where citizenship was confined to a relatively small and wealthy minority. He had connections, he came from a good provincial family, and there was plenty of money to go around, so the only question was whether he would pursue a senatorial or an equestrian career in imperial service.

We have already seen that the empire, for all its hierarchy and breathtaking dependence upon patronage, was also remarkably meritocratic. Even as its bureaucracy grew more complex, the distance between the lowest level of the imperial hierarchy and the highest was far narrower than the gap between a junior civil servant and a modern head of state, however tiny that state might be. The demonstrably able could always expect to be noticed alongside the well born and politically savvy, and if ability was sometimes hazardous, the right admixture of good luck could produce dramatic results. Links of patronage brought the young Septimius to the attention of the new emperor Marcus Aurelius – the African was granted the latus clavus, the symbolically broad stripe on the toga that would allow him to enter a senatorial career, starting with the minor qualifying offices of the vigintivirate and progressing thence to the quaestorship and beyond. In 162 or 163, at the request of his uncle (or perhaps cousin) C. Septimius Severus, who had recently been consul under Antoninus Pius, Septimius Severus entered the vigintivirate in 164. He showed no early promise, and he got no military tribunate, even though his brother Septimius Geta was serving as a tribune of the II Augusta in Britain. Presumably he worked on his oratory as a barrister in the courts hoping to draw favourable attention, but during the plague years of 167 and 168 he returned to Africa and survived a prosecution for adultery that might have ruined him.

In 169, he had returned to Rome to enter the senate as quaestor on 5 December. It was a time when the dual pressures of plague and the Marcomannic War stretched the resources of the governing classes very thin, and Severus had to serve a second consecutive term as quaestor. While his brother Septimius Geta was a curator of Ancona, Severus was slated to go to Baetica as quaestor to the proconsul Cornelius Anullinus, later one of his staunch supporters as emperor. But when the invasion of the Mauri discussed in chapter 4 led to the brief subordination of Baetica to the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, Anullinus was sent to Sardinia instead. Severus spent his second quaestorship there, in one of the least taxing positions in the empire. Then, five undistinguished years after entering the ordo senatorius, luck intervened.

In 173, his uncle (or cousin) C. Septimius Severus was chosen as proconsul of Africa, one of the three most prestigious provincial commands for a senator, and he brought his nephew along as legatus pro praetore. This was progress. In that same year, Severus married a Lepcitanian wife, Paccia Marciana, who probably accompanied him back to Rome in 174, where he became tribune of the plebs as one of the emperor’s own candidati. Who pulled the strings for him is unclear, but his fortunes were very much on the rise and in 176 he was designated praetor, serving as iuridicus in Hispania Tarraconensis while the governor was engaged in military duties. His next command was as legate of the Legio IV Scythica in Syria, to which he was appointed either in the very last weeks of Marcus’s reign or at the start of the sole reign of Commodus.

There were three legions in Syria: the IV Scythica, near Antioch; the XVI Flavia at Samosata; and the III Gallica at Raphaneae, near Apamea. The IV Scythica was the senior command, a sign of how far Severus had come, and, while serving in Syria, he formed a connection that had immense consequences for the future. At some point during his legateship, he journeyed deep inland, to the Arab town of Emesa (modern Homs), the easternmost Syrian city still inside the empire, before one came to the true desert, in which lay the oasis and caravan city of Palmyra (to use its Greek name, although it was called Tadmor in the local Aramaic dialect). Emesa was a foundation of the first century BC, a relic of a city state left over from Pompey’s destruction of the Seleucid kingdom. The city was an important Roman ally, courted by various late republican dynasts. After the turn of the millennium, the Emesenes were imperial clients who remained generally loyal against both the Parthians and rebellious Jews. When the native royal dynasty died out, however, at some point in the Flavian period, the city was absorbed into the Roman province of Syria. Collateral descendants of the royal house continued to prosper and Emesa remained a cultural hinge, sitting socially somewhere between the Arab interior and the Syrian coastal cities, with their Phoenician and Hellenistic, rather than Arab, roots.

Emesa was famously the home of the god Elagabal (meaning ‘El of the Mountain’: the ‘gab’ is the same Semitic root-form jeb that gives us the originally Arabic Gibraltar). This ancient deity was worshipped in the immanent form of a black stone, but was also frequently equated to a sun god because, with an easy if false etymology, educated Greek-speakers could transform his Semitic name into the Hellenised Heliogabalus. The hereditary priests of the cult of Elagabal were descended from the old royal dynasty and by the later second century they had gained Roman citizenship. At the time Septimius Severus stayed at Emesa, the high priest was a citizen named Julius Bassianus, his cognomen perhaps a coinage from the Semitic basus, a priestly title. Their acquaintance was important, for Severus would later marry Bassianus’s elder daughter, Julia Domna; long thereafter, Bassianus’s younger daughter, Julia Maesa, would oversee the resurgence of the Severan dynasty in the second decade of the third century.

Severus was dismissed from his Syrian command on the orders of Commodus’s praetorian prefect Tigidius Perennis, as discussed in chapter 4, after which he spent time in Athens and travelled through the east, staying away from Italy until the fall of Perennis in 185. He was then sent off to govern Gallia Lugdunensis, a large province but not a significant military command, as it had no legions. Paccia Marciana died in Gaul and, no later than 187, Severus sent to Emesa to request the hand of Julia Domna in marriage from his old acquaintance Julius Bassianus. The wedding took place in 187, and on 4 April 188 a son named Bassianus was born to the new couple. By 188, Severus and Julia returned to Rome, where he was designated for the command of Sicily. By the time he took up this new, though again not very significant, governorship, a second son, P. Septimius Geta, had been born. In 190, whether through the favour of Pertinax or Cleander, Severus became one of the notorious twenty-five consuls of that scandalous year, though Cleander had fallen by the time Severus returned to Rome from Sicily. There he was accused of treason and tried before the praetorian prefect Julius Julianus, probably because his preoccupation with oracles and prophecy, well attested in his later career, seemed like a threat in the paranoid last years of Commodus. Severus was acquitted, and his accuser was crucified, but some of the dirt stuck, and he spent a full year out of office in the aftermath.

Luck was once again on his side. The next upheaval at court brought Severus back to power, when the regime of the new guard prefect Laetus appointed him to govern Pannonia Superior in the summer of 191, an astonishing promotion for a man whose cursus had been relatively indifferent hitherto. Pannonia was one of the great armed provinces of the empire, with fully three legions and easy access to Italy. Only trusted men could be given that sort of power, which makes it extremely probable that he was a party to the conspiracy against Commodus. Given that all the senior commanders on the northern frontier stayed loyal to the regime of Laetus and his new emperor Pertinax, it seems likely that they had gone out to their commands knowing a coup d’état was in the offing. But no one could have predicted how unstable a ruler Pertinax would prove.

The praetorians, as we have seen, were hostile to the new emperor from the beginning, for reasons that are not entirely clear, and they eventually brought down his regime. One attempted mutiny followed almost immediately on the accession, and a second took place as soon as Pertinax left the city to consult with the procurator of the grain supply at Ostia, who happened to be a Syrian from Emesa named C. Julius Avitus Alexianus, the brother-in-law of Julia Domna. The rioting praetorians attempted to place the consul Sosius Falco on the throne, but when the mutiny failed and the senate condemned Falco to death, Pertinax pardoned him, with the assurance that no senator would be put to death under his regime – a significant variation on the standard oath of emperors not to put senators to death unless they were condemned by the senate itself. It was pious gestures of that sort that most contributed to the posthumous esteem in which Pertinax was held, but they did nothing to keep him alive. A few soldiers were put to death after the mutiny and the desultory attempt at usurpation, but Pertinax was heard to abuse the faith of the soldiery in the senate, and promptly faced a third armed uprising. The new emperor may also have been rather less generous than he had claimed, disbursing a smaller accession donative than he had promised and then dissimulating about it. In the end, Laetus turned on his imperial ally and refused to intervene to stop his praetorians from taking action on 28 March 193.

The emperor returned to the palace that morning to find himself set upon by hundreds of mutinous praetorian guardsmen who were joined by many of the palace staff; these latter had preferred life under the spend-thrift Commodus to the proverbially stingy Pertinax. Rather than call out the vigiles, who were commanded by his father-in-law Sulpicianus, or the still loyal horseguards, Pertinax stood on his personal authority and confronted the mutineers. His calm shamed and cowed them for a time, but then a Tungrian guardsman named Tausius (it is rare that we learn the name of a common soldier) drew his sword and attacked the emperor. The chamberlain Eclectus, who had been personally responsible for the murder of Commodus, defended Pertinax alone, wounding two guardsmen before he was himself killed. Pertinax offered up a prayer to Jupiter, covered his head with his toga in imitation of Julius Caesar’s dying moments, and was cut to ribbons. His head was struck off and fixed on a spear, and with that his eighty-seven day reign ended. It had been a plain and pure mutiny, unconcerted and unforeseen. No successor stood ready to take the throne, and the city was briefly paralysed.

Sulpicianus, the urban prefect, thought of seizing the purple for himself as the father of Pertinax’s widow, but the praetorians would accept no relative of the man they had just butchered. Instead, a detachment of guardsmen assembled in front of the senate house until they spotted a likely candidate in Didius Julianus, the most senior living senator of consular rank, and began urging him to take the throne. Upon escorting him to the praetorian camp, however, they found themselves in a stand-off with rival guardsmen who supported Sulpicianus. What followed remains notorious in Roman history: the praetorians auctioned the empire to the highest bidder. The throne hung in the balance, as Julianus and Sulpicianus threw out ever higher figures for accession donatives, until, with an offer of 25,000 sestertii per man and a promise to restore the memory of Commodus and grant amnesty to the murderers of Pertinax, Julianus finally outbid his rival. With the praetorians in full battle array under two new prefects, Julianus was escorted to the senate house that evening, where the senators had been awaiting the results with bated breath. Faced with this fait accompli, they acquiesced.

The urban plebs was less forgiving. By the next day, 29 March, Julianus was already being pelted with stones as he returned to the senate house, and the streets were ringing with rhythmically chanted insults, claiming that he was a robber and a parricide. This sort of rhythmic chanting, which we have already seen in the fall of Cleander, became an increasingly important form of political communication between emperors and their subjects as time went on. Though it could also be orchestrated to signal approval, when sentiments were hostile, it was an extremely menacing form of behaviour. The same chanting crowd then began to call out the name of Pescennius Niger, governor of Syria and master of three legions, to come and rescue the city from its captivity. It was clear that Julianus should expect a challenge to his rule.

Severus’s Danubian armies were ready to act faster than Niger’s were in Syria, Severus having been kept apprised of events by relatives and allies at Ostia and in Rome itself. Less than two weeks after Pertinax was murdered, Severus went into action. The neighbouring governors and legionary legates backed him – his brother Septimius Geta in Moesia, his friend C. Valerius Pudens in Pannonia Inferior, and the German and Alpine commanders as well. On 9 April, twelve days after Pertinax’s murder, Severus was acclaimed augustus by the Legio XIV Gemina, normally stationed at Carnuntum. He would, he told the troops, avenge the murder of Pertinax, whose memory was still honoured by the Pannonian, Moesian and Dacian legions that he had commanded at various times under Marcus. And Severus publicised his loyalty to the murdered emperor in his new titulature: Imperator Caesar L. Septimius Severus Pertinax Augustus. Having accepted the imperatorial proclamation of his soldiers, however, he ostentatiously refused to claim tribunician authority until he had been properly acclaimed by the senate. His next move was to neutralise his only potential rival in the west, Clodius Albinus in Britannia.

Albinus was, like Severus, an African, though he may also have been a maternal relative of Didius Julianus. He also commanded a truly vast army, composed of three battle-hardened legions and even more auxilia. Severus could not risk a challenge on his north-western flank if he was about to march on Italy. He therefore offered Albinus the title of caesar, which would designate him Severus’s imperial successor. Albinus accepted, taking the name D. Clodius Septimius Albinus Caesar. From Albinus’s point of view, and given the extreme youth of Severus’s own children (Bassianus was five, Geta three), it was clearly wiser to await events in Italy than to waste energy on a civil war along the northern frontiers. That there would be war was quite certain: Pescennius Niger, already mooted as emperor by the Roman mob, had proclaimed himself just as soon as news of Pertinax’s death reached Antioch in Syria, shortly after Severus’s proclamation at Carnuntum. The whole of the eastern empire, wealthy Egypt included, supported Niger and so it became ever more important for Severus to reach Rome and gain the legitimacy that acclamation in the senate and the conferral of tribunician power would ensure. He would be in a strong position once that was done, with sixteen western legions to Niger’s ten from the east. The legate of the III Augusta in Numidia had chosen to side with Severus, closing off Africa to Niger, and the emperor’s brother Septimius Geta advanced out of Moesia, seized Thrace, and with it the crossing points to Asia Minor.

Didius Julianus lacked similar strategic good sense. He failed to garrison the Alpine passes, allowing Severus’s army to descend on the North Italian plain via Emona (modern Ljubljana) and Aquileia and seize Ravenna, the seat of the Adriatic fleet. Severus moved by forced marches, often sleeping in his armour and sharing the rigours of the camp with his bodyguards, pausing to sacrifice at each city he passed, but neither stopping nor delaying. Julianus tried ineffectually to fortify Rome (our main source, Cassius Dio, is scathing) and he had both Laetus and Marcia killed. The two had once been kingmakers, but Julianus feared such agile politicians: they were likely to pick and then assist the winning side, and much better dead than hostile. None of this did him any good, however. The senatorial embassy he sent to meet Severus deserted to the advancing marshal, as did many of the few troops Julianus could command. The senate began to disregard him. When Julianus tried to acknowledge Severus as his co-emperor, it was an empty and pointless gesture: Severus could not even be troubled to respond. Julianus had lost all support and Claudius Pompeianus, that greatest of survivors among the Antonine elite, pointed the way. Having managed, so improbably, to outlive his vicious brother-in-law Commodus, Pompeianus publicly refused to advise Julianus, still less to accept the floundering ruler’s desperate offer to share in his imperial power.

By the end of May, Severus was poised at Interamna, the main staging post between Ancona on the Adriatic sea and Rome beyond the Apennine mountains, from where he issued a direct order to the praetorians, commanded by Veturius Macrinus. Septimius ordered the murderers of Pertinax to be arrested and held for trial. Wishing to be seen to do its part for the new cause, the senate condemned Julianus to death, deified Pertinax and acclaimed Septimius as augustus. A common soldier (unnamed in our sources, unlike the killer of Pertinax) cut Julianus down in the palace, alone save for one relative and the second guard prefect Flavius Genialis, who had stayed loyal. Meanwhile, Severus’s agents went searching for Pescennius Niger’s children for use as hostages. They also seized the offspring of Asellius Aemilianus, proconsul of Asia and a relative of Clodius Albinus who had reluctantly sided with Niger, as well as the children of the other eastern governors. Fabius Cilo, one of Severus’s long-trusted allies, was sent to take the Greek city of Perinthus and prevent access to Thrace from Asia Minor, while Marius Maximus, later to write scandalous biographies of the second-century emperors, besieged the Greek city of Byzantium, the only European city to have declared for Niger.

Back in Italy, Severus remained in full campaign mode, camped at Interamna and playing his hand for all it was worth. He greeted a delegation of 100 senators while still wearing a military breastplate and the paludamentum of a general in the field, and had them searched for weapons before they were allowed into his presence. Theatre this may have been, but it was expertly threatening theatre. He distributed gifts to those in attendance, welcomed the palace staff who had travelled en masse to greet him at Interamna, and allowed those senators who wished to do so to accompany him on the final stages of his march on Rome. Before setting out, he publicly retained Veturius Macrinus as one of the guard prefects and appointed Flavius Juvenalis as the second. Juvenalis was an African and, like Macrinus, a very senior equestrian officer whose career had been blighted in the later years of Commodus. Knowing that both his prefects could be trusted, Severus decided to take radical action against the unruly and mutinous guards. He ordered them to assemble outside the city, unarmed but in parade uniform, to take the oath of allegiance to him. Seeing this as the price of their continued employment and a suitable accession donative, they obeyed. But rather than welcoming them with the speech of thanks they had expected, Severus had them surrounded by his Pannonian troops, berated them for their disloyalty and the murder of Pertinax, and discharged them from the ranks. They were stripped of their uniforms and the ceremonial daggers which only praetorians were permitted to wear, and ordered to remain beyond the hundredth milestone from Rome on pain of death. With this act, Severus ended a 200-year-long history and reconstituted a new praetorian guard, manned by the cream of his Danubian legions.

After this, Severus finally entered the city of Rome. In a characteristic coup de théâtre he dismounted before the gates, stripped off his officer’s uniform and donned the civilian toga, while his army accompanied him in full battle array. He mounted the Capitol to sacrifice and then took up residence in the palace, while his armies camped in all the public places throughout the city, eating the Romans out of house and home. The victory had been bloodless, but Rome was not to doubt that it was under military occupation. Addressing the senate, while his soldiers clamoured for a colossal donative outside the curia, he made a show of bargaining down his troops’ demands – but still struck an extraordinary issue of coins to pay the donative, with the names of the Rhine, Danubian and Dacian legions on the reverses. The mint also struck in the name of Albinus Caesar, a sign of how seriously Severus was taking the alliance at this point. The senate officially bestowed the name Pertinax on Severus, endorsing the fiction that his proclamation at Carnuntum had all been in aid of avenging a murdered predecessor. As the pious son of a deified emperor, he ordered a state funeral for his ‘father’. He also adlected to the senate a variety of loyal equestrians. Among them were Julia Domna’s brother-in-law, Julius Avitus Alexianus, who had managed the Ostian grain supply under Pertinax, and Aquilius Felix, an ex-centurion who was given an extraordinary triple command, over the public works and the two financial offices of the patrimonium and the res privata (as the fiscus was coming to be known). Together with Albinus Caesar, Severus was designated for the ordinary consulship of 194.

None of this was enough to keep him in Rome, however. He stayed less than thirty days. Like Hadrian before him, he always preferred travel in the provinces to life in the capital city. His immediate concern was Niger. While still in Rome, Severus had begun to assemble three brand new legions, the I, II and III Parthicae. Although their names proclaimed their purpose to be a new Parthian campaign, few can have been deceived: they were destined for the now inescapable civil war against Niger. Severus strengthened the garrison of Africa, and perhaps of Tripolitania as well, and he kept tight hold on the hostages he had available to him – most of the children of Niger’s governors were in Severus’s hands, even if Niger’s own children were still in hiding. Neither imperial claimant had yet openly declared war on the other when Niger handed Severus a propaganda triumph: he sent a detachment to resist Fabius Cilo’s peaceful occupation of Perinthus, thus publicly opening hostilities. It was all that Severus needed to have him and Asellius Aemilianus declared hostes publici by the senate before setting out for the Balkans and the inevitable campaign.

Facing down an attempted mutiny on the via Flaminia just outside Rome, Severus resigned himself to paying his soldiers handsomely until the civil war was won, and after that, things went more smoothly. He marched north to Aquileia and then down via Singidunum and Viminacium to Naissus. He altered the Balkan legionary commands as he marched, securing his line of retreat, and then settled in with Fabius Cilo at Perinthus while Marius Maximus kept Niger besieged in Byzantium. The latter began to doubt his prospects and, like Didius Julianus in similar straits, offered Severus an equal share of the empire. Severus responded by offering Niger his life if that of Asellius Aemilianus was forfeited. Niger refused, but his position remained grim. In autumn 193, Claudius Candidus took one of the Pannonian legions across the Propontis into Asia Minor and put Aemilianus to flight before capturing and executing him. His soldiers continued to resist, however, retreating to Bithynia under their junior officers. Niger, having managed to slip out of Byzantium, joined his troops at Nicaea, which supported him simply because its local rival, Nicomedia, supported Severus. At Nicaea, Candidus tempted Niger into open battle, rallied his men from the beginnings of a rout, and proceeded to decimate Niger’s army.

With the few troops that remained to him, Niger retreated to Antioch, reckoning that if he ceded Asia Minor to Severus he could make a credible stand beyond the Taurus mountains. These mountains channelled all the military traffic between Cilicia and Syria down into the plains of Issus, where a set-piece battle should give both sides an equal chance of winning. By 31 January 194, when news of Candidus’s Bithynian victory reached Rome, Egypt had defected to Severus, as had several Syrian and Phoenician cities, among them Laodicea and Tyre, which Niger punished severely. Marching towards the Taurus passes, Candidus and the other Severan commanders levied massive fines on the Asian cities that had thrown in their lot with Niger and Aemilianus: their emperor had a large number of very expensive troops to pay and the various imperial treasuries were all nearly empty.

Severus himself remained at Perinthus, where he was joined by the proconsul of Africa, Cornelius Anullinus, a contemporary and a loyal ally throughout his life, to whom he now gave charge of the whole campaign against Niger. Anullinus marched out through Galatia and Cappadocia and forced the Taurus passes in a battle which is barely noticed by our sources. Instead, it was at Issus in Syria that, as Niger had intended, the climactic battle was fought. A massive thunderstorm coming down off the Taurus sowed confusion, giving Anullinus the cover he needed for a classic outflanking manoeuvre – the Severan cavalry under Valerius Valerianus got round the back of the Syrian legions and began to roll up their ranks from the rear. It is claimed that 20,000 of Niger’s troops died on the battlefield, a number that is by no means impossible. Niger fled into the city of Antioch, still hoping to escape as he had from Byzantium, but he was captured and executed. His head was sent to Severus, and thence to the city of Byzantium, in the hope that Marius Maximus could lift his siege after the city surrendered. The Byzantines declined to do so, even with their emperor dead. That stubbornness would eventually cost them dear.

Probably by the end of May, Severus arrived at Antioch. He was now master of the Roman world, and he lost no time in making the east realise it was spear-won territory. Cities like Antioch that had supported Niger to the end were punished by loss of status. Those that had switched sides in a timely fashion were rewarded – Tyre, for instance, was granted the ius Italicum, the highest honour a provincial city could receive, making it legally a part of Italy and therefore exempt from tax. Severus revisited the various places he had first seen as a legionary legate more than a decade before, but now in the company of his Emesene empress, who began to be formally addressed as the mater castrorum, mother of the camps. Thus deemed patroness and guardian of Severus’s armies, she would accompany Severus on the other campaigns he was now planning. He had decided to make good on the pretence that the three new legions raised in 193 were meant for a Parthian war. The minor kingdoms of Osrhoene and Adiabene, as well as certain Arabs known as Scenitae, had all given aid to Niger, while some of Niger’s routed troops had fled to Parthia. It was a good excuse for a punitive campaign beyond the Euphrates that would both add to Severus’s glory and allow the soldiers, who had so recently been fighting one another in a civil war, to come together against a common, foreign foe.

The first kingdom to fall was Osrhoene, incorporated into the empire as a province in 195, although its capital Edessa was allowed to remain under the autonomous control of its king Abgar, the last ruling member of a dynasty that had vacillated so frequently between Rome and Parthia that neither side ever trusted it. The new Severan province extended as far as Nisibis nearly on the Tigris river. When Adiabene surrendered without resistance, Severus took appropriate victory titles and, with these annexations, the provincial outline of the late imperial eastern empire begins to come into view. Further eastern conquests would need to wait, however, as Severus had determined to rid himself of his ally Albinus, whose support he no longer needed.