6
THE REIGN OF SEVERUS
The emperor was still in the east late in 195, from where he rejected the senate’s offer of a triumph. He did not want to be seen to triumph over fellow Romans. But he made a more interesting propaganda decision at the same time, declaring himself the son of Marcus Aurelius. Inscriptions at Rome record him as frater divi Commodi, ‘brother of the deified Commodus’, and a flurry of coins was issued in both east and west, with the legend Hercules Defens(or), ‘Hercules the Defender’, and a depiction of the god, in a clear reference back to Commodus’s favourite deity. Severus’s elder son Bassianus was now renamed Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, though we shall herein call him Caracalla, the nickname by which he is referred to in all our sources. In the context of this genealogical charade, Julia Domna’s title of mater castrorum makes perfect sense, since it was Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina with whom the honorific is most associated.
When the recently renamed Bassianus was swiftly promoted to the rank of caesar, Clodius Albinus must have understood himself to be the target. With the Parthian frontier secure, Niger’s legions safely absorbed into his own army and rebellious Byzantium finally subdued, there was nothing to prevent Severus from turning on his erstwhile ally in Britannia. It was put about that Albinus was behaving as if he were already an augustus and that powerful, though unnamed, senators had invited him to come to Rome to supplant Severus. That may have been no more than Severan propaganda, as the rumour that Albinus had plotted the murder of Pertinax certainly was. Regardless, as Severus began his march back to the west, the senate declared Albinus a public enemy on 15 December. There was rioting in the circus among a populace who wanted an end to warfare.
Albinus now did proclaim himself augustus, as he had to, but Severus was lethally efficient: Fabius Cilo went on to secure the loyalty of Moesia and its legions; the emperor’s brother-in-law, Julius Avitus Alexianus, was made legate of the IV Flavia at the strategic river crossing of Singidunum. At Viminacium, in the presence of the Dacian governor Claudius Claudianus and Severus’s brother Septimius Geta, Caracalla was displayed to the troops who would provide the strike force of the expeditionary army under the command of Claudianus. Supporters of Albinus were hunted down in Noricum, and Julius Pacatianus took control of the main passes into Italy with detachments from the new Parthian legions. Fulvius Plautianus became prefect of the vigiles at Rome at the same time, able to enforce discipline on senate and plebs alike. By early 196, Cornelius Anullinus, who had overseen the campaigns against Niger, was installed as urban prefect, thus tightening still further Severus’s iron grip on the city of Rome.
Albinus, too, had acquired some supporters. The large and wealthy province of Hispania Tarraconensis went over to him with its governor Novius Rufus, while Albinus expelled the Severan governor of Lugdunensis and took up residence at Lugdunum (Lyons). Belgica was largely in his camp, but there was resistance in the two Germanias, where the important garrison at Moguntiacum (Mainz) under Claudius Gallus stuck with Severus. Rather than invade Gaul immediately, Severus crossed the Alps and entered Rome, where a series of coins greeted his adventus and others advertised Caracalla’s ostensibly Antonine heritage with the customary title of princeps iuventutis. Severus spent several months in Rome, exercising the traditional imperial roles of lawgiver and judge, hearing petitions, and perhaps sounding out the mood of the senate, too many of whose members may have remained favourable to Albinus.
The plan of campaign was now set. As 197 dawned, the emperor returned to Pannonia and then moved west along the northern edge of the Alps, descending from the north on to Albinus’s capital at Lugdunum. Although Albinus had the large army of Britannia with him, Severus led much the larger force, with the combined legions of Dacia and the Danube. Battle was joined on 19 February outside Lugdunum. As with many of the decisive battles in Roman history, it was a close run thing. Albinus’s legions feigned retreat, but only to ensnare the Severan forces in trenches and embankments. Trying to rally his faltering troops, Severus was thrown from his horse and caught up in the general retreat. It took Julius Laetus to rescue the day with a charge of the auxiliary cavalry.
Lugdunum was put to the sack by the victorious Severans and Albinus took his own life. His decapitated head was sent to Rome, while his body and those of his wife and sons were cast into the Rhône. The moppingup operations in the west lasted a long time, and became proverbial for their brutality. Britannia needed re-enforcement rather than chastisement, because the tribes beyond Hadrian’s Wall used the absence of Albinus’s legions to lay waste the north, and Severus not only returned most of the British legions but re-enforced them with his Danubian troops. Elsewhere, though, the punishments were severe. Novius Rufus, the governor of Tarraconensis who had sided with Albinus, was put to death, while Claudius Candidus, a loyal Severan butcher, made sure that the proscriptions of Albinus’s supporters in Hispania bit deep. Throughout Lugdunensis, vast tracts of private land were brought under state control from the properties of those proscribed and Lollianus Gentianus undertook a new census in the province to extract additional revenue. The proscriptions in Africa required the creation of an entirely new equestrian office to register and manage the lands confiscated to the imperial fiscus. The Rhineland was generally spared, having stayed loyal; indeed, Severus was touring the German provinces when he learned that the Parthians had invaded the east. Julius Laetus, the victor of Lugdunum, went east at once to take command, while Claudius Gallus, whose legion had held Moguntiacum for Severus, followed after Laetus with a newly raised campaign army.
Severus himself made for Rome, in the company of his horse guards and the praetorian prefect Fulvius Plautianus. No matter how dangerous the Parthian situation might become, the loyalty of the senate needed to be tested and re-enforced. Though senators made a variety of pacific gestures to him, the emperor went out of his way to appear menacing. He quartered one of his new legions, the II Parthica, at Alba a few miles south of Rome, and he did so without reducing the complement of the praetorian guard in the city. That was a larger garrison than Rome had seen in a very long time. He publicly derided the clemency with which Julius Caesar had once treated his enemies, and praised instead the republican exempla of Sulla and Marius, famous for their ruthless destruction of those they defeated in civil war. His demands that Commodus be deified as his brother and that he himself be known as Marcus’s son were also meant to inspire terror, for no emperor since Domitian had been as hated and feared by the senate as Commodus. None of these were empty gestures, for Severus also purged the senate, executing twenty-nine senators and keeping many others under arrest. To drive home to the ordo its reduced status, he gave his three new legions equestrian rather than senatorial legates. By contrast, he treated his armies handsomely, allowing them to gorge on the influx of confiscated wealth. Pay rose substantially for every type of soldier, and the conditions of military service were formally altered so that, for the first time in Roman history, soldiers could contract valid marriages. This not only recognised the long-standing fact that many soldiers took concubines who were wives in all but law, but it also helped bind the army closer to Severus and his dynasty: the emperor needed his men to follow him willingly on the many campaigns that he planned.
The emperor’s Second Parthian War began in 197. He left Rome for Brundisium (Brindisi), and sailed from there to Aegeae in Cilicia, the shortest sea route between Italy and the east. From Asia Minor he went via Epiphaneia and Nicopolis to Antioch in Syria. Julia Domna, the mater castrorum, went with him, as did the royal children, Caracalla and Geta. The emperor left all three at Antioch and marched quickly inland, receiving embassies from the region’s few remaining client kings before joining Julius Laetus at Nisibis. Laetus had already repelled the Parthian invasion, so Severus returned to Syria to prepare a full-scale war against Parthia. Late in September a supply fleet had been assembled on the Euphrates and Severus had discovered a plausible claimant for the Parthian throne to lend a tincture of respectability to the expedition. The army met little resistance as it marched downriver, taking a string of famous cities: Seleucia, Babylon and Ctesiphon itself, the Parthian capital from which the king had fled. The city was put to the sack, probably in December of 197, and the royal treasury fell to Severus as part of the spoils.
By the end of January 198, Severus took the title of Parthicus Maximus and accepted his eleventh acclamation as imperator by the troops. He did so on the hundredth anniversary of Trajan’s accession to the throne. The symbolism was patent: Trajan had been the first true conqueror of Parthia and he, Severus, the second. To emphasise the point, Severus raised Caracalla to the rank of augustus. His younger son, Geta, was made caesar. Severus was re-enacting, on a larger scale and in a single person, the successes of his great predecessors Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. As he aggrandised his own family, many of those who had helped him in his rise to power found themselves either pushed to the sidelines or dead. The only real winner was the guard prefect Plautianus, who like other prefects before him envisaged himself as the emperor’s companion in the ruling of the empire. Claudius Candidus, who had won the campaign against Niger and been the hammer of Albinus’s partisans in Spain, was executed and his name subjected to damnatio memoriae. Where this took place, and on what pretext, we do not know, but the destruction of Julius Laetus, by contrast, happened almost within sight of the emperor. As soon as Ctesiphon fell, Severus marched back up the Tigris, intending to punish the independent principality of Hatra for having sided with Niger five years previously. Today Hatra is, with Palmyra and Dura Europus, one of the most conspicuous victims of the Islamicist iconoclasm (and remunerative looting for the antiquities market) that has characterised Middle Eastern conflicts since the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. When Severus set out, though, it had long been an important buffer between the Romans and the Arsacids. It controlled the caravan trade across the Mesopotamian steppes from Babylon in the south up to Singara and Nisibis, and then across to Zeugma, a popular crossing point on the Euphrates. Its hereditary rulers, in theory subject to the Arsacids, were powerful enough to use the Syriac royal title malka and their kingdom was more populous and wealthy under the Parthians than ever before, or indeed since. The suppression of Hatra required two separate sieges, which proved unpopular with the troops, who began to grumble about their preference for Laetus over their emperor. That was enough to doom the general, who was arrested and executed for treason. Though it is unlikely that Laetus had ever contemplated usurpation, the rumour was now spread that he had held back at the battle of Lugdunum, hoping that both Albinus and Severus would be killed so he could become emperor.
Hatra never did fall to siege but its king submitted to Severus as a client and, with that, the emperor could with some justification claim to have succeeded Trajan as a conqueror of the east. Unlike Trajan’s successor Hadrian, Severus made an effort to hold large parts of the conquered lands. Osrhoene was to remain a province centred on the city of Carrhae, and Severus created the new province of Mesopotamia, based on the territories of the old kingdom of Edessa but with a new capital at Nisibis; a hundred years later, Nisibis would be the creative engine of a Syriac cultural world that we will discuss in the sequel to this book. This Mesopotamian province was defended by two of Severus’s new legions, the I Parthica at Singara and the III Parthica at Resaina. With these annexations, Severus fundamentally remade the map of the Near East, shifting the front line of confrontation between Rome and its Mesopotamian and Iranian neighbours away from the border of Syria and deep into the land between the northern Tigris and the Euphrates. Right until the Muslim conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, control of the Severan provinces would be contentious, but Roman Syria, with the great city of Antioch-on-the-Orontes at its core, flourished more than ever now that it was further from the actual zone of confrontation.
Severus returned to Palaestina after the siege of Hatra, at the end of 198. More provincial reorganisations followed in 199. The emperor split Syria into two: Syria Coele (‘Hollow Syria’) to the north, garrisoned by legions at Samosata and Zeugma and still anchored by the metropolis at Antioch; to the south, Syria Phoenice had its capital at Tyre, which was now made a Roman colonia as a belated reward for supporting Severus against Niger. More significantly for future events, the caravan city of Palmyra, which had possessed colonial status since Hadrianic times but had long remained an independent player between Syria and the Euphrates frontier, was now incorporated into the newly formed Syria Phoenice and allowed to continue its main function of policing the Syrian desert against Arab tribesmen further south.
In 199, while these changes were being promulgated, Severus, his family and the court went to Egypt, travelling overland via Pelusium. Like Hadrian’s visit half a century earlier, the whole expedition was a sort of historical re-enactment. Severus sacrificed at the tomb of Pompey. At Alexandria he gazed upon the tomb of Alexander the Great and then had it permanently sealed up, so that no one should ever look upon it again and acquire the ambitions of Alexander. He took care likewise to correct his predecessors’ injustices. Alexandria, long and with good reason the object of imperial suspicion, was finally given the right to have a boulé, or city council, like any normal city in the Greek world. The city thus finally achieved the legal status that its size, commercial importance and historical significance had always merited. From Alexandria, the emperor moved on to a grand tour of the province, pressing on up the Nile to Memphis and Thebes, where he visited the singing statue of Memnon. He likewise visited the great sphinx, which the Egyptian prefect had recently had repaired – not the last time that a conquering power has attempted to restore Egypt’s monuments to their former grandeur. Severus lingered on his tour into the new year of 200 and made it as far as Philae (modern Aswan), where he celebrated its secret cult acts in May. We do not know whether he went any further south, to the provincial frontier, but by August 200 he was back in Alexandria, ready to return to the eastern provinces. This time he went by ship to Antioch, although we do not know where he spent the year 201. He inaugurated the new year of 202 at Antioch, holding the ordinary consulship together with his son Caracalla, who having now turned thirteen could wear the toga virilis that signalled he had reached adulthood
The early 200s were the quiet years of the reign. The guard prefect Fulvius Plautianus remained Septimius’s partner in government – he was consul for the second time in 203 – and plans were made to marry his daughter Plautilla to Caracalla. The dominance of Africans in the high commands remained unchallenged, not least thanks to the patronage of Plautianus; the several new legionary commanders of the Danubian provinces known from 202 were all Africans. Those old-time supporters who had survived the purges in Syria continued to do well. Ti. Claudius Candidianus, who had been with Severus since 193, was now made consular legate of Pannonia Superior, the same post that Severus had held when he claimed the throne, and Fabius Cilo, likewise present from the beginning, was promoted to the urban prefecture. Nevertheless, the influx of easterners into the Severan government, which had begun by 198, continued under the influence of Julia Domna and her family’s many connections. A relative of Julia, Aemilius Papinianus, became the a libellis of the emperor, in charge of answering petitions, and Domitius Ulpianus, a distinguished Roman lawyer from Tyre, served under Papinian. Both would be significant figures in later reigns and were central to the development of a late antique governmental culture that transformed the empire in the third century. Other sections of Julia’s family also witnessed important promotions – her nieces (daughters of her sister Julia Maesa) both married well and their offspring would continue the Severan dynasty into the 230s, after Septimius Severus’s direct heirs had disappeared. Those heirs, Caracalla and Geta, travelled with their parents during this period. Their tutor was a famous sophist from Egyptian Hierapolis named Aelius Antipater. Although an Egyptian sophist was no novelty, the larger role of Egyptians in government was changing thanks to Severus’s decision to allow Egyptians to become senators for the very first time. The first Egyptian to become a senator, one Aelius Coeranus, was – predictably – a client of Plautianus’s. What strikes the modern historian in all this, and what is so important for the transition between high empire and late antiquity, is the dominance of provincial senators and provincial equestrians at the heart of Severan government. Rome would continue to play an important role in imperial politics for another century, and would remain the ideological heart of empire for longer than that, but Roman and Italian elites would never again provide the indispensable foundation for government.
Soon after the New Year’s celebrations at Antioch, the court began its overland journey to Rome, where Severus’s decennalia were to be celebrated. The journey provided an occasion to restore many cities that had fallen into disfavour because of their support for Niger – Byzantium was raised up again, and Nicaea was given equality with Nicomedia, perhaps partly as a favour to the senatorial historian Cassius Dio, who composed laudatory histories of the civil war that met with the emperor’s strong personal approval. The official story made Caracalla responsible for these acts of beneficence and restoration and the Severans give us a better sense of a dynastic image being carefully curated over time than do most other dynasties in Roman history.
Back in Rome, the marriage of Caracalla and Fulvia Plautilla was celebrated with great largesse to the urban plebs and the praetorian guard – a gold aureus for every person for each year of Septimius’s reign, and hence a vast expense, the liberalitas tertia, or third great distribution of largesse to the people, which he proclaimed on coins issued for the occasion. The celebration of the emperor’s decennalia followed the wedding with games which lasted for seven days, during which, along with the usual gladiatorial and hunting shows, 700 of the rarest animals in the Roman world – including the Indian hyena – were displayed to the audience, and then slaughtered.
For all the splendour of these shows and the lavish gifts bestowed on the people of Rome, Septimius disliked the city. Not long after the decennalia celebrations ended, he left for Africa, his first visit since becoming emperor more than a decade before and, in another Severan echo of Hadrian, only the second time any emperor had visited that province. Arriving at Carthage with the entire court in tow, he honoured this greatest of African cities with the ancient ius Italicum, thereby exempting it from taxation, just as he had Tyre in Phoenicia for its support in the civil wars. He visited Numidia and the legionary fortress of Lambaesis, and presumably many other cities as well, before going overland eastwards past the cities of Tripolitania to Leptis itself – a patria which he had not seen in thirty years. Here, too, the ius Italicum was received as a great honour. The winter of 202/203 was spent in Leptis, and the New Year opened with Plautianus and Severus’s younger son Geta sharing the consular fasces. But the long visit also opened an ugly rift between the emperor and Plautianus. The prefect’s statues were put up alongside those of the royal family all around Leptis, not unnaturally given that these two sons of Leptis had conquered the world together. Yet the parity implied by the statues could not help but cause offence and Severus had some of his prefect’s images melted down. After that, a permanent breach was almost inevitable, although for the moment the two men renewed their alliance.
Early in 203, Severus took part in a campaign south into the desert against the tribe of the Garamantes, who lived in the Sahara oases and had long been the primary threat to the Tripolitanian frontier. New frontier posts were constructed, deep into the Sahara, and in the same period the Mauretanian provinces to the west were also expanded into the southern steppe and desert. Numidia, which had long functioned as an independent province under the command of its legionary legate, rather than as a part of Africa Proconsularis, was now formally constituted as its own separate province.
By June, when the Garamantes had been suitably chastised, the imperial party set sail for Rome, to which they had returned by June 203. There the emperor celebrated an ovatio, a sort of mini-triumph, for his African victories, and his imposing triumphal arch, which still towers over the north-eastern corner of the Roman Forum between the rostra and the curia, was built in this year. Its placement, directly in front of the temple of Concordia, may reflect the pious wishes of a senate that in reality mistrusted an emperor who had so little time for the city of Rome and its ancient ways. But Severus was never to have a smooth relationship with the Italian aristocracy, no matter how much either side might have wished it otherwise. Even the consuls for 204 were chosen for dynastic reasons, rather than to conciliate senatorial feelings: Fabius Cilo, from the beginning one of the great Severan marshals, was consul for the second time, while Annius Libo, a distant and undistinguished descendant of Marcus Aurelius, was chosen for his connection to the dynasty from which Severus claimed his fictional descent. The year 204 was another celebration of Severan monumentalism, for the secular games, meant to be celebrated only once a century (Latin saeculum, hence the name) were held for the seventh time in Roman history.
The Romans of the empire celebrated not one but two types of ‘secular’ games. On the one hand there was an archaic and originally Etruscan ceremony, based on an eccentric cycle of 110 years, that had been revived in 17 BC by Augustus, with his notorious penchant for reviving (or inventing) long-lost traditions. These Augustan games were repeated by Domitian, and then again, as we have seen, by Septimius Severus. On the other hand, there were other games also described as ‘secular’ in all our ancient sources. These were determined by a simpler counting from the supposed foundation of the city of Rome, according to a basic cycle of 100 years – and were held by Antoninus Pius, and then again in the 240s by Philip. Severus claimed to be celebrating the games for the seventh time – they were the ludi septimi, following on from Domitian’s ludi sexti. Preparations for the Severan secular games were complex and lasted throughout the first half of 204. They also involved the senate to a very large extent, since the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, the fifteen men in charge of sacred affairs, were all senators, usually from the very pinnacle of the ordo.
The quindecimviri of 204 are a study in how much the empire had changed since the last time the secular games had been held, under Domitian: almost none of the Severan quindecimviri were descended from families of Rome itself, but instead were from municipal Italian families grown grand or from provincial dynasties, Africans among them. After months of solemn preparation, the three days of the games themselves began on the night of 1 June, the Kalends. While Julia Domna led 110 of the great matrons of the city in rites sacred to Juno and Diana, Septimius presided over the sacrifice. Caracalla, now honoured as pater patriae, opened the prayers, and Geta concluded them. These two heirs apparent were the designated consuls for 205 – which meant that the new saeculum would open not with the dynastic founder, but rather with the dynastic future.
That dynastic future was cemented by two deaths in the year of the secular games. First, Lucius Septimius Geta, Severus’s brother, died naturally in 204 without male issue. Then, Fulvius Plautianus, the most powerful and longest serving of Severus’s supporters, was put to death. Plautianus’s son-in-law was, of course, Caracalla, whose hatred of his wife Fulvia Plautilla is well documented, and it was Caracalla who engineered the prefect’s downfall. In January 205, he recruited three centurions to claim before Septimius that Plautianus had ordered them to kill both augusti so that he could seize the throne for himself. Septimius, suspicious of his prefect ever since the affair of the statues in Leptis, summoned him to the palace. Plautianus protested his innocence, but Caracalla set murderously upon him so that Septimius had to personally restrain his son. It is the first glimpse we catch of the furious rages to which Caracalla was later prone. But though Severus had held back Caracalla from murder, it was not with the intention of sparing Plautianus. He had the prefect killed by a waiting guardsman and his body cast into the road outside the palace.
Caracalla divorced Plautilla and she and her brother were exiled to the tiny Aeolian island of Lipara to live out their lives. The imperial fiscus, drained by so many wars, was now revived with a massive influx of funds from Plautianus’s private property, a large enough windfall that a special official was needed to administer it. A further purge of senators, chiefly those who had been on good terms with Plautianus, now followed. The middle years of the decade thus witnessed a new low point in the relationship between Severus and the senate, but politics quieted down after the fall of the great prefect. It was in these years that Severus composed his autobiography, now lost.
In choosing Plautianus’s successor, Severus reverted to the more usual scheme of having two guard prefects – Q. Maecius Laetus and Aemilius Papinianus – rather than one, though only Papinian matters for our story. He was neither a military man nor a member of the great aristocracy, but rather a Syrian from Tyre, a distant connection of Julia Domna who had been serving as Severus’s a libellis since the end of the Parthian War. The guard prefecture had always been an equestrian office, but placing it in the hands of a very learned jurist would have historical consequences to which we will return in a later chapter.
Severus was ageing by now and he had not led an easy life. It was only natural that Caracalla should begin to exert more authority alongside his father. But whatever else the late Plautianus might have been, he had been a check on the passions of his son-in-law, the younger Augustus. After his execution, the full force of Caracalla’s long-festering hatred turned on his younger brother Geta, the last potential rival to his dominance. It is reported that both youths behaved very badly during these Italian years, corrupted by power and the almost infinite pleasures of the world’s largest city. A string of coin issues proclaiming fraternal harmony can have done nothing to disguise their mounting enmity. The constant discord wore on Severus, for whom getting his sons away from Rome seemed like a possible solution.
Our sources attribute two other causes of displeasure to the emperor: not only was a younger generation of military commanders leading successful campaigns outside Italy, but in the peninsula itself, even with the emperor present, a brigand by the name of Bulla was running out of control, terrorising Italy for two years before he was captured in 207. Banditry was a fact of life in the empire, a menace to travellers and country folk, but no more than an irritant to government – it cannot have been enough to stir the emperor to action, but the fact that he was no longer the greatest and most active general in the empire may well have rankled the old man. He was also deeply superstitious, putting great store by his birth horoscope. He fully expected death to come for him soon. Perhaps he thought it better to die on one last victorious campaign than remain trapped between his squabbling children in a city that he could hardly bear. He began to prepare for a major campaign in northern Britannia.
There had been disturbances there, as there usually were, and we do not know the scale of the disruption that prompted Severus’s last adventure. There is a great deal of speculation, which ranges from a maximalist hypothesis positing a major revolt by the native Brigantes of the Pennines alongside invasions by tribes from the Scottish Lowlands or even Caledonian highlanders, to the minimalist proposition of slightly increased raiding activity of the sort to which all Roman frontiers were prone. The imperial procurator Oclatinius Adventus and the senatorial governor L. Alfenus Senecio, operated simultaneously along Hadrian’s Wall in the early 200s, a type of collaboration in military affairs that was quite unusual, but that is partly explained by the archaeological evidence for a comprehensive rebuilding of the local infrastructure to support an army led by the emperor in person.
Back at court, the kinsmen and favourites of Julia Domna were increasingly in the ascendant. Julia’s brother-in-law Julius Avitus Alexianus was one of Severus’s comites on the expedition, as was his son in-law, Sex. Varius Marcellus, who succeeded Oclatinius Adventus as procurator of Britain. Of the two guard prefects, the Syrian Papinian was chosen to go north with the emperor. The year 208 was seen in by another joint consulship of Caracalla and Geta, and the expedition set off for Britannia. Both consuls travelled north with their 63-year-old father, but only Caracalla and Severus would see any actual fighting. Geta was left behind, perhaps at Eboracum (York), ostensibly to manage civilian administration. Caracalla accompanied his father beyond the Wall and into Scotland, where the war was to take place. The 209 campaigns penetrated deep into the Highlands, where the Caledonians formally submitted to the emperor. We have evidence of massive marching camps right up the eastern edge of Scotland, and the beginnings of a major legionary base, clearly designed for a permanent occupation that never came, have been found at Carpow in Perthshire. This was more than a punitive raid, then. It was a concerted decision to take and hold Britain north of Hadrian’s Wall – Severus would then be able to claim to have extended the frontiers of the empire in Britannia as well as in Mesopotamia. When the campaign was over, the imperial party returned to Eboracum, and Severus and Caracalla took the victory title Britannicus. The lowland Maeatae, in whose territory the new fortress at Carpow was being built, revolted and another large campaign was needed in 210.
Indisputably successful though it was, the British campaign foreshadowed its brutal dynastic aftermath. There is some evidence that Caracalla contemplated assassinating his father, and he did not trouble to conceal a public desire to kill Geta. His plans were checked by the revolt of the Maeatae, against whom he had to campaign on his own; Severus had become too ill for the rigours of the field, whether from arthritis or gout is unclear. The emperor now knew for sure that he was dying – the stars had foretold the span of his life and his sickness proved that they were right. In these last days, although he must have suspected it would be too late, Severus moved to secure his younger son’s future. Towards the end of the year 210, he promoted Geta to the rank of augustus and for two or three months the empire had three augusti. Then, on 4 February 211, Severus died at Eboracum, still on his last campaign – the expeditio felicissima britannica, that most happy British campaign – at the age of sixty-five. His advice to his sons, supposedly quoted verbatim by Cassius Dio, is famous: ‘Don’t argue between yourselves, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all the rest.’