7
THE LATER SEVERANS
Julia Domna was with her two sons at Eboracum when Severus died in 211. His body was cremated at once and his ashes placed in an urn made of porphyry, the purple stone of emperors and kings. Twenty-five-year-old Caracalla, so it was rumoured, had badgered the doctors to kill Severus off sooner; he executed quite a few of them as soon as his father died. The household freedmen who had been closest to his father, and who might have tried to protect his plans for the succession, were likewise killed. But the chief ministers of government, many of whom had long served under Severus, remained in place for the time being, notably the guard prefects Papinian and Q. Maecius Laetus.
While the court began to prepare to return to Italy, Caracalla remained with the campaign army in the north, urging it to make him sole emperor, without immediate success. He quickly made peace with the Maeatae and the Caledonians, agreeing to withdraw from their territory and return to the line of Hadrian’s Wall. He and Geta lived apart while they travelled and Julia had a difficult time even pretending that they could be reconciled.
Back in Rome, the brothers found it impossible to be together, supposedly bricking up passageways in the imperial palace to prevent contact with one another. By the end of the year, Caracalla decided to act. He had already dismissed Papinian and the urban prefect, replacing them both with one man, a relative by marriage. Sextus Varius Marcellus was the husband of Julia Soaemias, the niece of Caracalla and Geta’s mother Julia Domna. During the Saturnalia of December 211, on the twenty-fifth day of the month, Geta was stabbed to death in the palace in his mother’s arms, while Caracalla took himself to the praetorian camp and announced that he had escaped Geta’s attempt on his life. Anyone who might have supported Geta was now put to death, among them the former guard prefect Aemilius Papinianus, and all the male relations of previous emperors, including some quite distant ones: Caracalla’s harmless cousin, another Septimius Severus, died, as did Helvius Pertinax, the son of the emperor, and Marcus Aurelius’s venerable daughter Cornificia and her son; even old Severan trusties like Fabius Cilo were marked for death. Varius Marcellus was tasked with erasing the memory of Geta from the public record, while Caracalla secured the allegiance of the Legio II Parthica at Alba. He addressed the senate as well, dressed in full military regalia, but this was a perfunctory move. It was the army that counted, and he had won its support by promising a major pay rise. Confiscations, and the recall and reminting of the coinage of Geta, would underwrite these costs.
Caracalla proved to be a monumentally bad emperor, a menace to the senate, a builder on a grandiose scale, a lavisher of money on anything and everything that might make him seem larger than life, and, in the end, the accidental architect of the late imperial world. In the five years of his sole reign, the emperor’s cruelty and incompetence was inflicted mainly on those within easy reach. Like Commodus before him, he tried to win favour with the populace by competing in the arena and the circus, but, unlike Commodus, it seems not to have won him much support from the plebs. He was energetic enough, but his temper and bad sportsmanship had put the Roman crowd off him before the first year of his reign was over. Thereafter, he saved his energy for the life of the camps and for playing at soldiers with the troops. Provincial government remained in the hands of those Severus had chosen before his final campaign, which ensured a stability that Caracalla could not quickly wreck.
Syria Coele was governed by Marius Maximus, a long-time supporter of Severus going back to 193 and later a consul – and a prolific and scurrilous biographer. His brother Marius Perpetuus governed Moesia Superior; the praefectus of Egypt was Ti. Claudius Subatianus Aquila, a Numidian, and his relation Subatianus Proculus governed Numidia itself. Other Africans held both Pannonias (Septimius Castinus, a relation of Severus, and Egnatius Victor), while Aiacius Modestus Crescentianus governed Germania Superior. They kept the great military provinces safe, though Caracalla feared the concentration of power in any one general’s hands. For that reason, he split the single British province into a Britannia Inferior, governed by the legate of VI Victrix at Eboracum, and a Britannia Superior, with a governor at Londinium and command of the II Augusta at Caerleon and the XX Valeria Victrix at Chester.
While he could control the provincial governors relatively easily, Caracalla remained a shadowy figure to much of the populace. With his chronic insecurity and megalomania, he determined on a suitably grandiose way of introducing himself to the subjects of whom he was now sole ruler. He did so with a legal measure that we call the Constitutio Antoniniana, but which was actually an imperial edict. With it, he extended to every free inhabitant of the Roman empire the privileges of Roman citizenship, excluding only the small category of dediticii (former enemies who had surrendered, keeping their personal freedoms but losing all communal rights). At a stroke, millions of people who had not had access to Roman law, but only that of their local communities, were turned into Romans. Although the line between Roman citizen and non-citizen peregrinus had been blurring in the provinces for over a century – and despite the extension of Roman citizenship to the provincial elites in almost every civilised province, particularly in the towns – the consequences of this action were enormous. Suddenly, local practices that were considered normal under local law (like sibling marriage in Egypt) became illegal; equally, testamentary privileges and exemption from certain forms of punishment were now universal. It would take decades to sort out the legal consequences, and it is no coincidence that the great age of Classical Roman law should be the earlier third century: the jurists of Caracalla’s successors, prompted by the sudden accession of so many new Romans, had to clarify and spell out what Roman law actually meant and required in a systematic way.
Though over time the Antonine constitution would completely transform the culture of many provinces, contemporary authors took little notice of the measure. Indeed, if we had only the works of the historian and senator Cassius Dio to go by we would believe the emperor’s sole motive for the granting of citizenship was to raise more of the inheritance taxes that Roman citizens were required to pay. Apart from Dio, no literary references to Caracalla’s far-reaching edict survive, which means we are most fortunate that a fragmentary papyrus (known as the Giessen Papyrus) preserves the preamble of the imperial edict itself and gives us insight into the mind of Caracalla.
This emperor, having just murdered his brother and let loose a bloodbath at the imperial centre, sticks to the official story: he had been saved from Geta’s wicked plot and, because the gods had spared him, he would thank them by leading more of his subjects to them. By granting them the privilege of Roman law, he not only brought the gods new worshippers, he allowed his people to share in his good fortune. We should not dismiss this rhetoric out of hand. The ideology of Roman government encouraged a close identification of the populace with the emperor as an embodiment of a universal order. One can argue that this was a form of hegemony that made imperial subjects complicit in their own subordination, but it was no less powerful for that. The new citizens took Aurelius for their nomen, after Caracalla’s official name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, which announced their direct connection to the emperor who enfranchised them. It was this symbolism that mattered most; if, as the cynical Dio had it, the citizenship edict happened to raise more money for the treasury, then that was simply a bonus. For Caracalla certainly needed money.
Like any other emperor out to prove himself, Caracalla had to be seen to defend his empire. By the start of 213 at the latest, he marched north to the upper Danube frontier, personally leading the campaign in the same year that he was consul ordinarius. Late in the campaigning season, he passed beyond the Danube from Raetia into the region that would later be called Alamannia, after the barbarian people who dwelt there and who are first mentioned by our sources in the context of Caracalla’s campaign. Within the month he had declared victory and may even have won it: the capacity of Roman armies to rain destruction on the disorganised agricultural populations beyond the northern frontiers is a constant of the period. His movements are only sketchily recorded, but he shared his father’s compulsion to travel. In 214, he marched across the Balkans to the east, crossing into Asia Minor at Troy and sacrificing to the spirit of Achilles in imitation of Alexander the Great. From the Troad, he continued on into Bithynia, where he wintered at Nicomedia, and then moved to Antioch in Syria in the spring of the following year. He forgave the Antiochenes for siding against his father in the civil wars of the 190s. Having been stripped of its privileges in the aftermath of Severus’s victory, Antioch was now exalted with the title of colonia and given the right of ius Italicum, a privilege that had ceased to have much legal importance since the citizenship edict, but which still meant sharing in the Italian peninsula’s exemption from taxes, and was thus a real mark of status. Caracalla also returned to the city its right to celebrate Olympic games as it had always done in the past. He may have visited his mother’s city of Emesa, and he certainly bestowed colonial rank upon it, although the gesture did nothing to reconcile him with Julia Domna, who never forgave her surviving son for murdering his brother. Late in 215, Caracalla left Syria for Egypt, arriving in Alexandria in November or December. He would spend the winter in the city, leaving only in April 216, with destruction in his wake.
Just as his antics had angered the Roman plebs in the first year of his reign, so too did he alienate the even more unruly populace of Alexandria, notoriously among the most fractious citizenries of the empire. Precisely how he gave offence we do not know, but crowds began to gather and chant that he was a fratricide and a fraud, certainly not another Alexander. To an emperor with Caracalla’s temper, this was tantamount to treason – had he not sacrificed to Achilles at Troy as the great conqueror had done, and had he not left his soldier’s cloak and many other gifts at the conqueror’s tomb? What was more, he had not murdered Geta – the whole world knew that the gods had preserved him from his brother’s malevolence. After ordering those who were not Alexandrian citizens to depart from the city, he unleashed a massacre. Precise numbers are impossible to come by, but whenever soldiers were sent into the streets with orders to discipline the citizenry, it meant thousands of deaths, not hundreds. His vengeance partly satisfied, Caracalla departed the city intending to prove the Alexandrians wrong – he would be a new Alexander and subdue the Parthians as the great conqueror had the Persians.
Caracalla arrived at Antioch in late spring 216 and marched out on campaign shortly after 27 May. The timing was auspicious. He had already made an example of Abgar of Edessa, king of Osrhoene, deposing him on the specious pretext that he had mistreated the Mesopotamian tribes. Travelling from Arbela to Edessa, he was consciously tracing the footsteps of Alexander, who had defeated Darius there. He overwintered in the former royal capital of Osrhoene, celebrating his vicennalia there on 28 January 217 and raising the city to the status of colonia. That spring, he was prepared to march out into the Parthian kingdom itself. He never made it. Caracalla was murdered at Carrhae in Mesopotamia on 8 April.
His courtiers feared disaster going into a Parthian war with an emperor who relied more upon astrologers and an Egyptian charlatan called Serapio than on expert military advisers. The praetorian prefect Opellius Macrinus and the high command of the expeditionary force were behind the putsch. They suborned a ranker called Martialis who had reason to hate the emperor. Martialis stabbed Caracalla to death during a toilet break as he was travelling to the temple of the local moon god. Caracalla’s loyal bodyguard then killed Martialis, burying the true story of the coup but saving the army from a dangerous war that the generals did not want. The prefect Macrinus spent several days canvassing support, securing the assent of the Mesopotamian garrison and winning the acquiescence of his fellow guard prefect Oclatinius Adventus, who now became urban prefect. Four days after the murder, M. Opellius Macrinus was proclaimed emperor.
His position looked strong. His family was from Caesarea Maritima in Mauretania, thus at the other end of civilised, urban Africa from Septimius’s Tripolitania. They were of Moorish origin in the same manner that the Severans had been Punic, but their origins were lower than the Severans. Now in his early fifties, Macrinus had a son named Diadumenianus, only nine years old but still a potential dynastic heir. Macrinus also stood at the head of an army which had known him for some time and his long career had earned him a large clientele in the imperial bureaucracy. Two such clients were among his first appointments: the procurator Ulpius Julianus and the prefect of the cursus publicus now replaced Macrinus and Adventus as praetorian prefects. But the new emperor was less secure than he imagined. The people of Rome were furious that he did not immediately rush home to curry their favour and were already rioting before the year was out.
The senate, meanwhile, was appalled at the elevation of this low-born equestrian to the purple. The historian Dio, than whom few writers are more snobbish, probably speaks for his order in condemning the presumption of Macrinus and his promotion of uppity men just like himself to positions of power. They could also charge him with cowardice. The Parthian king Artabanus V had been mustering his forces to meet Caracalla when the emperor was killed and, though Macrinus tried to reach a negotiated peace, Artabanus invaded Roman Mesopotamia. At Nisibis, late in 217, Macrinus suffered a bloody defeat. The humiliating cost of peace was reportedly the staggeringly high figure of 200 million sesterces, money that could not have been found in the treasury without additional taxes or confiscations.
Overwintering in the east, while trying to raise the funds for the peace tribute, nothing Macrinus did went right. He proclaimed Diadumenianus as caesar and began to mint coins in each of their names, but the idea of his founding a dynasty appealed to no one. He had promised the soldiers that Caracalla would be deified, but he could not deliver that in the face of senatorial hostility. Searching for economies, he reduced the pay of new recruits, a recipe for unrest. He appointed some of Caracalla’s favourites to positions of power in Rome, while the senate griped and the citizenry rioted. Had he gone to Rome he might perhaps have defused the situation, but he was not given the chance to find out.
Caracalla left no heirs, but he did not lack for living relations. That Macrinus chose not to follow his predecessor’s example and massacre them proved a mistake. Julia Domna, sick with cancer, committed suicide at Antioch shortly after learning of her son’s assassination. Her family lived on, however, in their home city of Emesa. Julia Domna’s younger sister, Julia Maesa, had two daughters named Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea, born of her marriage to Julius Avitus, consul during the reign of Septimius Severus. Both daughters had been married to strong supporters of the Severan dynasty, Julia Soaemias to Caracalla’s prefect Sextus Varius Marcellus, Julia Mamaea to the senior procurator Gessius Marcianus. Both men had died of natural causes before 217, but both marriages had produced male heirs. These second cousins of Caracalla would perpetuate the Severan dynasty and ensure that the reign of Rome’s first equestrian emperor was painfully short.
Julia Soaemias and Varius Marcellus’s son, Varius Avitus, was a boy of thirteen or fourteen at the time of Caracalla’s death. It is unlikely that he had ever left Emesa, where he served in a role that had long belonged to his ancestors as hereditary priest of Elagabal (or ‘lh’gbl in the Syriac), the local manifestation of the ubiquitous Semitic deity Baal, here worshipped in the form of a black meteorite. The young Avitus, as the god’s earthly priest, took his deity’s name and is known to the Classical sources as Elagabalus (or, traditionally but less correctly, Heliogabalus). Julia Mamaea’s son Bassianus Alexianus, who was younger than Elagabalus, accompanied his mother back to Emesa after Julia Domna’s suicide. Soaemias and Mamaea together plotted the coup that would bring down Macrinus. The sisters had spent their lives near the centre of power in the Severan empire and they had supporters everywhere. They knew about the discord in Macrinus’s camp, and did everything in their power to make it worse. The Legio III Parthica, under the command of one P. Valerius Comazon, had taken up its winter quarters near Emesa and was therefore the natural audience for a potential Severan comeback. The legionaries witnessed Elagabalus celebrate the festivals of the sun god, and whispers began to go round the camps that the handsome young man looked an awful lot like Caracalla; perhaps he was actually the emperor’s son by his cousin Mamaea? Meanwhile, the oracle of Bel at Apamea, home town of Varius Marcellus, began to utter ominous prophecies about Macrinus’s longevity. Having led a successful coup himself, these whispers must have worried Macrinus, but he did nothing, and that paralysis was fatal.
On the night of 16 May 218, a freedman of Mamaea’s brought Elagabalus to the camp of the III Parthica, where Valerius Comazon let them in. By morning, a new emperor had been proclaimed, taking the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – a bold assertion of his descent from the legitimate dynasty. Supporters of Macrinus tried to act. Ulpius Julianus, legate of the Legio II Parthica, marched his men to Emesa, but there the Legio III declined to fight them, instead displaying images of Caracalla alongside their new emperor Elagabalus. After a few officers loyal to Macrinus were killed, both legions returned to quarters, the III Parthica near Emesa, the II Parthica at Apamea. Macrinus then tried to intervene personally, asking the II Parthica to acclaim his son, the caesar Diadumenianus, as his fellow augustus. They consented, in return for a large donative, but during the celebratory banquet presented the augusti with the head of their loyal legate Ulpius Julianus. The conditional loyalty of the II Parthica, which had so blithely murdered its own commanding officers, could clearly not be relied upon, so Macrinus and his son retreated to Antioch with only the praetorians to defend them. The supporters of Elagabalus marched on the Syrian capital, the III Parthica under Valerius Comazon leading the way.
The decisive battle, fought on 8 June, was hotly contested until Macrinus left the field and his troops began to desert. The emperor made for Rome, while trying to send Diadumenianus into hiding, but that simply revealed his fundamental incompetence. Had he made for Rome sooner, before the end of 217, he would probably still have faced an eastern rebellion of the Severan cadet line. But that would have been a civil war, in which he might have rallied the support of the western and Balkan legions to his side. As it was, his reign was a rout from start to finish. Macrinus was caught at Chalcedon, about to cross to Europe from Asia; Diadumenianus had already been arrested at Zeugma. Both were soon executed by their captors – Macrinus at Archelais in Cappadocia, en route back to Antioch. The equestrian officials on whom Macrinus had relied and promoted to higher office were killed, too. Back in Rome, a long-time servant of the Severans, the consular Marius Maximus, conducted a purge of the Syrians’ potential enemies.
The centurion who had executed Macrinus, Claudius Aelius Pollio, was made a senator and given command of Bithynia, later on being sent to hold Germania Superior. Elagabalus and his mother remained in Antioch for some months, until it became clear that they should not repeat the mistake of Macrinus and neglect the city of Rome. Before the end of 218 they began their journey west, wintering in Nicomedia. The boy did not finally arrive in Rome until late summer 219, making a formal adventus into the city, but his new imperial subjects were ill prepared for the spectacle their emperor presented. He might have gone by the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – and there is no question that he looked physically like a member of the family – but there the resemblance to his Severan forebears stopped. He dressed as a high priest of the cult of Elagabal at all times, travelling with the earthly manifestation of his god and conducting his rites wherever he went. Upon arriving in the eternal city, he ascended the Capitol and placed the image of his Baal in the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, the chief god of the Roman state religion. Romans lacked a sense of blasphemy in its later Christian valence, but they did have an acute awareness of what was and what was not acceptable religious conduct. The advent of a Syrian god, with no pedigree as an object of Roman worship, into the most solemn cult site in the empire could only be felt as a pollution, even if the emperor himself claimed to be the god’s high priest and even if his cult could be rationalised as a form of solar devotion.
Things got worse when, in 220, Elagabalus made himself appear still less traditionally Roman by adopting a new and bizarre title. Emperors had long been chief priests of the state cult, ever since Augustus had permanently taken over the role of pontifex maximus from his dead rival Lepidus. But now Elagabalus began to call himself the sacerdos amplissimus dei invicti Solis Elagabali, pontifex maximus – ‘the highest priest of the invincible Sun God Elagabalus and pontifex maximus’. If the title had been calculated to outrage conservative sensibilities it could not have done so any more effectively. Marriage to the impeccably high born Roman heiress Julia Cornelia Paula could do nothing to alter the offence, which the emperor exacerbated by declaring Elagabalus to be the chief god of the Roman state, above the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva that had long since protected the empire. The headstrong young emperor must himself have insisted upon this course of action, for no sane adviser could have endorsed it. But perhaps Elagabalus had surrounded himself with equally bizarre advisers. We cannot know, since the available sources become painfully deficient and grow more so as the century progresses: the excerpts in which Cassius Dio is preserved become patchier, while the biographies of the fourth-century Historia Augusta are pure fiction where they do not merely draw on Herodian, whose deeply unreliable narrative is still extant.
Despite our ignorance of precise facts, what seems clear is that Elagabalus conducted himself in a fashion that seemed, from the Roman perspective, mad at best, and dangerous at worst. This view was painfully reinforced by the events of 220, when Elagabalus divorced the blameless Cornelia and instead married a vestal virgin, Julia Aquila Severa, in order to celebrate the marriage of the deity Elagabalus to the goddess Minerva. Minerva was the Roman version of the Greek Athena, whose statue, the Palladium, was moved to the temple of Jupiter to accompany her new husband. That the emperor did this with great ceremony, in public processions in which the Roman populace was meant to take part, only made matters worse. In the following year, this charade – for so it must have seemed to many observers – was repeated, with the divine Elagabalus divorcing Athena and marrying the Punic Astarte, and the emperor Elagabalus divorcing Julia Aquila Severa and marrying Annia Faustina, a distant descendant of Marcus Aurelius. The marriage to Faustina did not last very long either, but by the time the emperor had discarded her and chosen other brides unnamed in the sources, his court had had enough of him.
The sisters Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea had come to Rome along with their sons, the former the emperor Elagabalus, the latter the somewhat younger Bassianus Alexianus. Mamaea now decided that her nephew’s conduct as emperor was simply too bizarrely damaging to tolerate any further. In this judgement she seems to have enjoyed the support of Valerius Comazon, the former commander of Legio III Parthica whose defection from Macrinus had sealed the latter’s fate, and who now held the urban prefecture. In June 221, Bassianus – who had been born in 208 – reached adulthood, taking the toga virilis to symbolise that transition. He was also made caesar to Elagabalus’s augustus and given the name Marcus Aurelius Alexander. As the second adult male in the imperial family he also gave anyone who wanted it a focus for resistance at court.
Two factions now vied for control in Rome, some siding with the emperor, some with the new caesar. Elagabalus tried to dismiss Valerius Comazon for disloyalty, but was forced to reinstate him after some murky negotiations. At the start of the New Year, when Elagabalus became consul for the fourth time and Alexander for the first, the situation worsened and Mamaea moved to force a coup. Alexander disappeared into hiding in March, whether in genuine fear or, perhaps more likely, to bring the cold war between him and his cousin to a boil. On 11 March 222, Elagabalus went with Julia Soaemias to the camp of the praetorian guard, hoping to reassure them of Alexander’s well-being, but the guardsmen had turned mutinous. Elagabalus tried to hide himself in a trunk, but was discovered and beheaded, along with his mother and their main supporters, including both guard prefects and the urban prefect who had briefly replaced Comazon.
With her sister dead, Julia Mamaea came into her own. The 14-year-old Alexander was proclaimed emperor by the army on 13 March, and a day later was made augustus, pater patriae and pontifex maximus by a senate only too glad to be rid of his cousin. At the same time, he added Severus to his nomenclature to reassert his dynastic connections, while the rumour was spread about that he, too, was actually the son of Caracalla, rather than of Mamaea’s husband Gessius Marcianus. The memory of his predecessor was condemned in a formal damnatio and a new era of peace was to ensue. Or so it was hoped.
For the better part of a decade, peace may indeed have done its bit, although in truth we know next to nothing about Alexander’s reign. The Historia Augusta’s account is almost pure fiction, offering an idealised portrait of the ‘good emperor’ to balance the stereotyped orientalism of its Elagabalus and the barbarous caricature of its Maximinus, Alexander’s eventual successor. Herodian, for his part, is limited by his ignorance and his distance from events, as well as an eternal preference for rhetoric over content. Dio remains our best account, not least because he himself played an important role in the politics of the moment.
We last met Dio as a junior senator in the reign of Commodus, of whose mad self-indulgence the historian gives a frightening and at times quite amusing account. He became and remained a good servant of the Severan dynasty, however, even though Elagabalus must have seemed at times like Commodus reincarnate. Dio spent most of the Syrian boy’s reign in his own home city of Nicaea, as a senatorial curator in charge of its administration. (Curatores were a special type of short-term senatorial appointment, generally charged with supervising the finances of provincial cities that had got themselves into fiscal trouble.) Thereafter, he became proconsul of Africa, a senatorial province still ostensibly chosen by lot from among the consulars in the senate, though frequently assigned by imperial fiat from among those eligible. His conduct in the proconsulate must have been impressive, for he was then appointed governor of two imperial provinces, first Dalmatia and then Pannonia Superior, the latter a key military province. In 229 he was honoured with a second consulate, sharing it with the emperor himself. The conspicuous favours showered on Dio reflect, on one level, a deliberate policy of Alexander’s regime – whereas Caracalla and Elagabalus had tended to honour those who emerged from their personal service, be that household or equestrian bureaus, the reign of Alexander was dominated by men of senatorial background. Indeed, much of what we know about the reign must be inferred from its official appointments, since its narrative history is all but a blank. One thing is clear – the equestrian and court favourites of Elagabalus and Soaemias were going to be excluded from the government of Alexander as much as possible. Instead, senators whose careers had begun under Septimius Severus – and sometimes even held their first consulships during his reign – would hold the main offices of government.
That fact alone explains why Alexander’s reign was remembered as a golden age in later centuries, irrespective of any conspicuous success, thanks to a tradition dominated by senatorial writers like Dio and Marius Maximus. The provincials, insofar as we can grasp their views, and even for the most part the legions, remained passive throughout. Rome itself was much less quiescent. The praetorian guard was unhappy from the start of the reign and never really settled down. Alexander’s new praetorian prefect, Domitius Ulpianus (known to us more frequently as the jurist Ulpian), whose career had begun under Severus’s praetorian prefect Papinian, was a harsh disciplinarian. His ideas about the law, and about fairness and justice, sat ill with a group of soldiers who were used to demanding and getting what they wanted. Ulpian has plausibly been identified as the first proper theorist of human rights, the first to articulate that broad category as a concept, and his careful clarification of and systematic approach to Roman civil law – an approach he shared with other Severan jurists of the time – not only shaped the following three centuries, but revolutionised European legal thought when his ideas were rediscovered and disseminated in the twelfth century AD and after. But in his own day, the praetorians objected to his sternness and disliked many of his appointees, to the point that the guard’s discipline broke down completely in summer 223.
Ulpian’s enemy Marcus Aurelius Epagathus, an equestrian freedman who had succeded him as the praefectus annonae in charge of Rome’s grain supply, fanned the flames of resentment. Ulpian escaped an attempt to kidnap him at home by fleeing to the palace, but a detachment of guardsmen caught him there and, in the presence of the emperor and his mother, murdered the prefect who had so enraged them. The hostility between the guard and the officials favoured by the emperor’s household continued: Cassius Dio, for one, was unable to remain in Rome during his own second consulate in 229 because of the praetorians’ threats. There were other problems, too – at some point in 225, Alexander was married to Gnaea Seia Herennia Sallustia Orbiana, the daughter of L. Seius Herennius Sallustius. She was given the title of augusta, while it is possible, if by no means certain, that her father was named caesar. But then, in 227, something went wrong – perhaps a conspiracy or an attempt at usurpation. At any rate, Herennius was executed and Orbiana banished to Africa, never to be heard of again.
The discontent that had simmered in Rome from the start of Alexander’s reign seems to have grown throughout the empire over time, perhaps in reaction to a young and cloistered emperor with little capacity to lead on his own behalf: mutinies and unrest afflicted many frontier regions and, sometime before 229, the Mesopotamian garrison went so far as to murder its legate. They were undoubtedly facing a novel threat to their east, from the new Persian king Ardashir, who had only a few years earlier overthrown the last Parthian king. Events in Central Asia and the Parthian empire will occupy much of the next chapter, but we can briefly trace their role in the downfall of the Severan regime here. Around the year 230, perhaps slightly later, the new Persian ruler Ardashir attacked Rome’s province of Mesopotamia, at the same time that a man named Uranius may have claimed the imperial purple (it is very unclear whether this is a misplaced, or even a correct, reference to the later usurper Uranius Antoninus known from his coins). Ardashir besieged Nisibis and his troops threatened the borders of Syria itself. The regime of Severus Alexander did not begin to mount a proper defence until 231, when the young emperor left Rome for the eastern front, collecting troops en route and summoning the Legio II Traiana from Egypt, the whole army converging at Antioch before the winter of 231–2, during which further mutinies are attested. The campaign of the next year was on a huge scale, with armies assaulting Armenia in the north, Osrhoene in the centre and Mesopotamia in the south. But the armies failed on their northern and southern fronts and our vague accounts suggest massive losses with little to show for them.
Then, at the end of the campaign season, news came of trouble on the upper Rhine and Danube. The Alamanni, or some group among that emerging confederation of barbarians along the upper Rhine and upper Danube frontiers, had launched a large raid or a full-scale invasion: details are as impossible to reconstruct as Alamannic motives. In response, the emperor and his mother made for the west, returning to Rome in 233 celebrating a Persian triumph, before moving on to Moguntiacum on the German frontier. Severus planned to chastise the barbarians in the approved manner, personally invading their territory and sowing havoc. He appears to have done so successfully, since it was a rare day on which a Roman army met serious opposition beyond the northern frontiers. Unfortunately for Alexander, while the campaign army had been laying waste Alamannia, some parties of Alamannic raiders had done the same to civilian settlements near the Rhineland garrisons. The emperor’s soldiers, or at least some of them, found their homes destroyed upon returning to winter quarters after their successes across the river. Distraught and enraged, they proclaimed the equestrian commander C. Julius Verus Maximinus as their new emperor, deposing and killing Alexander and his mother Mamaea. The coup brought Severan dynasty to a painful and sorry end, on 19 March 235.
One historical commonplace understands the death of Severus Alexander as the breaking point between the early empire and the hiatus or caesura of a third-century crisis. We will consider the concept of imperial crisis at greater length in the following chapters, but for now it is enough to insist that the four years after the murder of Alexander continued to play out the political tensions of his reign without any real substantive break. The usurper Maximinus belonged to the growing class of equestrian officials whose influence had increasingly supplanted that of traditional senatorial families since the late Antonine period. He was a senior officer, with a long but to us obscure career of reliable service behind him. The senatorial historical tradition, on which we are mainly reliant, deliberately casts Maximinus as a barbarian outsider, a rhetorical stance deployed throughout later antiquity by the civilian elites who wrote our extant histories; in the fourth-century Historia Augusta, after the pornographic luxuriousness of Elagabalus and the inspirational perfection of Alexander, we are given a physically monstrous and monstrously cruel Maximinus, the embodiment of pure id, although each of these portraits is equally lacking in basic fact. But we should not doubt how bitterly the senatorial elite of the late Antonine and early Severan periods resented the capacity of men with no birthright to achieve more and more genuine power as the third century wore on.
We do not know when Maximinus was born, but he came from Thrace in the Balkans, hence the inauthentic cognomen Maximinus Thrax by which he is still sometimes known, and the spurious imputation of barbarism it still connotes. He had risen to high equestrian rank through service in the army and civil service, and he was not young when the German troops mutinied and made him emperor. His portrait, on coins and the rare portrait busts, shows him as distinctly middle-aged, probably born in the last years of Marcus and entering imperial service during the civil wars of the 190s. He had, presumably, been on the winning side and had reached at least the rarely attested, and not very senior, rank of praefectus tironibus, ‘prefect of the recruits’, perhaps a sort of very senior sergeant-major. At the time of his accession he was married to a Caecilia Paulina of whom nothing is known and the two had a by-then adolescent son, C. Julius Verus Maximus.
Given his career, Maximinus fully understood the Severan policy of enriching the soldiers in order to keep the army under control. Alexander and Mamaea had never been hugely popular with the army, but it was their stinginess with donatives that got them killed. Maximinus promised his supporters both a large donative and a doubling of military pay. But promises like that called for desperate measures. Although posthumous slander clouds almost every aspect of Maximinus’s reign, and we will never know quite who were the main targets of his confiscations, he seems authentically to have lowered subsidies to the Roman grain supply and to the city’s imperial cult. Relying on its subsidies, and unable to feed itself entirely from its own market gardens or its wages, the Roman plebs was necessarily affronted; just as bad, the imperial cult regulated large parts of the urban calendar, and interfering with the schedule of religious observance could alienate the senatorial elite as much as the plebs. That Maximinus seems not to have cared very much about the offence he was causing at Rome only magnified its impact, and while he reigned he never did go to Rome, instead sending back images of his military exploits on the Rhine and the Danube. These campaigns are poorly documented, but in 235 and 236 he was fighting on the Rhine, probably against the Alamanni, and in later 236 and thereafter he was on the Danube frontier fighting the Sarmatians; he appears as Germanicus Maximus, Dacicus Maximus and Sarmaticus Maximus on the coinage by the time of his death in 238.
For all that he was a hate figure for Roman plebs and Roman senate alike, what mattered more was that he could neither afford the donative he promised his soldiers nor double their wages as they believed he had agreed to do. Conspiracies led by two otherwise unknown officers named Magnus and Quartinus are reported in our only source of value; they were probably acting on discontent in the ranks. Worse, the consecration of Maximinus’s wife Paulina, who died in 235 or 236, and the raising of the young Maximus to the rank of caesar did nothing to create the sense of a successful ruling dynasty. Indeed, the main structural point we can glean about the reign, beyond the narratives of its beginning and end, is that many men whose careers blossomed later in the century (including at least two future emperors, Valerian and Decius) either continued unchecked or actively prospered under Maximinus. That said, Maximinus seems nowhere to have generated any great enthusiasm, which is why an initially trivial revolt in Africa Proconsularis could spiral out of control in 238 and bring down his regime while achieving next to nothing on its own account.
The revolt of the senatorial regime in Africa Proconsularis forms the climax to the histories of Herodian which, though moralising and rhetorically mannered, preserve a detailed and broadly comprehensible account of events: an unnamed imperial procurator, while raising the funds his emperor Maximinus required, annoyed the well-born population of Proconsularis – some of them from the senatorial class, many of them clients of senatorial families now in Italy. The ‘young men’ of the province then rose up, murdering the offensive procurator and proclaiming as emperor the proconsul himself; this was the senator M. Antonius Gordianus Sempronianus Romanus Africanus, known to us as Gordian I. An old man of no special distinction, he had had a long career – governing Britannia under Caracalla, and Achaea under Elagabalus – which meant plenty of his fellow senators knew and might support him. He made the necessary show of refusing the purple, but swiftly got word back to the capital, where the senate acclaimed him and had Maximinus’s praetorian prefect Vitalianus killed. It then declared Maximinus himself a hostis publicus and took the unprecedented and ultimately quixotic step of appointing a board of twenty men (the vigintiviri) to lead the senatorial opposition to the emperor they had publicly condemned. Gordian’s son, who had held a suffect consulate under Alexander and was in 238 serving as his father’s consular legate in Africa, was now made his co-emperor. Coins of both Gordians were struck at Rome, word went out to all the provincial governors and legionary legates and, in the east at least, Maximinus seems to have had no support whatsoever. He proved luckiest in Africa, of all places: Capelianus, the legate of Legio III Augusta and thus also the governor of Numidia, marched on Proconsularis, a province that had been ungarrisoned since the time of Augustus. Capelianus put down Gordian’s revolt without difficulty, killing the younger emperor in battle and inducing the tired old man to commit suicide after a reign of just twenty days.
In Rome, events continued on their unprecedentedly peculiar course: not content with having supported the shambolic revolt in Africa, the senate now made two of the vigintiviri augusti, equal colleagues to replace the dead Gordiani. These men, Marcus Clodius Pupienus and Decimus Caelius Balbinus, were to have a reign as unhappy as it was short, and that despite their fine pedigrees: Balbinus was a patrician from an old family, probably from the Spanish province of Baetica where families of republican origin had lived for centuries – he had governed Asia as proconsul (which was, with Africa, one of the two most prestigious posts in the empire), and he had already enjoyed a second consulate in 213, with Caracalla as consul prior; Pupienus was a career soldier, perhaps the first in his family to enter a senatorial cursus, but extremely successful, starting out under Septimius Severus and continuing with governorships of Bithynia, Illyricum and Germania, as well as the proconsulate of Asia and then a second consulate under Severus Alexander.
The news of their proclamation was met with outrage in Rome, not by supporters of Maximinus – of whom there were few in the capital – but by loyalists of the Gordiani, who succeeded in stirring up a mob. Riotous crowds proclaimed as emperor the dead Gordian’s grandson, and the two new senatorial augusti conceded to him the rank of caesar in an effort to unite the opposition to Maximinus. Each of the successive rivals to the sitting emperor struck coins in profusion, though those of the first two Gordiani are now quite scarce and aurei of Balbinus and Pupienus virtually unknown: all conveyed the message that Maximinus was an illegitimate tyrant against whom the steady hand of honourable senators would restore the dignity of their republican forebears. Contrasts in the coin portaiture tell their own story: the first Gordian clean-shaven, firm of chin, civilian and classical; his doomed son young, vigorous and military; Balbinus fat, jowly and be-togaed; Pupienus grim, determined, wearing the beard of a philosopher-soldier like Marcus, but not the stubble of a contemporary warrior like Maximinus. And then, following them all, the boy Gordian, only thirteen when the crowds acclaimed him, a promise of the future on whom the viewer could project whatever they liked. The contrast with the professional, military and equestrian ethos of Maximinus could not be stronger; in 238, with the vigintivirate and the abortive support of the Gordiani, the senate was asserting its own sense of aristocratic privilege, which it now began to couch as a civilian contrast to the soldierly virtue that was all Maximinus had to offer.
The rioting had upset not just the senate, but also the praetorians, some of whom had lost their lives. For some days there was open warfare in the streets of Rome, but the plebs – or enough of them to make a difference – seems to have sided with the senate and besieged the praetorians in their camp, cowing them into submission. While this was going on – and possibly before he had even heard of Capelianus’s lightning victory in Proconsularis – Maximinus invaded northern Italy in March 238. Here he made a critical mistake. Rather than moving south with all speed, he stopped to besiege Aquileia, a key strongpoint on the route between Pannonia and northern Italy. Perhaps he was worried about leaving that nearly impregnable base of opposition in his rear, but the siege did not go well. After a couple of months, in late spring 238, the disgruntled soldiers mutinied, killing Maximinus and his son Maximus, and then holding fast in the north of the peninsula without advancing any further. When news of this reached Rome, instead of the expected rejoicing, the bloodbath continued. The praetorian guard, so recently in violent conflict with plebs and senate, now rallied behind the young caesar Gordian III, proclaiming him augustus on the people’s behalf and murdering Balbinus and Pupienus.
Survivors coalesced around the court of Gordian III, the sixth emperor to have held the imperial title, however briefly, in 238. The butchery stopped and the equestrian and military men who had prospered under Maximinus now came to dominate the new government: in Balbinus and Pupienus, a core of old-fashioned privilege had tried to reassert itself and failed miserably. With a boy barely in his teens on the throne, a palace junta ran the empire. That pattern of rule by committee, and the slaughters at Carthage, Rome and Aquileia, foreshadow what we have long called the third-century crisis, to which the next chapter will turn.