Years later, it was said that Severus had chosen Domna as a bride after meeting her on his Syria trip, because her horoscope had made the prediction that she would marry a king, and this seemed a good omen for an ambitious man such as himself. Severus would also of course not have been blind to the more prosaic advantages of an alliance with a girl who, if she was the same Julia Domna mentioned in a legal text of this period, was the great-niece of a senator and ex-consul named Julius Agrippa (no relation to Berenice’s father), to whose sizeable fortune she was in part heir.11 The horoscope story was probably invented and disseminated many years later after Severus’s accession, to make the new emperor’s curriculum vitae look more impressive. In the summer of 187, the wedding between forty-two-year-old Severus and his young Syrian bride took place. Severus’s talent for being visited by portentous omens led him to declare later that he had a dream in which a marriage bed for himself and his betrothed was prepared for them by Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina, in the temple of Venus and Rome near the imperial palace.12
Domna’s and Severus’s union was quickly blessed by the birth of two sons. Their first, born in Gaul on 4 April 188, was named Bassianus after his maternal grandfather from Emesa, while the second, born at Rome on 7 March 189, was named Geta, a name shared by Severus’s father and brother. Fatherhood coincided with an improvement in Severus’s career prospects. In 190, after he and his young family had spent a year in Sicily, he attained the coveted rank of consul at the age of forty-five. The promotion ensured them a place at the apex of Roman society, and gave the young Domna a taste of life as a political consort and hostess at their town house in the city. Conversations at the dinner parties and entertainments attended by the consul and his wife were pregnant with speculation and tension.13 Severus’s year of office was served out against the bloody background of Commodus’s twilight years, during which the emperor’s behavior became so erratic that he was said to have taken to entering the gladiatorial arena and slashing the heads off the competition, which might have been more impressive if his opponents hadn’t been ostriches. The historian Cassius Dio, a beneficiary of the Severans’ eventual rise to power, described how he and his fellow senators were forced to stifle their giggles at the sight of this bird-fighting spectacle in order to avoid their emperor’s ire.14
There was of course a serious side to the unravelling of Commodus’s reign. The months before the start of Severus’s consulship saw the fall of the unpopular and unscrupulous Cleander, a freedman chamberlain who had pulled the emperor’s strings since the death of the previous court favourite Perennis in 185. Accusations of conspiracy against the emperor flew around the city, and a wave of senatorial executions followed, including that of an Emesene kinsman of Domna’s named Julius Alexander. Severus was surely glad to put some distance between himself and the hothouse atmosphere of the city in 191, when he was dispatched to a governorship in Upper Pannonia, on the recommendation of Laetus, the head of the praetorian guard. Finally, Commodus’s increasingly unpredictable and violent behaviour convinced Laetus and his new imperial chamberlain Eclectus to act. On 31 December 192, with the connivance of the emperor’s mistress Marcia, Commodus was first poisoned and then strangled in his bath after twelve erratic, childless years of rule. Marcia’s reported role in the affair was a convoluted rehash of the part played by Agrippina Minor and Domitia in the deaths of their husbands – it was claimed she warned Laetus and Eclectus of the existence of a proscription list, on which their names were included, and then mixed poison into Commodus’s evening glass of wine, which only caused him to vomit copiously, forcing the conspirators to hire a professional wrestler to finish their victim off.15
Publius Helvidius Pertinax, the son of an ex-slave, was a distinguished military and civil servant under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and had already been installed by the conspirators as emperor by the time word of Commodus’s murder reached Severus, 683 miles (1,009 km) away in the Pannonian capital of Carnuntum.16 According to the contemporary civil servant Herodian, who wrote a history of the empire from 180 to 238, Severus dreamed that night of a horse unseating Pertinax and taking himself up in his stead as he passed through a gauntlet of cheering supporters, convincing Severus that the fulfilment of a cherished ambition was just around the corner. Though Pertinax himself was so determined not to be accused of despotism that he sought to emulate Augustus by styling himself princeps senatus and declining to accept for his wife, Flavia Titiana, the title of Augusta, his administration lacked the funds to keep the praetorian guard in the style to which they had become accustomed under Commodus.17 When the domino effect started, and Pertinax was brutally usurped by a former consul named Didius Julianus in March 193, Severus was ready, despite a rival claim to the purple from Pescennius Niger, the governor of Syria. Carried along by the acclamation of his own and neighbouring legions, Severus marched on Rome to make his bid for power, though not before ensuring that his sons and Julia Domna were spirited to his side to ensure their safety.
Less chivalry was shown towards the wife and children of his rivals. Having arrived on the outskirts of Rome, and convinced the Senate to condemn Julianus on 1 June, Severus was accepted as emperor and his entourage admitted to Rome on 9 June to a dutifully rapturous reception from its citizens, dressed in white and lining flower-decked streets. One of the new emperor’s first actions was to order his right-hand man Plautianus to find and hold hostage the children of Niger, who was declared an enemy of the state. Niger was eventually defeated in battle at Antioch in April 194, his severed head exhibited at Rome, and his wife and children executed. The threat from another rival for the throne, Clodius Albinus, the governor of Britain, was at first negated by Severus in a less ruthless manner, with the offer to his rival of the deputy rank of Caesar. However, when Clodius decided a couple of years later that this was not good enough for him after all, he too was defeated – this time in Gaul – and his abused body thrown into the Rhône along with those of his wife and sons. Their fate was a stark reminder of what had been at stake in defeat for Domna and her own children.18
During the 1930s, the National Museums in Berlin acquired a fragile portrait from a Parisian art dealer. It depicted the newly enthroned Septimius Severus and Julia Domna standing like proud parents behind their two young sons.19 A homespun artwork, daubed in egg-yolk tempera paint on a circular panel of wood, it was the work of an Egyptian artist, and it perhaps commemorates a trip by the emperor and empress to Africa in around 200. The ‘Berlin tondo’, as it is known, is not only the most famous portrait of Julia Domna and her husband, it is the only painted portrait of members of the Roman imperial family that survives from antiquity, affording us for the first time a unique and precious chance to look on the faces of the new incumbents of the Palatine in ‘colour’. With his silvery curls and beard, Severus’s appearance fits with descriptions of him in Roman literary sources, while his skin tone against the gold stripes of his toga is several shades darker than his wife’s, a counterpoint to his official marble portraits whose material hue depicted him as white as any other emperor before him and an important piece of evidence in support of the theory that Severus was Rome’s first black emperor.20
Domna’s creamy-skinned oval face on the other hand is characterised by wide-set eyes, thick straight eyebrows and full lips. Fat white pearls the size of gobstoppers circle her neck and drip from her ears, a departure from the minimalist approach to women’s jewellery adopted by imperial Roman sculptors and further proof of the gulf between ideal and reality in women’s adornment.21 Her dark, thickly crimped locks, however, are entirely in keeping with sculptural images of her. Of all the Roman empresses, Julia Domna’s hairstyle was the most distinctive, a rippling, centre-parted, helmet-like coiffure which is thought to have been created with the aid of a wig. It has been suggested that she even introduced the Syrian practice of wearing wigs to the women of Rome, although several detachable marble hairpieces belonging to female sculptures from the early and mid-second century ha
ve been found of late, some with traces of a plaster adhesive called gesso which was presumably used to stick the marble ‘wig’ to the head. This suggests that some of Domna’s imperial predecessors may have already been familiar with the practice of wearing them in real life.22
Domna’s baptism into the role of Roman first lady was anything but the staid affair this Quakerish hairstyle might suggest. Less than a month after her husband’s proclamation as Augustus and her own as Augusta, she and Severus were on their way east to deal with the threat from Niger and to square up to the Parthian territories which had sided with his enemy. After settling both scores, Severus doubled back to Gaul and crushed the last of his rivals, Clodius, in February 197. Throughout these hard-fought campaigns, Domna was at her husband’s side, enduring the same dry, thirsty desert conditions as he and his troops, and unlike certain of her female forebears, receiving nothing but praise for her role as army mascot. Following in the footsteps of Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina, another lauded camp-follower, she was rewarded with the title mater castrorum (‘Mother of the Camp’) on 14 April 195. A statue of her in this guise was set up along Rome’s Sacred Way, near the temple of Antoninus and Faustina.23
As well as setting up Domna as the reassuring guardian of Roman stability, both domestic and military, there was another agenda behind the bestowal on Domna of a title first awarded to Faustina. When and wherever possible, Severus strove to link himself to Rome’s last ‘good’ emperor, Marcus Aurelius, even to the extent of wearing the same Greek-style beard as his and getting Marcus’s physician Galen to prescribe him the same cassia-based medicine he had administered to his former patient. The military, economic and political uncertainties of the third century had made it even more important for Septimius Severus than it had been for his predecessors to establish strong roots for his dynasty in the solid traditions of a stable past. From the portraiture commissioned and churned out in vast quantities by the empire’s master sculptors, cameo-makers and painters, to the insignia and slogans chosen for his family’s appearances on Roman coinage, Severus not only modelled himself on his most successful Antonine predecessor but claimed to be that dynasty’s natural heir. The same year that Domna was linked to Faustina with the title mater castrorum, Severus adopted himself into the Antonine clan, declaring himself the son of Marcus Aurelius. Riskily, this also meant accepting kinship with Commodus, so the bluntly pragmatic decision was taken to deify the former emperor, thus sweetening the pill and legitimising Severus’s seizure of power.24 The elder of Severus’s and Domna’s sons, Bassianus, was meanwhile renamed Marcus Aurelius Antoninus after his newly acquired ancestor, though like Caligula, an emperor to whom he was unfortunately later compared, it is by his nickname – ‘Caracalla’, a reference to the hooded cloak that he habitually wore – that he is far better known.
Unsurprisingly, this charade did not pass without a wry comment or two from Severus’s public. One wag commented on the emperor’s newly arranged family tree by quipping that it was nice that he had finally found himself a father.25 Severus’s artificial ‘self-adoption’ was certainly a piece of remarkable chutzpah. Yet in doing it, he was showing himself a keen student of previous emperors, such as Augustus and Vespasian, who had shored up their own legitimacy quotient by emphasising – and sometimes embellishing – their ties to admired former leaders. Another profitable stratagem, as we have already seen, was to stress one’s connections to former emperors’ wives – a tactic adopted, for example, by Galba and Otho in relation to Livia, and by Hadrian in tribute to Plotina. Severus himself could boast of no such personal friendships or family ties to famous empresses. So, instead, he improvised. By mapping the deified Faustina’s image on to Domna’s, even though she, like him, had no ties, blood or otherwise, to the Antonines, Severus fostered an illusion that his dynasty came with divine approval. The story that he had dreamed of Faustina preparing the wedding couch for himself and Domna shortly before his marriage, was just one component of such propaganda, whose urgent purpose was to provide a reassuring sense of continuity and stability, glossing over the war-ridden interlude of the early 190s, while also distracting attention from the interloper status of the new first family.26
As a consequence, all corners of the Roman Empire were bombarded with images of the Severans as a family unit during their first few years in power. Every imperial house since the Julio-Claudians had seen itself celebrated in group portraits, but none had included the emperor’s wife and children with such regularity. On almost every public monument featuring Severus, Domna and their boys were beside him, heavily underlining her symbolic importance as the maternal guarantor of the Severan dynasty’s future. Coinage issues reinforced the message – gold aurei issued from 202 featured a portrait bust of Domna framed on either side by the profiles of her sons. The accompanying slogan felicitas saeculi (‘The Fruitfulness of the Age’) deliberately echoed the message of a similar coin featuring Faustina and her boys.27
But these compositions, with their statement of togetherness, were to have their message tainted. Soon the image of one family member would be obliterated.
The army of slaves, freedmen and civil servants who had run the imperial household on the Palatine since the days of Augustus and Livia saw little of its new occupants for the first decade of Septimius Severus’s reign.28 Refurbishments to the palace were commissioned, such as the addition of a new imperial audience box from which Severus and his family could enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the races in the Circus Maximus down below, but there was little initial opportunity to enjoy this luxurious facility. Having criss-crossed the empire eliminating internal rivals for the throne, the new emperor returned by sea to the east in 197 to take on the external threat posed by the Parthian Empire and did not set foot in Rome again for the next five years. Domna and his sons continued to accompany Severus on this odyssey, as well as his closest adviser and fellow African, the newly appointed praetorian prefect Fulvius Plautianus.
For Domna, the trip meant a welcome return to her native land, Syria, and perhaps a reunion with members of her Emesene family. To have a locally born wife could only have done Severus’s approval ratings in the region good, and during these changing and uncertain times in which the empire’s centre of gravity was gradually shifting outwards from Rome to its peripheries, it was politically useful to have eyes and ears so close to Rome’s easternmost borders in the form of Domna’s relatives. Several of her Emesene kinsmen in fact rose to prominent positions within the emperor’s circle, perhaps with the help of lobbying from Domna herself if the example of Livia and Plotina was anything to go by. Most notable among those promoted included Domna’s brother-in-law Julius Avitus Alexianus, a former equestrian officer who was brought into the Senate at the beginning of Severus’s reign and later awarded the consulship. Alexianus was the husband of Domna’s sister Maesa, who had come to live with Domna when she became empress, giving her an insider’s view of palace politics that would come in useful later in her own career.29
By January 198, Severus was celebrating the emulation of Trajan’s achievement in the capturing of the Parthian capital Ctesiphon. He now chose to bestow on Caracalla the imperial title of ‘Augustus’ – which had never been shared by a father with his son in order to delineate the latter as heir – and gave Geta the more junior title of ‘Caesar’. Domna could now claim to be the first imperial woman to be simultaneously wife and mother to two Augusti. After an aborted attempt to lay siege to the Arab fortress of Hatra, Severus and his entourage went on an extended tour of Egypt in 199, echoing the trip up the Nile taken by Hadrian and Sabina. The new first family visited the same cultural monuments as their Antonine predecessors, including the Colossus of Memnon, where Domna was able to walk up and read the verses composed by Balbilla to commemorate the visit of Sabina. It was on this same trip that Severus issued his unfortunate order to ‘fix’ the singing statue, silencing it for ever more.
In contrast to Hadrian’s and Sabina’s reputedly stilted relationship
, there are no reports of disharmony in the union between Severus and his Syrian-born wife. In truth, little is said about their relationship at all, although the amusing piece of information that Severus spoke Latin with an accent thick enough to make him pronounce his own name as ‘Sheptimius Sheverus’ leads one to assume they most likely conversed in Greek, a language that Domna herself would have spoken growing up in Emesa.30 The only discordant note about their marriage appears in the Historia Augusta, which claims that the emperor refused to divorce Domna even though ‘she was notorious for her adulteries, and also guilty of plotting against him’.31 This story more probably had its roots either in the kind of pre-ordained narrative traditions established for the careers of previous imperial wives, or alternatively in a smear campaign against her by another member of her husband’s circle – Fulvius Plautianus, the head of the praetorian guard.32 A fellow native of Lepcis Magna, Plautianus had enjoyed a flourishing career under Domna’s husband, but was said to dislike the empress intensely, for reasons that will soon emerge.
In 202, the imperial family finally arrived back in Rome to great fanfare, and Plautianus’s position as the emperor’s most powerful and trusted aide was strengthened still further. In an echo of the attempts of Tiberius’s ruthless praetorian prefect Sejanus to ingratiate himself into the imperial family, Plautianus saw his daughter Plautilla married to Caracalla, making him father-in-law to the future Augustus. The wedding took place in April as part of the celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of Severus’s rule and was described by Cassius Dio, one of the wedding guests, as a lavish affair at which the gifts were paraded through the forum and up to the palace, and the guests were served both refined dishes of cooked meat yet also ‘live, raw meat’ such as barbarians would eat.33
The First Ladies of Rome Page 30