Marcus was fortunate neither in his times nor his preparation. He was singularly unlucky in the crises he faced. In fact, few emperors in Roman history saw deeper problems than he did. Marcus lacked the technical knowledge and experience needed in an emperor.
Yet he is a shining example of how a person of principle and intellectual discipline and a sense of duty can rise to the occasion. Marcus’s reign marked a turning point for Rome. As one contemporary put it, with Marcus’s death, an age of gold ended to be replaced by one of iron and rust. Strange to call an era of war and disease golden, but Marcus’s benign character and his treatment of the Senate (always important to elite sources) shone, especially in comparison to what replaced them.
Marcus was the first emperor in eighty-two years not to be succeeded in power by an adoptive son. Instead, his birth son replaced him, making Commodus the first emperor in Roman history who was born to the throne. None of his predecessors learned that he was destined to rule before he was a teenager. Commodus took his power for granted—which may help explain why he abused it.
Only eighteen when he became emperor, Commodus behaved like a teenager who was suddenly freed from the burden of a father who had set a dauntingly high standard of austerity and responsibility. He gave up Marcus’s war in the north and settled for a negotiated peace. He returned to Rome, where he turned over the reins of government to others and devoted himself to the opposite of philosophy: blood sport. Fit, handsome, and vain, Commodus identified with the god Hercules. He prided himself on his skills as a gladiator and actually fought in the arena.
Commodus remained popular with the army by paying generous bonuses and with the people by putting on frequent games, funding them by taxing senators and devaluing the currency. The Roman elite, however, was not about to stand for a decadent brute who threatened their lives and property and insulted their sense of dignity. Several conspiracies tried to assassinate him but failed, and they prompted brutal repression. Finally, a plot headed by his mistress and his closest officials succeeded. At their behest, Commodus’s wrestling partner, a gladiator, strangled him to death in his bath on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 192.
The rule of Marcus’s family had reached an end. The age of the Five Good Emperors came to a close twelve years earlier, with Marcus’s death, a reminder of the fragility of the imperial system. As Marcus discovered, forces beyond Rome’s control offered constant danger: pressure from migrations by barbarian peoples hundreds of miles beyond the frontier and from epidemics with distant origins, as well as from the challenge of recurrent Parthian dynastic ambitions.
Marcus’s reign also offered a reminder that, at its heart, the Roman Empire was a military monarchy. No matter how many wise edicts and enlightened laws an emperor might promulgate, no matter how good his relations with the Senate, in the end, he depended on the army. No emperor was ever safe from coup d’état or rebellion. No frontier was ever firm without a competent emperor in the lead and a fit and ready army to defend it.
Having a philosopher on the throne was a blessing, especially one who was versatile enough to turn himself into a good general. Yet the times also called for a man who was ruthless about his family. A more hard-nosed ruler might have pushed aside a son such as Commodus and chosen a better man as his successor—his son-in-law Pompeianus, say. Yet that might well have led to civil war. Rome’s dynastic system was flexible only up to a point.
Indeed, the civil war came anyway after the farce of Commodus. It was long and bloody. It put another man of stature on the throne, but not someone of Marcus’s breadth of vision. It took more than a century for such a great figure to reappear. During that time, a series of new disasters struck that made the good years between Nerva and Marcus seem a distant memory, if not a myth.
Bust of Septimius Severus.
8
SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS
THE AFRICAN
The year that followed Commodus’s murder, 193, is sometimes known as the Year of Five Emperors. It marked Rome’s first civil war in more than a century. For nearly 125 years, the succession to the throne had been relatively peaceful if not always proper. Yet not since the Year of the Four Emperors in 69 had anyone seized the throne by marching on Rome. But 69 was relatively mild compared with 193. While the change of dynasty after Nero’s death was settled in eighteen months, it took four years to restore peace after the death of Commodus; fighting went on until 197.
Ultimately, Rome had a new ruler, Septimius Severus. His rule was a paradox. The man was egotistical, rude, and crude but also shrewd and fluent. Although not a professional soldier, he militarized the government as none of his predecessors had. He combined enlightened legal reform with autocracy and purges at home while launching Treasury-draining wars abroad. He also represented a new stage in Rome’s ethnic history, and perhaps its racial history as well. Severus was Rome’s first African emperor, and he founded a dynasty that also gave Rome its first emperors from the Middle East.
OUT OF AFRICA
Lucius Septimius Severus was born on April 11, 145, in the city of Lepcis Magna, on the Mediterranean coast of what is today western Libya, about eighty miles west of modern Tripoli. It was one of the great cities of Roman Africa. This was the height of the Roman peace under Antoninus Pius, and Africa shared in it fully.
Lepcis was an old city, a wealthy trading center founded by immigrants from Phoenicia (today, Lebanon) and also including native Libyan Berbers. Carthage took control of the city until Rome destroyed Carthage. Lepcis had been Roman for three hundred years when Severus was born.
A Latinized elite governed the town, but many of them, like Severus, had ancestors who spoke Punic, a Semitic language, related closely to Hebrew and Aramaic, and spoken in Carthage as well as Phoenicia. Severus spoke Punic as well as Greek and Latin. In Rome, they mocked his provincial accent. His father’s family was wealthy, with strong connections to Rome, including two senators. Although they probably came from the native aristocracy, their status rose when Trajan declared Lepcis a colonia, which entitled all of its free citizens to Roman citizenship.
Severus’s father, Publius Septimius Geta, did not pursue a political career. Unfortunately, his mother, Fulvia Pia, is little more than a name. She and her husband had two other children, another boy and a girl, both of whom rose high in Roman imperial circles, like Severus. Whether Fulvia Pia pushed her children toward their later success, like many Roman mothers, is a matter for speculation. Her ancestors were probably Italian colonists who intermarried with local people. She was likely related to Severus’s boyhood friend Gaius Fulvius Plautianus. Severus and Plautianus established a relationship of trust. Gossip said they were once lovers, but Roman gossip would say that. Like Augustus and Agrippa, they became lifelong collaborators, although, unlike that earlier duo, their friendship did not end happily.
Severus was Rome’s first African emperor. But was he Rome’s first black emperor? We don’t know, in spite of a variety of contemporary evidence. One written source makes him dark skinned, but it was written centuries later and is demonstrably wrong about other matters. One contemporary image shows him as dark skinned, but it is an outlier, and, besides, it comes from an Egyptian tradition that tended to depict men as dark skinned and women as light skinned. It is possible that Severus was of mixed descent—Italian, Middle Eastern, and perhaps native Libyan Berber—but that is speculation. As is often the case, the ancient sources don’t tell us what we would like to know.
Roman Africa was in its heyday during Severus’s lifetime, emerging to prominence like Hispania a century earlier. Africa provided roughly 15 percent of known knights and senators around 200. By this time, the Senate was no longer dominated by Italians but was representative of the empire as a whole.
No one symbolizes the change better than Cassius Dio, who lived from 155 to 235. A Roman senator and son of a Roman senator, he maintained a villa in Italy but was born and raised in the Greek-speaking city of Nicaea (near today’s Istanbul). Yet Dio the Greek felt f
ully Roman, itself a sign of Rome’s success in integrating provincial elites. Roman history fascinated Dio, who wrote a massive eighty-volume narrative of it, in Greek, over a period of twenty-two years. Parts concerning the late republic and early empire survive in full, but for the period from 41 to 229, we have only a later abridgement. Dio knew Severus personally and had mixed feelings about him. He admired Severus’s intelligence, industry, judiciousness, and thrift, but he deplored his treatment of the Senate. Since Dio believed that that Rome had entered a period of decline, perhaps he was willing to overlook Severus’s defects on balance.
Severus was educated in Greek and Latin as a boy in Lepcis. His schooling culminated in a public oration at age seventeen. Unlike Marcus Aurelius, Severus did not continue his formal education afterward, which he regretted. Dio describes him as a man of few words but many ideas. Severus was thoughtful, cunning, and strategic. Although he wore a long beard, he was a man of action rather than a philosopher.
Yet Dio also claims that Severus took time off to study, first during a lull in his political career before becoming emperor, when he spent time in Athens, and then, while emperor, when he regularly spent afternoons in Greek and Latin debates. He was literate enough to publish an autobiography eventually. Apparently it was aimed at a broad audience and not merely at educated readers. Although not a word survives, indications elsewhere suggest the book included dreams and omens and chronicled wars. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of omens in the public mind as a way of legitimating a man who usurped the throne.
Severus had a special passion for the law. As a boy, he supposedly played at being judge. As emperor, he regularly held legal cases every peacetime morning. His jurists took a key part in codifying Roman law. Although Severus usually favored military men, he promoted one of his best jurists to the position of Praetorian prefect.
Physically, Severus was short but strong. He had curly hair and a short nose. He is said to have had a capacity for hard physical labor.
That young Severus was ambitious is certain. Other qualities would emerge in time. He was energetic, inquisitive, and blunt. He was quick witted and decisive. He had a temper, sometimes a violent one. His critics considered him ruthless and deceitful, but Severus did not suffer a low opinion of himself.
At eighteen, Severus went to Rome. One of his cousins was a senator, and he arranged for Severus and his brother to become senators too. Marcus Aurelius was on the throne, and he made an indelible impression on young Severus.
His career was in many ways typical of a young man on the make among Rome’s elite. He held important political and administrative positions in Rome and the provinces, including a stint as legionary commander in Syria and governor of northwestern Gaul. He reached the position of consul in 190 at the age of forty-five. The next year, he became governor of Upper Pannonia, a strategic frontier province on the Danube. Marcus Aurelius was based there during part of his frontier wars, and he wrote part of his Meditations there. As governor, Severus controlled three legions, or roughly eighteen thousand men. That made him a very important person when the central government collapsed. And he had the help of an intelligent, capable, and well-connected partner.
THE SYRIAN WOMAN
As a young man, Severus possibly sowed his wild oats. He stood trial for adultery but defended himself successfully. Then he married a woman from Roman Africa whose family were Roman citizens of Punic origin. She died, evidently without children, leaving Severus a widower. He looked eastward for a new bride.
In 185 Severus married Julia Domna. She was the daughter of a rich and powerful family in Emesa (today, Homs), a wealthy Syrian city whose population had Arab roots. She claimed to number among her ancestors the rulers of the city before Rome annexed it. Her father was priest of the local god, Elagabalus, literally “Mountain God.” The god was worshipped in the form of a conical black stone in a temple in town. Family members were native speakers of Aramaic, with Greek as a second language, and they were Roman citizens.
Once upon a time, ambitious Roman men wanted to marry into the old republican nobility. Now they were happy to take brides from the prominent families of the East; families that provided imperial administrators and Roman senators, and who could give rich dowries to their daughters, as Domna’s father surely did.
Domna was beautiful. According to one fairly speculative theory, she might even have served as the model for Venus de Milo, the famous Greek marble statue now displayed in Paris’s Louvre museum. Meanwhile, we have many statues and coin images of Domna. They show that she had a broad face and rich, wavy hair, parted in the middle, drawn back on the sides, and sometimes gathered at the neck in braids. Various hairpieces were probably part of the coiffure.
Domna knew how power worked and liked wielding it. She was, as it turned out, fertile too. By bearing Severus two sons, she surely increased her stock in his eyes and her influence. Thanks to her, the Severans had a chance of a dynasty: Rome’s first Libyo-Syrian ruling house.
She was a cultivated woman. In addition to Aramaic and Greek, she also spoke Latin, although probably not as well. As empress, Domna gathered a loose circle of intellectuals around her, probably including philosophers, mathematicians, and jurists. One of them, a Greek man of letters who settled in Rome, gave Domna the title of the Wise or the Philosopher. At Domna’s urging, he wrote a book about a first-century Greek philosopher and miracle worker. Conservative in outlook, it serves as a kind of guide to princes—or, in this case, to princesses.
In short, Domna was a very good catch, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Severus were in love with her. Her talents could only have been an asset to him in the struggle that lay ahead.
THE YEAR OF THE FIVE EMPERORS
The year 193, the Year of Five Emperors, was Rome’s first civil war in 124 years and its longest and most violent civil war in more than 225 years. But for all its drama, 193 did not settle things. It took four years before a new emperor ruled without challenge.
The story begins on December 31, 192, the day Commodus was murdered. Tipped off about the plot, Publius Helvidius Pertinax was ready to be named emperor by the Senate that very night. He was a man of impeccable professional qualifications and distinctly nonaristocratic background. It would be hard to find a better example than Pertinax of the opportunity society that the empire represented occasionally. And like many a social climber, Pertinax adapted impeccably to the ways of the ruling class—in his case, the Senate.
Pertinax was born the son of a freed slave in northwestern Italy. After starting out as a schoolteacher and trying and failing to get a commission as captain in the army, he finally attained an officer’s position on the eve of Marcus Aurelius’s wars. He went on to distinguish himself on the Rhine and Danube frontiers and as governor of Britain. To his credit, he earned both Marcus Aurelius’s praise and the enmity of one of Commodus’s henchmen.
A mature man, Pertinax was nearly seventy when he became emperor. He was bearded, and, in coin portraits, he has the wrinkles and sunken cheeks that come with age.
With Pertinax as emperor, many in the Senate thought that good government had returned to Rome. But he proved to be too ambitious and immediately ran afoul of the Praetorian Guard. Commodus had given the Guard free rein; now Pertinax tried to restore discipline. Strapped for cash, he offered the Guard a smaller bonus on his rise to the throne than his predecessors had done. The Guard responded by murdering Pertinax. He had served barely three months in office.
Violence now gave way to farce. In a moment of great unseemliness, two senators next competed for the favor of the Guard by each offering a juicy bonus. The higher bidder got the nod as emperor. He was Didius Julianus, the first emperor imposed by the Praetorian Guard since they had put Claudius on the throne 150 years earlier. Julianus was an experienced provincial governor, but the circumstances of his “appointment” denied him any credibility, even with the Praetorians themselves.
The action now switched to the provinces, where sudden
ly imperial power was within reach. Three provincial governors each eyed the throne. Pescennius Niger, governor of Syria, had notched a small military success on the Danube frontier. An Italian, he had strong support from the common people of Rome, but otherwise his base was in the East. After being proclaimed emperor, he had ten legions ready to march for him and support from the Parthians as well.
Clodius Albinus was governor of Britain. He had only three legions in Britain, but they were battle-hardened veterans, and he had followers in Gaul. Like Severus, he came from Africa (from modern Tunisia), and, like Niger, he won military success in the Danube region. But he decided in the end to support Severus. The shrewd Severus gave Albinus the title of Caesar, thereby naming Albinus his successor and dividing him from Niger.
Severus had once served under Pertinax in Syria, and he considered himself that martyred emperor’s avenger. Twelve days after Pertinax’s murder, Severus was proclaimed emperor by his troops on the Danube. Along with the troops on the Rhine, he had the loyalty of sixteen legions. As he approached the capital, the Senate voted Severus its support. Didius Julianus was duly murdered. The new ruler entered Rome on June 9, two months to the day after being proclaimed emperor, a distance of up to 735 miles away from Severus’s province. One of Severus’s strengths was his speed.
Severus was now Augustus, and it is probably now that he had Domna proclaimed Augusta. He swore an oath to the Senate that he would never execute any senator. Yet he also marched into Rome with his army, making the military basis of his rule obvious. In a memorable passage, Dio describes Severus’s entry into the city:
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