Although Severus failed to conquer Scotland, he succeeded in establishing a dynasty. Caracalla succeeded him as emperor, sharing the rule at first with Geta.
“Caracalla” is actually a nickname. It comes from the heavy woolen military cloak or caracallus, which the emperor discovered in use by Roman soldiers in northern Europe and which he brought to the armies of the East. Caracalla was born Julius Bassianus and, as mentioned, became Marcus Aurelius Antoninus after his father “adopted” himself into Marcus Aurelius’s family.
Coins and sculpture alike show Caracalla as a strong-looking man with blunt features. He has curly hair, a close-cropped beard, a prominent nose, and a thick neck. The word gentle does not come to mind.
Domna was now also the mother of the emperors. She played an important role as a sign of continuity and a source of advice. Eventually Caracalla put her in charge of his correspondence and replies to petitions. No imperial woman ever held such an office before, and it certainly attests to Domna’s literacy and perhaps even more to how few other people Caracalla could trust with important jobs.
But he didn’t listen to his mother’s pleas. Less than a year after their father’s death, Caracalla sent a team of soldiers to kill his brother. Geta was in the palace and ran for safety to his mother’s arms, but he was killed there. She was wounded in the hand. Domna was no doubt distraught, but she continued as one of Caracalla’s advisors, whether out of duty or love or love of power, or all of these reasons. Caracalla, meanwhile, won over the Praetorian Guard with a big bonus, then purged his enemies. More generally, he carried out his father’s advice and increased spending on the soldiers.
Caracalla was shrewd, articulate, and ambitious but also emotional, impulsive, and violent. He loved physical activity. He had many enemies, which is no surprise. Who could trust a man who ordered the murder of his brother?
Caracalla spent most of the rest of his reign on military campaigns, first in northern Europe and then in the East. Seeing himself as a new Alexander the Great, he negotiated to marry the daughter of the Parthian king and, when that failed, prepared a war of conquest. He is remembered mostly, though, for two nonmilitary acts.
Seen from today, Caracalla’s great achievement was extending Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire in a law, promulgated in 212, known as the Constitutio Antoniana, or, the Antonine constitution (after Caracalla’s official name). Earlier, Rome had extended its citizenship, as a reward to favored communities and to prominent local officials, but probably only a minority of free people were citizens. Now, all free Romans were citizens. Never in human history had citizenship been shared so widely.
But Rome’s elite focused more on the big tax increases that Caracalla put into effect to fund his increased military spending. According to a contemporary, the purpose of extending the citizenship was to raise revenue from the citizens-only inheritance tax. Over the decades, the citizen-noncitizen divide had faded in importance. The more important division in the Roman world was between the rich and privileged, officially called honestiores, and the poor and humble, called humiliores. The former group, whether citizen or not, enjoyed various privileges in law and practice, while the latter suffered. In short, Rome extended the citizenship only when it started not to matter.
Meanwhile, Caracalla undertook a massive building project to win support from the urban poor. The Baths of Caracalla, whose massive ruins still delight tourists today, were one of imperial Rome’s largest construction projects. Severus planned the work, and Caracalla completed it. The great complex included gyms, a swimming pool, and libraries (one Latin, one Greek). High-quality works of art decorated it. The complex was free and open to the public. Enormous engineering challenges faced the builders, from removing around 17.7 million cubic feet of clay for the foundation, to erecting columns that stood 40 feet tall and weighed about 100 tons. Yet the project was completed within six years, using an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 workers.
Domna accompanied Caracalla to the east and based herself in Syria while he advanced farther eastward. Then, in April 217 he was assassinated. The prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Marcus Opellius Macrinus, discovered that he was next on the emperor’s hit list, so he struck first. At his prompting, a soldier whom Caracalla had insulted stabbed the emperor to death. Macrinus arranged for the assassin to be killed and then disavowed any knowledge of the deed.
Distraught at the news and possibly ill herself, Domna committed suicide. Macrinus, proclaimed emperor by his troops, lasted in power for only a year.
Domna’s elder sister, Julia Maesa, was determined to put their family back on the throne. Coin portraits show her as attractive and dignified. She has wavy hair like her sister, but fastened in a small bun at the back of her neck. In some portraits, she wears a diadem, the symbol of royalty.
Maesa’s candidate was her grandson, Varius Avitus Bassianus, son of her daughter. Bassianus was only fourteen. Although raised in Rome, he lived now in Emesa, Syria, and was priest of the local god Elagabalus. (And Elagabalus is the name by which Bassianus is known to history.) On the face of it, not promising material for an emperor, but the determined Maesa spent her own money to buy the support of soldiers. Claiming that Elagabalus was Caracalla’s love child, she had the soldiers proclaim him as emperor in 218. After a brief civil war, Macrinus was defeated and killed, clearing the path for Elagabalus to reign in Rome.
No television epic boasts any female powers-behind-the-throne to rival those who now stepped across the Roman stage. Maesa and her daughter Julia Soaemias, Elagabalus’s mother, went with the new emperor to the capital. It was a good thing, too, because they ran the government while Elagabalus devoted his time to establishing his religious cult in Rome. In coin portraits, Elagabalus appears to be a hale and hearty young man with a thick neck, a laurel wreath or a diadem, and a breastplate. He looks ahead vigorously like a military commander. Wishful thinking! A marble bust depicts a slim, curly headed teenager with a mustache and an ethereal look.
Elagabalus rebranded his exotic deity as a sun god, a familiar guise in the Roman pantheon, now calling him the Unconquered God of the Sun. That raised eyebrows, but Elagabalus’s wish to replace Jupiter, Rome’s chief deity, with his god aroused fury. Nor was Elagabalus shy about it. He gave the new god a temple on the Palatine Hill, paraded through town the black conical stone representing his god, and danced around an altar. Public opinion objected to all this. It is best to be skeptical about the other deeds that hostile ancient sources attribute to him, such as his alleged marriage to a Vestal Virgin and his alleged homosexual affairs, in which he supposedly flouted convention by being the passive partner.
In any case, Elagabalus was unpopular. Not one to let sentiment get in the way, Maesa decided that she had to replace him in order to save the dynasty. She turned to her other daughter, Julia Avita Mamaea and to Mamaea’s thirteen-year-old son, Severus Alexander. After agreeing to adopt him as heir, Elagabalus thought better of it but it was too late. In 222, the Praetorian Guard murdered Elagabalus and Soaemias, decapitated their bodies, and threw Elagabalus’s corpse in the Tiber. He’d ruled for four years.
Official Rome was relieved to have a more conventional man on the throne, even if he was just a thirteen-year-old boy and even if his mother probably held more power over him than even Agrippina had held over Nero, who was seventeen when he became emperor. A coin from early in the new reign shows Alexander in military and royal garb, as it did Elagabalus, except that Alexander looks like his very young age. In some later coins, he is bearded. A marble bust shows him in a toga, his face poised between youth and maturity. Mamaea is depicted with her family’s characteristic wavy hair, in some coins, very elaborately coiffed in rows. Sometimes she wears a diadem. She looks royal and dignified.
Mamaea had the official title of Augusta, Mother of the Augustus, the Camp, the Senate, and the Fatherland. Unofficially, she ran the empire. It was hardly conventional, yet mother and son both remained popular until Rome started losing
wars. The unmilitary Alexander made little headway in the East against the new Sasanian Persian dynasty. Compared with their predecessors, the Sasanians were better organized, more threatening, savvier at military technology, and more resilient. In the West, Alexander decided to buy off aggressive Germans on the Rhine rather than fight them. Mortified, the soldiers on the Rhine named one of their commanders as emperor. Then they murdered both Mamaea and Severus Alexander in 235.
CONCLUSION
The dynasty founded by Septimius Severus lasted forty-two years to the death of Severus Alexander minus a year’s interruption by another North African, Macrinus. It was far less than the ninety-nine years of the Julio-Claudians and less than the fifty-four years of the Antonines (Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, and Commodus) but almost double the twenty-seven years of the Flavians. Not for another seventy years after 235 would anyone found a longer-reigning Roman dynasty. Hence it marked a real achievement.
Septimius Severus himself ruled for nearly eighteen years. His was the longest reign of any emperor in the century after the death of Marcus Aurelius. He restored stability to the empire after Commodus’s tyranny and the civil war that followed it. Modeling himself on Marcus, Severus supported the study of philosophy and initiated a golden age for Roman law. Yet when it comes to his historical reputation, the military man overshadows the reformer. As much by circumstance as by design, Severus was the first true soldier-emperor. He came to power by the sword, spent much of his reign on campaign, showed the Senate the back of his hand, and went out of his way to exalt the military. And he was a harbinger of things to come.
To Edward Gibbon, Severus’s lack of respect for the Senate made him “the principal author of the decline and fall.” Gibbon was a snob, writing in the Age of Enlightenment, with little sympathy for upstarts and outsiders. Other scholars, writing during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century heyday of European Western imperialism, are even more scathing toward the so-called barbarian, surely betraying a certain bigotry toward the African emperor.
The western empire would last 250 years after Severus’s death. Many of his acts, although jarring to tradition, were necessary. Rome became less civilian, true, but military crisis had made civilian rule a luxury. Besides, Severus paid as much attention to public relations as he did to the army because he insisted on making his family legitimate and popular. Finally, by opening the elite to new people, Severus made Rome stronger, not weaker.
Severus did not merely seize the throne; he founded a dynasty. The Severans became Rome’s first family of militaristic mayhem but also of multicultural enlightenment.
Severus was Rome’s first African emperor and his wife Julia Domna was Syrian and definitely of non-Roman descent. Severus filled Rome’s highest offices and its legions with men of new blood from the provinces, thereby writing a new chapter in the history of Rome’s ethnic and racial diversity.
True, violence began to spiral out of control in Severan Rome. Severus combined the civil wars of Augustus or Vespasian with the expansionist policies of Trajan and the police-state apparatus of Tiberius. Yet it was the moment for ambitious men and women who knew how to hustle.
Like many of his predecessors, Severus was no friend of the Senate. He purged the body and executed more senators than either Commodus or Domitian did. He filled his top administrative and military positions with knights, the wealthy and elite order that stood just below the Senate in rank and prestige. Yet this may reflect less hostility to senators than a shortage of qualified senators or an unwillingness of some senators to serve. By doubling the size of the Praetorian Guard and stationing a legion in a permanent camp outside Rome, as Severus did, he put a severe chill on freedom of speech.
Yet this same militarist—a lawyer early in his career—took a great interest in Roman law. He appointed excellent jurists whose work codified the law for centuries. One of the legal principles enunciated during Severus’s reign was “the emperor is not bound by the laws.” It was more honest than novel, as this rule had marked every reign starting with Augustus. For what it’s worth, Severus and Caracalla promised to live in accordance with the laws, although they didn’t have to.
With the Severans, magnificent multiculturalism and enlightened despotism met the morals of a crime family. Perhaps it was ever thus, and perhaps this dynasty’s sole mistake was not working harder to disguise the harsh truth. Although some cried foul at his comparing himself to Augustus, Severus was no more ambitious or ruthless than Rome’s first emperor. He was just less polished.
Severus made his biggest mark in the military sphere or, rather, in the conjunction of the military and politics. Under Severus, a series of long-simmering trends coalesced that made the Roman government less civilian and more military. The army obtained more power and became more expensive, which strained Roman finances and laid the groundwork for major instability. By raising army pay, making war, and engaging in a big public building program, Severus strained Rome’s budget. Instead of levying taxes to pay for it, he and his successors inflated the currency, which eventually had disastrous effects on the Roman economy. By the same token, both army and imperial administration at the top became more diverse. The result was a rougher and cruder Rome, with plain folk from the margins pouring into the center, but it was a more democratic Rome as well.
Although imperial women wielded great influence in all periods of Roman history, no dynasty since the Julio-Claudians saw such powerful women as the Severans. Domna was probably the most powerful empress since Livia. Her sister, Maesa, was a kingmaker to rival the Praetorian Guard, her niece Soaemias was the power behind the throne, and her niece Mamaea was as close to a regent as the Roman system allowed.
The Severans liked to think big, whether it was a new bath complex, the renovation of the city of Rome, a rebuilding of their home city of Lepcis Magna, a military campaign against Parthia, a purge in the Senate, the introduction of a new god to Rome, or the extension of the Roman citizenship (backhanded compliment though that was).
Septimius Severus pointed to the shape of things to come. He was only the first of a series of military men who came from distant parts of the empire. Nor was he the last emperor to have a woman in the family who worshipped a nontraditional god. More than most of his predecessors, he based his power on continuing military success, but soldier-emperors would become the rule in Rome. He was a man of violence with a troubled family and with an incongruous taste for the rule of law. It might not have seemed so contradictory to the Romans, with their legalistic frame of mind, emphasizing as it did the legal aspects even of war. Severus combined a strong army with a strong state. Diocletian and Constantine would be cut from the same cloth.
They would also be men of brutality who banged heads together to save the system but at the cost of changing it enormously.
Diocletian Antonianus coin.
9
DIOCLETIAN
THE GREAT DIVIDER
The emperor Diocletian was a career soldier. No aristocrat he, Diocletian came up from poverty in the Balkans, and he had the rugged manners to prove it. He once stabbed a rival to death in front of the assembled troops. On another occasion, he threatened to drown a rebellious city in rivers of blood up to the knees of his horse. Yet the most famous thing that he ever said was a tribute to vegetables.
“If only you could see at Salona the cabbages raised by our hands,” said Diocletian, “you surely would never judge that a temptation.” That was a request that he return to power as emperor after three years of retirement outside the provincial city of Salona, on the lovely coast of today’s Croatia. It was an unusual request, but then, it was an unprecedented retirement. Diocletian was the first and only emperor to abdicate by choice. He relinquished his throne in front of his army and then lived as a private citizen.
Although Diocletian set aside his sword, the reference to cabbages seems like a case of protesting too much. You wonder if, like an elderly Don Corleone tending his tomatoes in The Godfather, Diocle
tian in his garden offered shrewd advice to his hand-picked successor, his son-in-law and father of Diocletian’s only grandchild, who faced tough political opposition. It’s hard to imagine the retired emperor indifferent to current events. Like Lewis Carroll’s Walrus, Diocletian surely talked not only of cabbages but also of kings.
Diocletian was one of the longest-reigning Roman emperors and one of the most consequential. He ruled for twenty-one years. Along with his more famous successor, Constantine, Diocletian ended the crisis that had nearly destroyed Rome. He laid the foundations for a new course that allowed the empire to survive, if in a much-changed form. Yet we have few good sources of evidence for this great man.
Diocletian was big, bold, brutal, and orderly. Finesse was not his way, but the times did not call for finesse. They demanded military muscle, a steel-trap mind, an iron will, and absolute self-confidence. Diocletian fit the bill.
Portrait sculpture shows a strong-featured, bearded man with a wrinkled brow and a watchful expression. One marble bust depicts a rough-hewn thug, but with eyes turned upward for divine inspiration. Another striking bust in black basalt, thought to be Diocletian, shows an aging but vigorous man. His tense mouth projects resolution, while his eyes portray intensity that you would not like to meet head on.
Diocletian reorganized the Roman Empire and, in a real sense, saved it. Yet he proceeded by division: by shaking things out before putting them back together. He divided East and West, giving each a separate emperor and subemperor, but with all of them answering to one man: him. He divided Roman and barbarian, soldier and civilian, buyer and seller, and, most notably, pagan and Christian. He achieved a real measure of success, if neither perfect harmony nor the results he most wanted. But he left a realm that was stronger and better able to survive than it had been in several generations.
Ten Caesars Page 28