The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  Of the three new claimants to the throne, Severus was in the strongest position. The descendant of a wealthy North African family of Phoenician ancestry in the city of Leptis Magna, he had risen through the ranks of the senate to become commander of Roman forces in Pannonia by AD 191. The central European armies, totalling ten legions, were the most powerful in the empire. Moreover, Severus had taken care to forge an alliance with the other governors in the region – one of whom was his elder brother – and they were all at his disposal. And, last but not least, of all the pretenders to the throne, he was physically closest to Rome. Proclaimed emperor at Carnuntum (on the Danube, now in Lower Austria) on 9 April, Severus was in Rome by mid-June. As Severus approached the city, Julianus realized that resistance would be futile; he was soon dispatched by a member of the Praetorian Guard. His pathetic last words were reportedly ‘But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?’ The betrayal of Julianus did the guard no good – Severus dismissed them and appointed members of his army in their place. He then departed to attack Niger and struck a deal with Albinus, trading the position of heir apparent, or Caesar, in return for his loyalty. This alliance was merely a temporary expedient.

  Meanwhile, Pescennius Niger’s actions in the east had already precipitated civil war. Heavily outnumbered, he knew that his only hope of success lay in quickly invading territory held by Severus and winning swift victories before his rival could concentrate his forces. For his part, Severus had needed few men to take Rome and so had lost no time in dispatching a large part of his army to face Niger. Before long, he had managed to displace the theatre of war eastwards through Turkey into Syria. Winning the final battle in May AD 194 at a place called Issus – previously famous as the site of a great victory by Alexander the Great – Severus spent the rest of the year hunting down supporters of Niger, rewarding those who had switched allegiance and launching an expedition against the western provinces of the Persian empire. The immediate pretext for this act of aggression was that the Persian king had aided Niger. Even before returning to Rome, Severus elevated Caracalla, the elder of his two sons, to the rank of Caesar. This amounted to a declaration of war on Albinus, who was crushed after fierce fighting in February, AD 197, at the Battle of Lugdunum (Lyons).

  Rome’s new dictator

  Between his return to Rome in AD 195 and his departure to fight against Albinus, Severus took the remarkable step of retroactively having himself adopted into the family of Marcus Aurelius. This attempt to validate his claim to authority was backed by the specious assertion that Commodus was his brother. It could have been interpreted as a salute to the traditions of an earlier age, but Severus eschewed the merciful moderation of his new-found Antonine ancestors. Rather, his avowed role-model was the dictator Sulla, a fact he made plain in a thinly veiled threat to senators when they protested at his deification of Commodus. His large-scale executions of men who were suspected of sympathizing with his rivals certainly recalled Sulla’s proscriptions.

  Although Severus filled Rome with monuments to his regime, he clearly did not feel at ease in the capital. Immediately after defeating Albinus, he took off for a further campaign in the east, sacking the Persian capital Ctesiphon, and adding new provinces between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in what is now southeastern Turkey. This was the first significant addition of new territory to the empire since the time of Trajan, and it soon proved to be a source of serious trouble. The new province, known as Mesopotamia, was a constant provocation and casus belli to later Persian kings, who saw Roman control of the region as a threat to their security.

  In the years following his invasion of Persia, Severus continued to traverse the provinces, visiting first Egypt and then his North African homeland, where he rebuilt his home city of Leptis Magna to make it appear a suitable place of origin for an emperor. While he was engaged on his extensive travels, Severus turned over much of the day-to-day administration of the empire to his kinsman and fellow North African Gaius Fulvius Plautianus (d. AD 205). Plautianus had performed invaluable services for Severus in the perilous year AD 193 – including ensuring that his wife and children were spirited out of Rome before Julianus could do them harm – and was now sole praetorian prefect. He further strengthened his bond to the emperor by marrying off his daughter Fulvia Plautilla to Severus’ son Caracalla. Plautianus enjoyed such favour at this time that statues of him were erected alongside those of close members of the imperial household. Cassius Dio claims that when unfounded rumours of Plautianus’ demise swept the empire, civic officials tore down these statues and were subsequently executed for treason.

  A troubled succession

  In the course of AD 205 the relationship between Severus and Plautianus cooled dramatically. The agent of the change may have been Caracalla, who hated both his wife Fulvia Plautilla and his father-in-law. Accused of organizing a conspiracy, Plautianus was summoned to the palace and summarily executed. Effective control of the state now passed to a group of Severus’ most trusted confederates, including Papinian (AD 142–212), the greatest jurist of the age. Another key member of the charmed circle was Severus’ wife, Julia Domna (c. AD 170–217). Julia was related to the formerly royal house of the Syrian city of Emesa (Homs), whose members now held the priesthood of the sky god; Severus – like many emperors before him, spellbound by astrology – is reputed to have married her after he learned that her horoscope predicted she would marry a king. Their marriage was a happy one, and she bore Severus two sons in quick succession – Caracalla in AD 186 and Publius Septimius Geta in AD 189. The two boys were quarrelsome from the outset; tensions between them were not eased by the fact that their mother made it quite clear that Geta was her favourite. In his final years, their father made several fruitless attempts to reconcile his warring sons.

  Ever ambivalent about Rome, Septimius Severus took personal command of a campaign in northern Britain in AD 209 to push back tribes that had broken through the Antonine Wall. Operations went well, but the emperor fell severely ill and died at Eboracum (York) in February, AD 211. Prior to his death, Severus probably recognized that neither of his sons – both of whom accompanied him on his British campaign – was yet capable of ruling on his own. He therefore decreed that they should ascend the throne jointly; accordingly, in AD 211, Caracalla and Geta became co-emperors of Rome, an arrangement that had not been witnessed for 50 years since the joint rule of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. The sibling rivalry between Severus’ two sons was driven by intense hatred and, before the year was through, their turbulent relationship was to end in bloodshed.

  Inadequates and Misfits:

  Emperors of the Early Third Century

  (AD 211–238)

  Severus’ reported deathbed advice to his sons was that they should ‘live in harmony with one another, enrich the soldiers, and despise everyone else’. The second and final elements of this edict represent a radical break with the policies of the Antonine age. While careful to maintain good relations with the military, rulers from Tiberius onwards had always been wary of identifying too closely with it. It was a problematic new departure that the emperor’s authority should now be seen to depend solely on the wishes of the army.

  If Severus had hoped that his sons would learn to get along, he would have been seriously disappointed at the outcome. By the time they returned to Rome, the new joint rulers had ceased speaking to each other, and set about dividing the imperial palace between them, walling off direct access points between the two zones. The administration was hopelessly split between advisers such as Papinian, who were devoted to trying to make dual government work, and partisans of either side. In this power struggle, Geta was at a severe disadvantage. He was younger, possibly less ruthless, and certainly less well connected than his brother. By 25 December, AD 211, Caracalla felt that he had gained enough of an upper hand to summon Geta to a private meeting. It was a trap; centurions of the guard concealed in the room butchered him as he sought the protection of his mother, who had come to mediate the
encounter. A wholesale massacre then ensued of anyone, including Papinian, who was deemed potentially disloyal to Caracalla. It is alleged that this round of bloodletting claimed up to 12,000 lives.

  The unpopular populist

  For all his calculated brutality, Caracalla seems to have craved popular acclaim. He spent a great deal of time at the circus, gave private exhibitions of his skill as a hunter and was a competent enough athlete to master driving a racing chariot, albeit not in public. In styling himself a man of the people, his intention may have been to let the populace of Rome know that he shared their pleasures, while expressly avoiding the excessive showmanship of Commodus. Early in AD 212, Caracalla also took the remarkable step of inviting the empire to share in his joy at having escaped unscathed the alleged plots of his brother by issuing an edict (the so-called Constitutio Antoniniana) that conferred citizenship upon all free-born inhabitants of the empire:

  Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Augustus Antoninus Pius herewith decrees the following: After having received numerous requests and petitions enquiring above all how I propose to give thanks to the immortal gods for saving me by granting me victory over my enemies, I now deem it prudent to announce that I am minded to undertake in gratitude an act of great magnanimity and piety, as befits the gods’ great majesty … Accordingly, I am granting to all those non-citizens who dwell within the borders of the Empire the rights of Roman citizenship, including all those who live in cities of whatever kind but with the exception of the dediticii [prisoners of war settled in Roman territory]. It is meet and proper that the general populace should also henceforth share in the joy of my victory. This edict shall redound to the greater glory of the Roman people.

  (from a papyrus found in Egypt in 1901 (includes editorial interpolations to make sense of the badly damaged Greek text))

  Most of Rome’s imperial subjects had not been citizens prior to the promulgation of this edict. However, even taking Caracalla’s professed motivation for this decree at face value, the impact of the Constitutio was more symbolic than real; people were still attached to the empire through the mechanisms of local government, meaning that it mattered little whether they were formally designated citizens or not. More significantly, the age-old protections that Roman citizens had enjoyed from cruel and unusual punishments, such as exposure to the beasts and crucifixion, had long since been eroded, so that only people who were both citizens and locally important were now spared the horrors of those modes of execution. By the early third century, even high social status was not always adequate protection if the charge against a person was sufficiently serious.

  Cassius Dio, for one, took a highly sceptical view of Caracalla’s supposed magnanimity when he claimed that the Constitutio Antoniniana was a cynical move aimed solely at increasing taxes raised in hard currency. One result of the edict was indeed that more people now became liable to inheritance taxes. The decree ultimately derived its name from Septimius Severus’ forced attempt to cover his own dynasty in some of the reflected glory of the Antonines. However, the spirit of the age of these ‘new’ Antonines was very different from that of their illustrious second-century predecessors.

  Caracalla plainly failed in his objective of winning over the Roman people, despite ordering lavish public works such as the extensive Baths of Caracalla in AD 212. Instead, he took off for the provinces, journeying from the Rhine to the Danube before proceeding further east. As he spent more and more time in the company of his troops, he followed the dying words of his father by shamelessly currying favour with the army. He increased soldiers’ pay substantially (to 1250 denarii annually) and reportedly even marched on foot alongside the legionaries. The unashamed favouritism he displayed towards the military was only matched by his callous disregard towards civilian populations. In AD 215, Caracalla’s response to insulting chants (regarding the death of his brother) from a hostile crowd that had assembled as he entered the city of Alexandria in Egypt was to unleash a wholesale massacre of his tormentors.

  In the course of his travels Caracalla became fascinated with Alexander the Great, presenting himself as a new version of the great conqueror and even rearming some legions in the style of the ancient Macedonians. In AD 216, he resolved to undertake a serious military adventure, and emulate his hero Alexander by invading the Persian empire. By the end of that year, he stood on the plain of Gaugamela (near Mosul in northern Iraq), where Alexander had won one of his greatest victories, before withdrawing to overwinter with the army in Roman territory.

  Caracalla had long fancied himself something of an antiquarian, with a particular interest in artifacts relating to the mythological past or to the gods. As he waited to launch his Parthian campaign, he decided to spend the first week of April, AD 217, viewing ancient ruins around Carrhae – modern Harran in southern Turkey – one of the oldest inhabited sites on earth. Venturing out from the city one day to visit a nearby temple dedicated to the moon goddess Luna, he dismounted from his horse to relieve himself. As he did so, a man who had been suborned by Marcus Opellius Macrinus (AD 165–218), one of the praetorian prefects, ran him through with his sword. This undignified end was not unfitting for a nefarious and obnoxious ruler.

  A short interregnum

  After several days of intense negotiation, the general staff agreed to make Macrinus emperor. Despite being implicated in the conspiracy against Caracalla, it was not a job that Macrinus sought with any great eagerness, as the situation confronting him was extremely dangerous. The king of Persia was advancing on Roman territory at the head of a substantial force, while discontent was rife among the rank and file of the Roman army. After an indecisive encounter with the Persians, who agreed to make peace in return for an enormous indemnity payment, Macrinus withdrew the army to spend the winter in Syria. He would have been better advised to return to Rome.

  Never popular with the army, Macrinus made the situation worse when he declared his intention of rescinding the additional pay granted by Caracalla to new recruits. Although existing soldiers kept their new pay packages, they felt threatened by the move. Another cloud was also looming on Macrinus’ horizon: Caracalla’s mother Julia Domna, who had accompanied her son to the east, died in the early months of his reign, but her sister Julia Maesa began to plot against the new emperor. Fearful that she would lose the prerogatives that went with being an imperial aunt, she withdrew to the family homeland of Emesa in Syria. There she encountered her teenaged nephew Varius Avitus Bassianus, who was the chief priest of the local sun-god Elagabal. Because he somewhat resembled Caracalla, she was able to convince soldiers of the legion stationed near the city that Bassianus was in fact his illegitimate son. The soldiers were already unhappy with Macrinus, and with the additional sweetener of a substantial bribe, promptly proclaimed the boy emperor when he was brought to their camp. Macrinus bungled an attempt to nip the revolt in the bud, but finally managed to muster a force to confront his rivals. The battle was evenly matched until Macrinus lost his nerve and fled the field. He got as far as Asia Minor before a centurion who had been sent in pursuit caught up with him and cut off his head.

  The most eccentric emperor

  Although his formal name as emperor was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (reinforcing his spurious claim to be related to Caracalla), the young man from Emesa is generally known by a Latinized form of the name of his patron deity: Elagabalus (c. AD 203–222). His reign is one of the most controversial in Roman history, despite the best efforts of the effective palace staff that he inherited from Caracalla to rein in his excesses. The civil war that brought Elagabalus to the throne was essentially a struggle for control between members of the government who were closely associated with the palace and the more bureaucratic elements that had supported Macrinus. The ascendant palace group made genuine efforts to include members of the senate and senior equestrian bureaucracy in the regime.

  Contemporary commentators such as Dio Cassius and Marius Maximus would later castigate the palace faction as a collection of worthless sex
ual deviants. This is probably a piece of retrospective self-justification, for both men were comfortably employed under this discredited regime. Marius continued to hold the prefecture of Rome that Macrinus had granted him, while Dio had a sinecure as overseer of financial affairs in his home province of Bithynia. The issue that would divide Dio and other decent provincial administrators from their patrons in Rome was the uncontrollably eccentric behaviour of the emperor.

  Elagabalus believed passionately in the power of the sungod and was intent on installing him as the principal deity in the Roman pantheon. Giving Elagabal the Latin honorific Deus Sol Invictus (‘God the Undefeated Sun’), Elagabalus dressed in elaborate priestly robes and led dances around the god’s altar. However, the emperor’s exotic form of piety struck more conventional Romans as nothing short of a transvestite charade, and Roman senators had limited tolerance for such expressions of cultural difference. As if all this were not enough, the emperor then announced that the gods of the Roman pantheon were henceforth all subservient to Elagabal. The pinnacle of Elagabalus’ scandalous behaviour was reached when he married the Vestal Virgin Aquilia Severa, a blatant violation of one of the most hallowed tenets of traditional Roman religious observance. The emperor claimed that ‘godlike children’ would result from their union.