The spectacle proved the most brilliant of any that I have witnessed; for the whole city had been decked with garlands of flowers and laurel and adorned with richly colored stuffs, and it was ablaze with torches and burning incense; the citizens, wearing white robes and with radiant countenances, uttered many shouts of good omen; the soldiers, too, stood out conspicuous in their armor as they moved about like participants in some holiday procession; and finally, we senators were walking about in state. The crowd chafed in its eagerness to see him and to hear him say something, as if he had been somehow changed by his good fortune; and some of them held one another aloft, that from a higher position they might catch sight of him.
How could someone with as little connection to Italy as Severus become emperor? The answer is: sixteen legions, and they had even less of a tie to Italy than their commander did. Most of them came from northern Europe. The Italians had grown accustomed to a long peace. One contemporary puts it well: “The men of Italy, long unused to arms and war, were devoted to farming and peaceful pursuits.”
Severus did not stay long in Rome because he had a war to fight against Pescennius Niger. He also knew how to play dirty and made a point of capturing Niger’s children as hostages while keeping his own safe. There followed two years of armed struggle against Niger in the East, ending in a complete victory and Niger’s death. Severus then attacked Parthian territory and created a new province by annexing a border state that today straddles the Syrian-Turkish border. By doing so, he took revenge on Niger’s supporters there, added a wealthy area to the empire, and balanced the criticism of his killing fellow Romans in a civil war. But he did not hesitate to execute his long-held hostages, Niger’s children.
It was inevitable that so ruthless a man as Severus would fall out with his supporter Clodius Albinus. The two rivals went to war, climaxing in a battle in Gaul that almost cost Severus his life. His troops prevailed in the end and killed Clodius, whose head Severus sent to Rome to be displayed on a pike. He also executed Clodius’s wife and sons. In early 197 the civil war was over at last.
Severus finally returned to Rome, aware both of the price he had paid to rule and the support that not a few senators had shown his rivals. Although he pardoned thirty-five senators, he ordered the execution of twenty-nine others, despite his oath several years earlier not to execute any senators. We know of at least ten other senators whom he killed on other occasions. A contemporary compared his reign to bloody Tiberius’s, while Severus openly compared himself to the brutal soldier-statesmen of the late Roman Republic, Gaius Marius and the dictator Sulla (Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix). Yet a better comparison is probably Augustus, whom Severus also cited, and who had more than a hundred senators killed before settling down to respectability. Like Augustus, Severus fought a long and bloody civil war.
To punish the Praetorian Guard for its role in murdering Pertinax and auctioning off the throne, Severus executed several hundred guardsmen and fired the rest. Traditionally the Guard was recruited from Italy, but Severus replaced them with his own foreign-born legionaries, many of them probably from the Danube region. In Roman eyes, especially to nobles, the new guardsmen were savages.
To top things off, Severus doubled the size of the Praetorian Guard. He also doubled the size of Rome’s firemen and tripled the size of its police, both of which were paramilitary forces. He may have also increased the number of specialist troops—archers and spies, among others—located in a garrison in the southeast part of the city. In addition, Severus built a permanent garrison for one of his legions south of Rome in the Alban Hills, in a town along the Appian Way. Built to last, the camp’s ruins still lie scattered through the little town of Albano Laziale, just down the road from the summer residence of the Popes.
Altogether, Severus increased the number of troops in and around Rome from approximately 11,500 to roughly 30,000. His purpose was partly military, as the new forces provided the nucleus of a mobile reserve that Rome needed badly to respond rapidly to challenges at various points on the frontier. Later emperors would do much more along these lines. But Severus’s changes had a political effect, too, making the capital feel as if it were in a military vise.
To Severus, a strong army and a strong state went together. He raised three new legions, increasing the total from thirty to thirty-three, or about a half million men. Soldiers from the Danube region and the Balkans loomed large in importance among his troops.
More generally, Severus favored the military. He gave the legions their first pay raise in over a century. He allowed soldiers to marry, as many of them had done over the years anyhow, in violation of regulations. A bigger, better-paid army was expensive, and the emperor debased the currency to pay for it. So had Marcus and Commodus, but Severus lowered its value even more. In the short run, Rome was strong enough to absorb the stress, but a later generation paid for it with runaway inflation.
Severus became the greatest military expansionist emperor since Trajan. In this, too, he followed in Marcus Aurelius’s footsteps, although Marcus did not succeed in creating new provinces, and Marcus attempted to expand the empire only in response to aggression against Rome. Severus had less of an excuse. He created two new provinces in the east beyond the Euphrates River. In Africa, he extended the boundaries of Rome’s provinces southward. In Britain, he tried to conquer the entire island. He was indeed someone who enlarged the empire, as the inscription of his triumphal arch in Rome proclaims.
Ironically, Severus did not have a strong military background. His was almost entirely a civilian career before 193. He commanded armies but only in peacetime roles—he did not fight in any war. He was more bureaucrat than warrior. Yet, like Marcus Aurelius, Severus found himself forced by circumstances into a combat role, and he took to it with gusto. Unlike Marcus, Severus first tasted blood in a civil rather than foreign war. The outcome was that Severus became a kind of Roman caudillo, the sort of military strongman who has plagued modern Latin America. Or perhaps the better analogy is a new CEO, brought in to effect a restructuring, and who ruthlessly reshapes a corporation to save it.
Violent as they are, civil wars allow people to break through social boundaries. Around 195, for example, a school principal from Gaul impersonated a Roman senator, raised a small army in support of Severus, won a real victory, and lived the rest of his life on an imperial pension. It was brash, to put it mildly, but Severus liked brash.
In April 195 Severus did something that not even his most outrageous predecessors had done: he adopted himself! He made himself son of Marcus Aurelius, and he did it on his own, never mind the Senate nor, obviously, the long-dead Marcus. Severus changed his oldest son’s name from Caracalla to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and also made him Caesar, thereby making Caracalla (we will stick to that name) his successor. At the same time, Severus announced the deification of Marcus’s son Commodus, which outraged the late, unlamented rogue emperor’s enemies in the Senate. But the soldiers had adored Commodus, who paid them well, and they surely loved the move.
One Roman wit congratulated Severus for finding a father in Marcus Aurelius, which was a backhanded compliment and a nice piece of snobbery, since it called attention to the obscurity of Severus’s birth father. Yet Severus’s move was serious business and not just a wink-nod ploy. Romans wanted to believe in hereditary succession, in one continuous imperial family. They preferred blood descent, but they did not require it. Romans were nothing if not pragmatic, and they accepted adoption readily. Severus’s “adoption” was a bald lie and too hard to swallow for some, but most considered it worth the price to pay for peace in a civil war.
Severus offered constant reminders of the military basis of his rule. To take one index, he gave his wife Domna the title of Mother of the Camp, recalling the only previous holder of that title, Faustina, wife of Marcus Aurelius and mother of Commodus. The house of Severus was the Roman army, and the army was the house of Severus—so the title said. Some legionaries even met Domna personally, as, over the yea
rs, she constantly joined Severus on his wars and travels from Britain to Iraq.
Severus had an impact on Roman government. He promoted fellow Africans to the Senate and to provincial governorships and legionary commands. He also shifted the balance of new administrative positions away from the Senate and to the knights.
WAR, POLITICS, AND MURDER
Domna was valuable to Severus in Rome as a liaison to elites from the eastern Mediterranean. She was equally valuable, because she had eastern connections, when her husband left Rome in 197 to renew the war on Parthia. Once again, she joined him in his travels.
Severus had three reasons to attack Parthia. He needed to retaliate for a Parthian invasion of Roman territory during his absence in the west to fight Clodius. He wanted glory for himself. And he surely found fewer headaches dealing with the army than with the Senate. It was Rome’s first major foreign war of conquest since Trajan, and Severus constantly reminded people that he followed in distinguished footsteps.
Severus invaded Iraq, sacked the capital city (near modern Baghdad) and annexed the northern part of the country, which he named the province of Mesopotamia. He thereby re-created Trajan’s lost province. Like Trajan, though, Severus failed to capture an important fortress city even after two sieges. Nonetheless, he declared victory and took the title Parthicus Maximus, which roughly means the Great Victor in Parthia.
Severus turned the capture of the Parthian capital into a propaganda coup. He timed the event for January 28, 198, the hundredth anniversary of Trajan’s becoming emperor. Severus also made that the official day of Caracalla being named Augustus, or, co-emperor. In short, the emperor squeezed the maximum political advantage he could from his military success.
He should have been careful in what he wished for. The new province of Mesopotamia was an overextension of the empire and not in Rome’s interests. A contemporary critic complained about its expense and tendency to embroil Rome in new and dangerous conflicts. But when Severus finally returned to Rome in 202, after several more years in Syria and a long trip to Egypt, he was voted a triumph. He declined to celebrate it, though, because he was too sick with gout to stand in a triumphal chariot.
Severus’s health did not stop him from traveling with his family to North Africa in 202 and 203, including a proud homecoming in Lepcis. Severus sponsored a magnificent program of urban renewal in his native town, with marble monuments still visible today. In 203 Severus and his family returned to Rome, where they dedicated themselves to a big program of buildings and festivals. That same year, they dedicated the new Arch of Severus and Caracalla, celebrating their victories over Parthia.
Triumphal arches were squarely in the Roman tradition, but Severus erected his arch in an unconventional spot, near monuments celebrating Augustus, thereby basking in his predecessor’s glory. As for the sculpted reliefs carved on the new arch, they are unusually blunt and brutal scenes of military victory and unlike earlier Roman triumphal arches. As he did so often, Severus had one foot in the genteel past and the other in a violent present. Just as victory in a civil war won him the empire, so, he claimed, victory in a foreign war justified the continuation of his dynasty. He prided himself on having expanded the empire.
Other construction projects in Rome included rebuilding temples destroyed in an earlier fire, adding a massive addition to the imperial palace, and constructing a freestanding façade near the palace. This monument displayed members of the imperial family among the seven planets then known, as if to say that the heavens themselves approved of the new dynasty.
There would be other celebrations, most notably the Secular Games of 204, marking the completion of roughly another century of Rome’s history. It was another echo of Augustus, the first emperor to hold the games. A new touch, though, was the term Holy City to refer to Rome, which came into use at this time. The title Eternal City went back to the Augustan Age, and the adjective “most holy” had already been used to describe several emperors. Calling the city itself holy was a logical next step. Although today the designation of Rome as Holy City refers to Christianity, originally the term was pagan.
But it was Tiberius rather than Augustus whom Severus resembled in his willingness to let much of his power devolve to his prefect of the Guard, Plautianus. He was an intimate second in command, a boyhood friend who traveled everywhere with the emperor, but he was not to be trusted.
Like Sejanus, the unscrupulous Praetorian prefect under Tiberius, Plautianus aimed at building up his own base and eventually gaining supreme power. An assiduous networker with soldiers and civilians alike, Plautianus also became rich, which brought new friends in turn and the clout to execute enemies. He badmouthed Domna constantly. Plautianus reached a peak of power in 202, when he married his daughter to Caracalla, then fourteen. The hope was that, at a minimum, Plautianus’s grandson would be emperor one day but, if he played his cards right, Plautianus might get rid of Caracalla and succeed Severus on the throne. Both Caracalla and his mother feared and hated Plautianus and his family, so it was not a happy marriage.
But Plautianus overplayed his hand. Crowds at the races in Rome complained loudly about his ambition. He allowed more bronze statues of him to go up than of Severus. The emperor noticed and had some of the offending statues melted down. When Severus’s brother lay dying in 205, he delivered a deathbed warning against Plautianus. Finally, that same year, Caracalla, sixteen, successfully accused Plautianus of plotting to kill Severus.
On January 22, 205, Caracalla had the arrogant prefect executed in the imperial palace in Rome. Then he had a tuft of Plautianus’s beard brought into another room, where Caracalla’s wife—Plautianus’s daughter—and his mother, Domna, were waiting. “Here’s your Plautianus!” the messenger said, which horrified one woman and cheered the other. Caracalla then divorced his wife and sent her into exile on a remote island.
There is a trace of this squalid vendetta in an often-overlooked monument on a quiet street in Rome. There stands a marble arch, dedicated in 204 by the cattle merchants and their bankers, as a tribute to Severus on the tenth anniversary of his reign. It was the Roman equivalent of a campaign donation—a gift by a business group in honor of the imperial family—no doubt in the hope of a return favor such as a tax break.
The stone is thickly chiseled with an ornate but appropriate combination of themes. Legionary emblems, imperial eagles, prisoners of war, Hercules—the god of the cattle market, with his club and lion skin—cattle being driven by their herders, and knives and axes for the sacrifice all decorate the monument. The biggest images belong to the imperial family: Severus and Domna stare down in a blunt and frontal pose in a relief on one inner wall. The emperor, dressed in a toga, is carrying out a sacrifice, while Domna holds a symbol of her role as Mother of the Camp. Opposite them is their older son, Caracalla, also engaged in a sacrifice to the gods.
Upon closer look, the signs of violent erasure are visible. Caracalla’s wife and his father-in-law, Plautianus, were once depicted, as was Caracalla’s younger brother, Geta, but all three were later chiseled out after they were disgraced, exiled, or murdered.
CARACALLA
In 208 Severus, Domna, their sons, and much of the rest of their entourage left for Britain and the hope of one last campaign of conquest and one chance of reconciling the two feuding heirs to the throne. The two boys were so competitive that Caracalla once fell and broke his leg in a chariot race with his younger brother. He threatened to murder Geta.
Apparently, Severus considered the threat credible. At least some thought that the emperor chose to undertake a distant military campaign, despite such poor health that he had to be carried to war on a covered litter, in hope of distracting the boys. It was a vain hope: not only did Caracalla continue to threaten Geta but also once, while riding on horseback beside Severus to a parley with the enemy in Caledonia (Scotland), Caracalla raised a sword against Severus himself. The emperor’s men saw him, and they shouted loud enough to stop Caracalla. Later, back at headquarter
s, the emperor chewed out his son, but he did nothing to punish him. Severus often blamed Marcus Aurelius for not getting rid of Commodus; but despite often angrily threatening to kill Caracalla, love or pragmatism stopped Severus.
The emperor launched his British campaign with dreams of laurels. He waged war for two seasons in Scotland with the hope of conquering all Britain, only to see the army stall against an elusive enemy and inhospitable terrain. Then illness forced him to quarters for months. For a decade now, disease and hard living had worn him out, and at sixty-six, he was losing the battle. Gone were the days when Severus thought nothing of riding bareheaded through the rain and snow on campaign in the mountains in order to encourage his men. Yet this short man still had a big appetite for work. Even now he gasped to his aides, “Come, give it here, if we have anything to do.”
Caracalla and Geta attended him. Julia Domna was nearby. Even though they were on the frontier, hundreds of miles from home, she carried on. Not for nothing did she bear the title Mother of the Camp. No less determined than her husband, Domna was his constant companion on campaign.
Gout-ridden, immobile, saddened, the emperor lay on his deathbed. Now, with the end finally near, Severus addressed his sons. Supposedly, his exact words were, “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men.” The thoughts bear the mark of the man: terse, blunt, wise, and at once both cynical and hopeful.
And then Severus was dead, on February 4, 211. A man born amid the marble colonnades of a rich city on North Africa’s sunny Mediterranean coast ended his life in far-off Eboracum (today’s York), a spartan military town in northern Britain. The rituals of an imperial funeral—the procession at double-time around the pyre that was adorned with gifts from the soldiers, the corpse in armor, the two boys lighting the fire—dissipated the winter gloom. So did the final touch: a purple urn in which Severus’s bones were deposited. It was later brought back to Rome and laid to rest in Hadrian’s tomb. The story went that Severus sent for the urn before dying. After feeling it, he is supposed to have said, “You shall hold the bones of a man that the world could not hold.”
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