Battle of Antioch, 218: the boy emperor and the fleeing Macrinus

Marcus Opellius Macrinus was an unusual emperor. An educated official from Caesarea in Mauretania, he was praetorian prefect, an equestrian post, when Caracalla was murdered near Carrhae in April 217. On 11 April the troops proclaimed him emperor, the first who was not a senator, and suspicion that he had arranged the murder never left him.²

An emperor the soldiers did not love

Macrinus spent his whole 14-month reign in the East. The Parthian king Artabanus V attacked, and after a battle at Nisibis that the Romans lost, Macrinus bought peace with large payments. He tried to save money on the army by giving new recruits less pay than veterans. In a letter to Rome quoted by the senator and historian Cassius Dio, he complained that Caracalla's pay rise cost 280 million sesterces a year, which the treasury could neither afford nor take back.³

The family of Caracalla saw its chance. His aunt Julia Maesa, sister of the empress Julia Domna, lived at Emesa in Syria with her daughters Soaemias and Mamaea and their sons. On 15 May 218 a legion camped near Emesa proclaimed Maesa's 14-year-old grandson Avitus, the son of Soaemias, known to history as Elagabalus, as emperor. The soldiers were told he was Caracalla's son, and Maesa's money did the rest. Herodian, who lived through these years, writes that the troops were moved by hatred of Macrinus and pity for Caracalla, but above all by the hope of money.⁴

The rebellion grows

Macrinus first treated the affair as the work of children and sent the praetorian prefect Julianus with a force to crush it. When Julianus attacked the camp, the rebels showed the boy from the walls and waved full purses at the besiegers, who cut off their commander's head, sent it to Macrinus and changed sides. Deserters came in every day. Macrinus then gathered his army and marched out, and the rebels came to meet him.⁵

The battle

The armies met on 8 June 218. Cassius Dio, a senator in Rome at the time, places the battle at a village of the Antiochians 24 miles from the city; Herodian puts it on the borders of Phoenicia and Syria. The rebel leader Gannys, a man with no military experience who had spent his life in luxury, Dio says, nevertheless seized the pass in front of the village and drew up his troops in good order.⁶

Macrinus had taken away his praetorians' scale armor and grooved shields to make them lighter, and Dio admits that they fought well. It was the rebel army that wavered. According to Dio, the men would have run if Maesa and Soaemias had not leaped down from their chariots and stopped them with their lamentations, and if the boy himself had not been seen galloping along with drawn sword as if about to charge. Even so they would have turned again, had Macrinus not fled first when he saw them standing their ground.⁷

Herodian tells it differently. In his account Macrinus's soldiers were indifferent and went over to the boy, and Macrinus, afraid of being captured, threw off his purple cloak and slipped away with a few centurions while the fight still raged. Only the praetorians fought on, until Elagabalus told them their emperor had fled and promised them pardon and a place in his guard. They changed sides.⁸

The flight of an emperor

Macrinus sent his son and Caesar, Diadumenianus, toward the Parthian king and rode into Antioch, pretending he had won. When the truth came out he fled again by night, Dio writes, with his head and chin shaved and a dark cloak over his purple. Posing as an army courier, he drove through Cilicia, Cappadocia, Galatia and Bithynia, hoping to reach Rome, where he might have found support. He was recognized when he asked a procurator for money, and arrested at Chalcedon on the Bosporus.⁹

The sources disagree on the end. Herodian says his pursuers cut off his head at Chalcedon after the wind drove his ship back from Europe. Dio and the modern Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors say he was taken back to Cappadocia and executed there, after he had heard that his son had been caught at Zeugma; Dio adds that he threw himself from the carriage and broke his shoulder. Dio puts his age at 54, and counts his reign at a year and two months, less three days, to the day of the battle. An oracle of Zeus Belus, he notes, had warned the old man that young warriors would beset him.¹⁰

The boy of Emesa entered history as Elagabalus, one of Rome's most notorious emperors, and was murdered in 222. Macrinus, Michael Meckler concludes, was an able administrator who lacked the aristocratic connections and personal daring that might have won him legitimacy. For the legions behind Rome's greater wars, see our guide to the greatest battles of ancient Rome.¹¹ › The Severan dynasty, 193 to 235