The Severan dynasty, 193 to 235: the soldier emperors and the Syrian empresses

The year of five emperors

When the emperor Commodus was murdered on the last day of 192, Rome entered a year of civil war. His successor Pertinax was killed by the Praetorian Guard within months, and the guard sold the throne to Didius Julianus. On 13 April 193 the troops on the Danube proclaimed their commander, Lucius Septimius Severus, governor of Upper Pannonia, emperor. He marched on Rome, Julianus was murdered, and Severus entered the city without a fight.²

Severus disbanded the old guard and formed a new, larger one from his own provincial legionaries. He then turned on his rivals. Pescennius Niger, proclaimed in Syria, was beaten near Nicaea and finally near Issus in 194, and killed as he fled. Clodius Albinus, the governor of Britain, was first bought off with the title of Caesar, then declared a public enemy, and destroyed near Lugdunum, today Lyon, in February 197.³

An army monarchy

Severus fought the Parthians next. His armies swept down the Euphrates, sacked Ctesiphon and turned northern Mesopotamia into a Roman province. At home he rebuilt the state around the army. Soldiers' pay rose by half and they were allowed to marry while in service, and the emperor favored equestrian officers and provincials over the Senate. Britannica sees in his reign a critical stage on the road to the absolute rule of the later empire; Michael Meckler stresses the financial and military burdens his choices placed on Rome.⁴

His wife, Julia Domna, was a Syrian, the daughter of the hereditary high priest of the sun god at Emesa. Her family would shape the dynasty to its end. Severus died at Eboracum, today York, in February 211, during a campaign in Britain on which he had taken his quarrelling sons.⁵

Caracalla

The brothers Caracalla and Geta inherited the empire together and hated each other. Caracalla had Geta killed in their mother's arms, at the end of 211 in Meckler's account and in 212 in Herbert Benario's, and his followers were massacred. In 212 Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire, the measure known as the Constitutio Antoniniana; Britannica notes the suspicion of ancient writers that it was meant to raise tax revenue.⁶

Caracalla spent his last years at war, admiring Alexander the Great and campaigning against the Parthians. In April 217, on a trip to a temple near Carrhae, he was stabbed by a soldier of his escort, in a plot that both encyclopedias link to his praetorian prefect, Macrinus.⁷

Macrinus and the battle of Antioch

Macrinus was the first emperor who had never been a senator. He fought an indecisive battle with the Parthians near Nisibis and bought peace with large payments, and his economies with the soldiers' pay made him enemies in the army. Julia Domna's sister, Julia Maesa, saw her chance. She spread the story that her grandson, the young priest of the god Elagabal at Emesa, was Caracalla's son, and in May 218 a legion camped nearby proclaimed him emperor.⁸

The armies met outside Antioch on 8 June 218. Macrinus left the field and his troops gave up the fight. He was caught trying to reach Europe and executed; Meckler places his capture at Chalcedon and his death in Cappadocia.⁹

Elagabalus

The new emperor, known to history by the name of his god, Elagabalus, brought the sacred stone of Emesa to Rome and tried to raise the god above the old cults. His marriage to a Vestal Virgin, Aquilia Severa, scandalized the city. Julia Maesa, now the real power, made him adopt his cousin Alexander as heir. When Elagabalus turned against his cousin, the Praetorian Guard murdered him and his mother, Julia Soaemias, on 11 March 222.¹⁰

Severus Alexander and the end

Severus Alexander was thirteen or fourteen when he became emperor, and power lay with his grandmother and then his mother, Julia Mamaea. Britannica describes a government losing control of its own guard, which murdered the jurist Ulpian, its chief minister, in 224. In the East a new enemy appeared: Ardashir I, founder of the Persian Sasanian state, invaded Mesopotamia in 230, and Alexander's counteroffensive of 232 ended in a costly stalemate.¹¹

Called to the Rhine to face the Alemanni, Alexander, on his mother's advice, tried to buy peace. The soldiers would not accept it. In 235 they killed him and Julia Mamaea at Mainz and proclaimed Maximinus Thrax emperor. Britannica dates to his fall the civil strife that engulfed the empire for the next fifty years.¹²