ON January 1, 193, a few hours after the assassination of Commodus, the Senate met in a transport of happiness, and chose as emperor one of its most respected members, whose just administration as prefect of the city had continued the finest traditions of the Antonines. Pertinax accepted with reluctance a dignity so exalted that any fall from it must be fatal. He “demeaned himself as an ordinary man,” says Herodian,1 attended the lectures of the philosophers, encouraged literature, replenished the treasury, reduced taxes, and auctioned off the gold and silver, the embroideries and silks and beautiful slaves, wherewith Commodus had filled the imperial palace; “in fact, he did everything,” says Dio Cassius, “that a good emperor should do.”2 The freedmen who had lost their perquisites through his economy conspired with the Praetorian Guard, which disliked his restoration of discipline. On March 28, 300 soldiers forced their way into the palace, struck him down, and carried his head upon a spear to their camp. The people and the Senate mourned and hid.
The leaders of the Guard announced that they would bestow the crown upon that Roman who should offer them the largest donative. Didius Julianus was persuaded by his wife and daughter to interrupt his meal and enter his bid. Proceeding to the camp, he found a rival offering 5000 drachmas ($3000) to each soldier in return for the throne. The agents of the Guard passed from one millionaire to the other, encouraging higher bids; when Julianus promised each man 6250 drachmas the Guard declared him emperor.
Aroused by this crowning indignity, the people of Rome appealed to the legions in Britain, Syria, and Pannonia to come and depose Julianus. The legions, angered by exclusion from the donative, hailed their respective generals with the imperial title, and marched toward Rome. The Pannonian commander, Lucius Septimius Severus Geta, gained the Principate by boldness, expedition, and bribery. He pledged himself to give each soldier 12,000 drachmas upon his accession; he led them from the Danube to within seventy miles of Rome in a month; he won over to himself the troops sent to halt him, and subdued the Praetorians by offering them pardon in return for the surrender of their leaders. He violated precedent by entering the capital with all his troops in full armor, but he himself appeased tradition by wearing civilian dress. A tribune found Julianus in tears and terror in the palace, led him into a bathroom, and beheaded him (June 2, 193).
Africa, which was at this time providing Christianity with its ablest defenders, gave birth (146) and early schooling to Septimius. Brought up in a family of Punic-speaking Phoenicians, he studied literature and philosophy in Athens and practiced law in Rome. Despite the Semitic accent of his Latin, he was among the best-educated Romans of his time, and liked to surround himself with poets and philosophers. But he did not allow philosophy to impede his wars, or poetry to soften his character. He was a man of handsome features, strong physique, and simple dress, hardy in hardship, clever in strategy, fearless in battle, ruthless in victory. He conversed with wit, judged with penetration, lied without scruple, loved money more than honor, and governed with cruelty and competence.3
The Senate had made the mistake of declaring for his rival Albinus; Septimius, surrounded with 600 guards, persuaded it to confirm his own accession; then he put scores of senators to death, and confiscated so many aristocratic estates that he became landlord to half the peninsula. The decimated Senate was replenished by imperial nomination with new members chiefly from the monarchical East. The great lawyers of the age—Papinian, Paulus, Ulpian—accumulated arguments in defense of absolute power. Septimius ignored the Senate except when he sent it commands; he assumed full control of the various treasuries, based his rule frankly upon the army, and made the Principate an hereditary military monarchy. The army was increased in size; the pay of the soldiers was raised, and became an exhausting drain upon the public purse. Military service was made compulsory, but was forbidden to the inhabitants of Italy; henceforth provincial legions would choose emperors for a Rome that had lost the fortitude to rule.
This realistic warrior believed in astrology, and excelled in the interpretation of portents and dreams. When, six years before his accession, his first wife died, he offered his hand to a rich Syrian whose horoscope had pledged her a throne. Julia Domna was the daughter of a rich priest of the god Elagabal at Emesa. There, long since, a meteorite had fallen, had been enshrined in a gaudy temple, and was worshiped as the symbol, if not the embodiment, of the deity. Julia came, bore Septimius two sons, Caracalla and Geta, and rose to her promised throne. She was too beautiful to be monogamous, but Septimius was too busy to be jealous. She gathered around her a salon of literary men, patronized the arts, and persuaded Philostratus to write and adorn the life of Apollonius of Tyana. Her strong character and influence accelerated that orientation of the monarchy toward Eastern ways which culminated morally under Elagabalus, and politically under Diocletian.
Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after a four years’ siege, thereby lowering a barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). “I have been everything,” he said, “and it is worth nothing.”4 Caracalla, says Herodian, “was much vexed that his father’s decease was so lingering . . . and solicited the physicians to dispatch the old man by any means that might come to hand.”5 Septimius had blamed Aurelius for yielding the Empire to Commodus; now he bequeathed it to Caracalla and Geta, with cynical advice: “Make your soldiers rich, and do not bother about anything else.”6 He was the last emperor, for eighty years, who died in bed.
Caracalla,I like Commodus, seemed made to prove that a man’s quota of energy seldom allows him to be great in both his life and his seed. Attractive and obedient in boyhood, he became in manhood a barbarian infatuated with hunting and war. He captured wild boars, fought a lion singlehanded, kept lions always near him in his palace, and had one as occasional table companion and bedfellow.7 He particularly enjoyed the company of gladiators and soldiers, and would keep senators cooling their heels in his antechambers while he prepared food and drink for his companions. Unwilling to share the imperial power with his brother, he had Geta assassinated in 212; the youth was slaughtered in his mother’s arms, and covered her garments with his blood. We are told that Caracalla condemned to execution 20,000 of Geta’s following, many citizens, and four Vestal Virgins whom he accused of adultery.8 When the army murmured at the killing of Geta, he silenced it with a donative equal to all the sums that Septimius had gathered into all the treasuries. He favored the soldiers and the poor against the business classes and the aristocracy; possibly the stories we read about him in Dio Cassius are a senator’s revenge. Anxious to raise more revenue, he doubled the inheritance tax to ten per cent; and noting that the tax applied only to Roman citizens, he extended the Roman franchise to all free male adults in the Empire (212); they achieved citizenship precisely when it brought a maximum of obligations and a minimum of power. He added to the adornment of Rome an arch to Septimius Severus, which still stands, and public baths whose gigantic ruins attest their ancient grandeur. But for the most part he left the civil government to his mother, and absorbed himself in campaigns.
He had made Julia Domna secretary both a libellis and ab epistulis—of petitions and correspondence. She joined or replaced him in greeting high members of the state or foreign dignitaries. Gossip whispered that she controlled him by incestuous means; the wits of Alexandria maddened him by referring to her and him as Jocasta and Oedipus. Partly in revenge against these insults, partly because he feared that Egypt might revolt while he was fighting Parthia, he visited the city and superintended (we are assured) the massacre of all Alexandrians capable of bearing arms.9
Nevertheless, the founder of Alexandria was his model and envy. He organized 16,000 troops into what he called “Alexander’s phalanx,” equipped them with ancient Macedonian arms, and dreamed of subduing Parthia as Alexander had conquered Persia. He tried hard to be a good soldier, sharing the food and toil and marches of his army, helping it to dig ditches and build bridges, bearing himself bravely in action, and often challenging the enemy to single combat. But his men were not as eager for the Parthian campaign as he was; they loved spoils more ardently than battle; and at Carrhae, where Crassus had been defeated, they stabbed him to death (217). Macrinus, prefect of the Guard, acclaimed himself emperor, and ordered the reluctant Senate to make Caracalla a god. Julia Domna, banished to Antioch, and bereft, within six years, of empire, husband, and sons, refused food until she died.10
She had a sister, Julia Maesa, as capable as herself. Returning to Emesa, this second Julia found there two promising grandsons. One, by her daughter Julia Soaemias, was a young priest of Baal; his name was Varius Avitus, and would be Elagabalus—“the creative god.”II The other, by Maesa’s daughter Julia Mamaea, was a boy of ten called Alexianus, and would be Alexander Severus. Though Varius was the son of Varius Marcellus, Maesa spread the rumor that he was the natural son of Caracalla, and gave him the name Bassianus; the Empire was worth her daughter’s reputation, and Marcellus was dead. The Roman soldiers in Syria were already half won to Syrian cults, and felt a pious respect for the fourteen-year-old priest; moreover, Maesa suggested that if they would make Elagabalus emperor she would distribute a substantial donative among them. The soldiers were convinced, and complied. Maesa’s gold brought over to her cause the army that Macrinus sent against them. When Macrinus himself appeared with a substantial force, the Syrian mercenaries wavered; but Maesa and Soaemias sprang from their chariots, and led the softened army to victory. The men of Syria were women, and the women were men.
In the spring of 219 Elagabalus entered Rome dressed in robes of purple silk embroidered with gold, his cheeks stained with vermilion, his eyes artificially brightened, costly bracelets on his arms, a string of pearls around his neck, a jeweled crown on his pretty head. Beside him his grandmother and his mother rode in state. On his first appearance in the Senate he demanded that his mother should be allowed to sit beside him and attend the deliberations. Soaemias had the sense to withdraw, and contented herself with presiding over that Senaculum, or little Senate, of women, which Hadrian’s Sabina had founded, and which dealt with questions of feminine dress, jewelry, precedence, and etiquette. Grandmother Maesa was left to govern the state.
The young emperor had some elements of charm. He made no reprisals against the supporters of Macrinus. He loved music, sang well, played the pipes, the organ, and the horn. Being too young to rule the Empire, he only asked permission to enjoy it. Pleasure, not Baal, was his god, and he was resolved to worship it in all its genders and forms. He invited every class of the free population to visit his palace; at times he would eat and drink and make merry with them; often he would distribute among them lottery prizes ranging from a furnished home to a handful of flies. He loved to play jokes upon his guests: to seat them on inflated cushions that would suddenly burst; to stupefy them with wine and let them wake up amid harmless leopards, bears, and lions. Lampridius assures us that Elagabalus never spent less than 100,000 sesterces ($10,000)—and sometimes 3,000,000—on a banquet to his friends. He would mix gold pieces with peas, onyx with lentils, pearls with rice, amber with beans; he would present horses, or chariots, or eunuchs, as favors; often he bade each guest take home the silver plate and goblets in which the dinner had been served. As for himself, he would have nothing but the best. The water in his swimming pools was perfumed with essence of roses; the fixtures in his bathrooms were of onyx or gold; his food had to be of costly rarities; his dress was studded with jewelry from crown to shoes; and gossip said that he never wore the same rings twice. When he traveled, 600 chariots were needed to carry his baggage and his bawds. Told by a soothsayer that he would die a violent death, he prepared worthy means of suicide if occasion required: cords of purple silk, swords of gold, poisons enclosed in sapphires or emeralds.11 He was slain in a latrine.
Probably his enemies of the Senatorial class invented or exaggerated some of these tales; certainly the stories of his sexual depravity are beyond belief. In any case he perfumed his lust with piety, and schemed to spread among the Romans some worship of his Syrian Baal. He had himself circumcized, and thought of emasculating himself in honor of his god. He brought from Emesa the conical black stone which he worshiped as the emblem of Elagabal; he raised an ornate temple to house it; the stone, encrusted with gems, was carried to it on a chariot drawn by six white horses, while the young emperor walked backward before it in dumb adoration. He was willing to recognize all other religions; he patronized Judaism, and proposed to legalize Christianity. He merely insisted, with admirable loyalty, that his stone was the greatest of gods.12
His mother, absorbed in amours, looked with indulgence upon this Priapic farce; but Julia Maesa, failing to control it, resolved to forestall a debacle that would end this remarkable dynasty of Syrian women. She persuaded Elagabalus to adopt his cousin Alexander as successor and Caesar. She and Mamaea trained the boy in the duties of his office, and by every art drew the Senate and the people to look upon him as a desirable alternative to the priestly satyr who had offended Rome not by his extravagance or obscenity, but by his subordination of Jupiter to a Syrian Baal. Soaemias discovered the plot, and stirred up the Praetorians against her sister and nephew; Maesa and Mamaea offered richer arguments; and the Guard slew Elagabalus and his mother, dragged his corpse through the streets and around the Circus, and flung it into the Tiber. The Guard proclaimed, the Senate accepted, Alexander as emperor (222).
Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander, like his predecessor, mounted the throne at the age of fourteen. His mother had given herself with singular consecration to the training of his body, mind, and character. He strengthened his frame with labor and exercise, swam in a cold pool for an hour every day, drank a pint of water before each meal, ate sparingly and of the simplest foods. He grew into a handsome youth, tall and strong, skilled in every sport and in the arts of war. He studied Greek and Latin literature, and only moderated his love for them on the insistence of Mamaea, who quoted to him those verses of Virgil that called upon Romans to yield the graces of culture to others, and form themselves to organize a world state and rule it in peace. He painted and sang “with distinction,” and played the organ and the lyre, but never allowed any but his own household to witness these performances. He dressed and behaved with modest simplicity, “was temperate in the enjoyment of love, and would have nothing to do with catamites.”13 He showed high respect for the Senate, treated its members as his equals, entertained them in his palace, and often joined them in their homes. Kindly and affable, he visited the sick without distinction of class, gave ready audience to any citizen of decent repute, quickly forgave opponents, and shed no civilian blood in the fourteen years of his reign.14 His mother reproved his amiability, saying, “You have made your rule too gentle, and the authority of the Empire less respected”; to which he answered, “Yes, but I have made it more lasting and secure.”15 He was a man of gold, without the alloy required to withstand the rough usage of this world.
He recognized the absurdity of his cousin’s effort to replace Jove with Elagabal, and he co-operated with his mother in restoring the Roman temples and ritual. But to his philosophic mind it seemed that all religions were diverse prayers to one supreme power; he wished to honor all honest faiths; and in his private chapel, where he worshiped every morning, he had icons of Jupiter, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, and Christ. He quoted frequently the Judaeo-Christian counsel: “What you do not wish a man to do to you, do not do to him”; he had it engraved on the walls of his palace and on many a public building. He recommended the morals of the Jews and the Christians to the Roman people. The unimpressed wits of Antioch and Alexandria referred to him as “Head of the Synagogue.” His mother favored the Christians, protected Origen, and summoned him to explain to her his flexible theology.
Julia Maesa having died soon after Alexander’s accession, Mamaea, with his tutor Ulpian, determined the policies, and conceived the reforms, of Alexander’s administration. She ruled with wisdom and restraint, caring more for the success of the dynasty than for the pageantry of power; she yielded to the great lawyer and the young emperor the credit for the achievements of his reign. She and Ulpian chose sixteen outstanding senators to serve as an imperial council, without whose approval no major measures were carried out. She could control everything except her love for her son. When he married and showed an affectionate partiality for his wife, Mamaea had her banished, and Alexander, forced to choose, surrendered to his mother. As he grew older he took a more active part in administration. “He would give his attention to public business even before dawn,” says his ancient biographer, “and would continue at it to an advanced hour, never growing weary or irritated, but always cheerful and serene.”16
His basic policy was to weaken the disruptive dominance of the army by restoring the prestige of the Senate and the aristocracy; rule by birth seemed to him the only actual alternative to rule by money, myth, or the sword. With the co-operation of the Senate he effected a hundred economies in administration, dismissed the supernumeraries in his palace, in governmental offices, and in provincial rule. He sold most of the imperial jewelry, and deposited the proceeds in the treasury. Perhaps with less Senatorial approval he legalized, encouraged, and reorganized the workers’ and tradesmen’s associations, and “allowed them to have advocates chosen from their own numbers.”17 Assuming a severe censorship over public morals, he ordered the arrest of prostitutes and the deportation of homosexuals. While reducing taxes, he restored the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla, built a public library, a fourteen-mile aqueduct, and new municipal baths, and financed the construction of baths, aqueducts, bridges, and roads throughout the Empire. To force down interest rates that were harassing debtors, he lent public money at four per cent, and advanced funds to the poor, without any interest charge, for the purchase of agricultural land. All the Empire prospered and applauded; the godly Aurelius, it seemed, had returned to earth and to power.
But as the Persians and the Germans had taken advantage of the philosopher king, so now they took advantage of the emperor saint. In 230 Ardashir, founder of the Sassanid dynasty in Persia, invaded Mesopotamia and threatened Syria. Alexander sent him a philosophical epistle reproving his violence, and arguing that “everyone ought to rest content with his own domain.”18 Ardashir judged him a weakling, and replied by demanding all Syria and Asia Minor. Accompanied by his mother, the young emperor took the field, and waged with more courage than subtlety an indecisive campaign. History is obscure as to his victories and defeats; in any case Ardashir withdrew from Mesopotamia, perhaps to meet attacks on his eastern front; and the Roman coins of 233 pictured Alexander crowned by Victory and having the Tigris and Euphrates at his feet.
Meanwhile the Alemanni and the Marcomanni, noting that the Rhine and Danube garrisons had been depleted to reinforce the legions in Syria, broke through the Roman limes and ravaged eastern Gaul. After celebrating his Persian triumph, Alexander, again with Mamaea at his side, rejoined his army, and led it to Mainz. On his mother’s advice he negotiated with the enemy, offering them an annual sum to keep the peace. His troops condemned his weakness, and mutinied; they had never forgiven his economy, his discipline, and his subordination of them to the Senate and a woman’s rule. They acclaimed as emperor C. Julius Maximinus, commander of the Pannonian legions. The soldiers of Maximinus forced their way into Alexander’s tent, and slew him, his mother, and his friends (235).