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

The Severan emperors in order

Septimius Severus reigned from 193 to 211. His sons Caracalla and Geta succeeded him together in 211, until Caracalla had Geta killed at the end of that year; Caracalla then ruled alone until 217. Macrinus, who held the throne from 217 to 218, was not a member of the family. The dynasty returned with Elagabalus, from 218 to 222, and ended with Severus Alexander, from 222 to 235.²

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. In 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.³

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 197.⁴

An army monarchy

Severus fought the Parthians next. His army moved down the Euphrates, partly on boats built on the river, and captured and plundered the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon, while the Parthian king escaped. He did not stay to hold it. On the way back he laid siege to Hatra, a fortified city in the desert, and failed; Herodian says disease killed more of his soldiers than the enemy did. Northern Mesopotamia became a Roman province, and the Senate voted Severus victory titles, among them Parthicus.⁵

At home he rebuilt the state around the army. Soldiers' pay rose 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. His record as a general is weighed in our ranking of the greatest commanders of ancient Rome.⁶

Julia Domna and the Julias: how the Severans were related

Severus' second wife, Julia Domna, was a Syrian from Emesa, the daughter of Julius Bassianus, the hereditary high priest of the sun god Elagabal there. With Severus she had two sons, Caracalla and Geta. Her family, not his, would carry the dynasty to its end.⁷

Domna's sister, Julia Maesa, lived with her at court for the whole of her sister's years as empress. Maesa and her husband, Julius Avitus, had two daughters, Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea. Soaemias' son by Varius Marcellus, a Syrian, was the future emperor Elagabalus; Mamaea's son was the future Severus Alexander. The last two Severan emperors were therefore first cousins, grandsons of Maesa and great-nephews of Julia Domna, and neither descended from Septimius Severus.⁸

Their claim to the throne had to be built. For Elagabalus it was the story, spread by Maesa among the soldiers, that he was Caracalla's natural son; for Alexander it was his adoption by Elagabalus. Behind both boys stood the women of the family: Maesa first, then their mothers, Soaemias and Mamaea.⁹

Domna herself was more than a consort. Cassius Dio says she took up philosophy and spent her days with sophists, and she stood at the center of a circle of Greek and Roman writers and philosophers. One of her circle, Philostratus, wrote that the empress commanded him to rework the memoirs that became his Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Under Caracalla she received petitions and ran his correspondence in Greek and Latin.¹⁰

When the news of Caracalla's murder reached her at Antioch in 217, Domna refused food and died. Her remains were first laid in the Mausoleum of Augustus; Maesa later moved them, with those of Geta, to the Mausoleum of Hadrian.¹¹

The campaign in Britain, 208 to 211

In 208 Severus went to Britain with both his sons. Herodian says the governor had reported that the tribes were overrunning the province and had asked for more troops or for the emperor himself. Both Herodian and Dio add a family reason: Severus wanted to take his sons away from the life they were leading in Rome, and Dio says he also thought the legions were growing soft from idleness.¹²

The emperor was old and ill, and he was carried in a covered litter for much of the march. His army pushed north beyond the frontier walls, cutting roads through forest and building causeways across marshes, but the enemy would not stand and fight: Dio says Severus fought no battle at all, and Herodian describes tribesmen who escaped into the woods and swamps.¹³

Severus died at Eboracum, today York, on 4 February 211. Caracalla made terms with the enemy and withdrew from their territory, and the brothers carried their father's ashes back to Rome.¹⁴

Caracalla

The brothers Caracalla and Geta inherited the empire together and hated each other. Both Dio and Herodian describe how Caracalla had Geta struck down in the arms of their mother, who was covered with his blood. Geta was murdered in December 211 (the Loeb editors of Dio date it to 212), and his followers were massacred.¹⁵

In 212 (or 213) Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire, the measure known as the Constitutio Antoniniana. Until then many provincials had been free non-citizens, at a disadvantage in law and in taxation, and earlier grants of citizenship had gone to particular groups, such as discharged auxiliary soldiers. Part of the text of the edict survives on a single papyrus, P. Giss. 40, now in the University Library of Giessen in Germany; since 2017 it has been part of UNESCO's Memory of the World.¹⁶

Why Caracalla did it is still debated. Cassius Dio, a senator who loathed him, wrote that the honor was a pretext and that the real aim was revenue, since foreigners did not pay most of the taxes that fell on citizens, among them the tax on inheritances. Modern readers do not dismiss the fiscal motive but see more in the edict. Falk Wackerow of the University of Hamburg reads it as a rational answer to the empire's needs and points to the army, since citizenship was required for service in the legions; the Giessen scholars quoted by the German UNESCO Commission stress that it gave one civic status to people across Europe, Africa and Asia while leaving local legal traditions in place.¹⁷

Caracalla spent his last years at war, admiring Alexander the Great and campaigning against the Parthians. On 8 April 217, riding from Edessa toward Carrhae, he stopped by the road to relieve himself and was stabbed by Julius Martialis, a soldier of his escort with a personal grudge. Dio and Herodian both put the praetorian prefect, Macrinus, behind the plot, as do the modern encyclopedias.¹⁸

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 (Dio calls it a defeat) 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.¹⁹

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 and Dio place his capture at Chalcedon and his death in Cappadocia.²⁰

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 222.²¹

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 its own commander, the jurist Ulpian, chief minister of state, in 223 or 224. In the East a new enemy appeared: Ardashir I, founder of the Persian Sasanian state, overthrew the last Parthian king, invaded Mesopotamia in 230, and Alexander's counteroffensive of 232 ended in a costly stalemate.²²

Called to the Rhine to face the Alemanni, Alexander tried negotiation and money before fighting. The soldiers would not accept it. Herodian says they despised him as a mother's boy who was stingy with gifts. In 235 they killed him and Julia Mamaea at Mainz and proclaimed Maximinus Thrax emperor.²³

Why the dynasty fell

The Severans rose and fell by the same means. Severus took the throne with the Danube legions and kept it by paying the soldiers more. Macrinus lost the army when he cut its pay, and Maesa won it back for her family with money and a story about a dead emperor's son. Each claim to rule lasted only as long as the soldiers accepted it, and the last two emperors were boys whose authority came from their mothers and grandmother. When Alexander looked weak against Persia and on the Rhine, nothing but the army stood behind him, and the army chose someone else.

What came next: the crisis of the third century

Maximinus was a career soldier from Thrace whom Alexander had put in charge of training the army's recruits on the Rhine. Herodian calls him the first man to rise from a humble station to the highest office, and he seems to have spent his reign with the armies on the frontiers.²⁴

His fall in 238 showed how far the system had broken. Early that year two Gordians, father and son, rose against him and were defeated, and the Senate chose two of its own members, Pupienus and Balbinus, as emperors. Maximinus, besieging Aquileia in northern Italy, was killed by his own soldiers. Soon afterward the Praetorian Guard murdered Pupienus and Balbinus and proclaimed the third Gordian, a boy of about thirteen. Six men had been recognized as emperor in a single year.²⁵

Britannica dates to the fall of Severus Alexander the civil strife that engulfed the empire for the next fifty years. The Severan pattern, emperors made by the army and unmade by it, had become the rule. The wider story of Rome's soldiers and wars is told in our military history of ancient Rome, and you can test what you know with the Roman battles quiz.²⁶