CHAPTER I

THE ARMY AND THE IMPERIAL HOUSE

I.

THE ACCESSION OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS

 

COMMODUS had left no heir behind him, and with his death the line of the Antonines came to an unworthy end. As the conspirators had anticipated, the Senate promptly annulled his acts and condemned his memory. Nor did the Praetorian Prefect Laetus misjudge senatorial feeling when he induced the Guard to proclaim as successor the City Prefect, P. Helvius Pertinax. An Italian of humble origin, Pertinax had won his way into the Senate after a varied military experience as an eques. Under Marcus Aurelius he had commanded a legion on the Upper Danube, and for distinguished service there had been rewarded with the consulship. After holding consular commands under Marcus in Moesia and in Syria, he had been sent by Commodus to govern Britain, where he had sternly repressed a mutiny of the troops, and thereafter he had been appointed proconsul of Africa, where an outbreak of disorder called for a strong hand. It was not a career that gave the Praetorians any reason to expect a continuance of the licence which they had recently enjoyed, but they had no candidate of their own, and the promise of a donative of twelve thousand sesterces apiece overcame their hesitation. By the Senate Pertinax was at once accepted as a man who seemed likely to resume the policy of the earlier Antonines, while his military achievement and reputation commanded the respect of the frontier armies.

At sixty-six years of age he could not be expected to have a long reign, but there was the hope that if he took advantage of the general goodwill to secure a settlement of the succession, he might introduce a period of stable government, as another sexagenarian emperor had done, after the assassination of Domitian, by the adoption of Trajan. Unlike Nerva, Pertinax had a son of his own, and the Senate itself proposed that he should be given the title of Caesar. But the lad was young, and Pertinax did not feel that his own position was yet assured, and he rejected the proposal as premature. On 6 March 193 the Prefect of Egypt, L. Mantennius Sabinus, issued orders for a general festival of fifteen days to mark the accession of the new imperial family. The belated celebration can hardly have run its course, at least in the remoter parts of Egypt, before the Emperor was dead, with the succession still unsecured, and, judged by what followed, he must be likened not to Nerva but to Galba.

Between the reigns of Pertinax and Galba there is a resemblance also in the causes which cut them short. The follies of Commodus had been as serious a drain upon the imperial treasury as the extravagance of Nero, and that at a time when the sources of revenue were tending to shrink. An attempt made by Pertinax to stimulate commerce by lightening the customs duties and to encourage the cultivation of waste land by granting titles of ownership, with exemption from taxation for ten years, appears to indicate a positive and comprehensive policy to increase, or restore, the resources of the Empire. But a scheme of this kind required time, whereas the personal and public economies by which he endeavoured to relieve the immediate situation made themselves unpleasantly felt at once by those who were directly affected by them, notably the personnel of the palace. To the Praetorians he seems to have paid the promised donative, but he put a stop to practices of petty plundering in which they had been indulged by Commodus, and he attempted to enforce a strict discipline. Laetus, still Praetorian Prefect, was chagrined to discover that he had chosen a master instead of a tool, and he so worked upon the misgiving of his men that, on 28 March, a party of them marched to the palace, and presently descended into the City streets displaying the head of the Emperor whom they had proclaimed eighty-seven days before. In spite of the brevity of his reign, Pertinax had made a lasting impression as a model of a constitutional ruler, and in the confused movements that followed his death his name became the symbol of a policy.

The Prefect of the City, T. Flavius Sulpicianus, who had enjoyed a brief experience of palace life as the father-in-law of Pertinax, was intriguing with the Praetorians for the succession when a rival presented himself in another elderly senator, M. Didius Julianus, a man of more dubious reputation but greater wealth. This was an opportunity which the Praetorians knew how to exploit. They put the Empire up to auction between the two until they had extorted from Julianus the promise of a donative of 25,000 sesterces apiece. It was a simple matter to intimidate the Senate into ratifying the bargain. The City populace resented being so disposed of, but they were a helpless mob, and their only hope was that the Praetorians’ behaviour would remind the frontier armies that ‘an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome.’

Their expectations were centred chiefly in the governor of Syria, C. Pescennius Niger. They were not disappointed; he was proclaimed emperor by his legions as soon as the situation at Rome was known in the East. But by this time the governor of Upper Pannonia, P. Septimius Severus, had already got himself proclaimed by the troops at his headquarters at Carnuntum (13 April). The conflict of ambitions was reinforced by the mutual jealousy of the two armies, confirmed by a long period of local recruiting. A repetition of the disaster of a.d. 69 seemed inevitable.

Since that date, however, the distribution and composition of the frontier legions had changed. With nine legions, including the legion in Egypt, the army of the East remained much the same, but the Rhine army had been reduced from seven legions to four, and its unity had been affected by the closer association of the legions on the Upper Rhine with the troops on the Upper Danube since the construction of the limes between the two rivers. On the other hand, the Danube army had been increased from seven to twelve legions by the frontier policy of successive emperors, and whereas in the first century it had been drawn partly from Italy and the Latin West, partly from the Greek-speaking population of Macedonia and the Asiatic provinces, it was now recruited almost entirely from the Danube area. The legions from end to end of the river were united in the support of Severus, and their strength and position put the initiative in their hands.

At the time of his proclamation Severus took the name of Pertinax as a cognomen, and represented himself as his avenger. This was intended to conciliate the Senate, as a preliminary to the attainment of his first objective, which was to take advantage of his proximity to the capital to secure constitutional investiture and to gain control of the central machinery of administration and finance. By the time news of his departure from Carnuntum reached Rome he had already advanced by forced marches into North Italy. Julianus thereupon induced the Senate to proclaim him a public enemy, and attempted to put the City into a state of defence. But he had not the power to command obedience or enforce discipline, and in desperation he prepared to barricade himself within the palace. He put Laetus to death, and with him Marcia, on suspicion of favouring the enemy, and then himself opened negotiations with Severus. But by now Severus was master of the situation in Italy. At Rome itself the Praetorians made it known to the Senate that they were in correspondence with the man whom it had just declared a public enemy, and the Senate, which had hitherto been content to watch the despairing efforts of Julianus with a malicious aloofness, now judged it opportune to condemn him to death and to recognize Severus as emperor. On 1 June Julianus was killed in the palace by a soldier. Soon after Severus entered Rome with his entire force in full armour. It was a ceremonial announcement of the power and spirit that were now to direct the government.

As part of the manifesto, however, Severus himself, in conformity with the ancient rule, had dismounted at the City gates and changed into civil dress. This was a display of deference to the Senate and People of Rome. Besides granting a donative to his troops, he sought to win the favour of the populace by a liberal distribution, and at a meeting of the Senate he took an oath, as Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian had done, not to put any of its members to death without bringing the case before it, and even had this procedure formulated as a rule in a senatus consultum. His policy, he promised, would be that of Marcus Aurelius: informers would not be encouraged; and he would be a Pertinax not only in name but in goodwill to their order. It was a kind of ritual sanction to this declaration that he then celebrated in full form the apotheosis of Pertinax, which the Senate had decreed when it condemned Julianus to death.

Some of the older senators, who had long known Severus, doubted his sincerity. At all events, his professions are an indication of the importance which he attached at this time to the civil power. He had heard the expected news that Niger had been proclaimed emperor by the Syrian legions, and Niger, he knew, was popular in the City. During the absence in the East which he now anticipated, he had no desire to see turned against him the organs of the central government which he had marched into Italy to secure. But he did not rely entirely upon conciliatory methods. He put to death, or proscribed, those who had been active partisans of Julianus, and in acting through the Senate in this matter he was not only fulfilling his promise but was bringing home to it a warning of what his enemies might expect.

He knew, however, that his position in the capital depended less on the Senate than on the troops stationed there. Before entering the City he had summoned the Praetorians to meet him unarmed, had surrounded them with his legionaries and dismissed them with ignominy. That he was not simply punishing the murderers of Pertinax was presently shown by the manner in which he reconstituted the Guard, now increased to 15,000 men. Hitherto admission to its ranks had been a privilege confined to natives of Italy and of the romanized communities of Spain, Noricum and Macedonia; henceforth it was to be recruited from the frontier legionaries, and in reforming it Severus selected the pick of the men from his own Danube legions.

Outside Italy there were two formidable groups of legions in the West. These were the four legions stationed on the Rhine and the three legions which formed the garrison of Britain. By this time the Rhine legions had declared for Severus, but in Britain the situation was still doubtful. The governor there, D. Clodius Albinus, was suspected of entertaining ambitious hopes with which his army was believed to sympathize; and it was known that there were many in the Senate who would welcome his intervention. An agreement was reached by which Albinus accepted from Severus the position of Caesar, which was formally conferred upon him by the Senate and commemorated on the coinage. Severus must have had reason to suppose that this arrangement which carried with it a presumptive right of succession, satisfied Albinus, for his own immediate design was to have his hands free to meet the challenge in the East, where Niger had now had two months to make his preparations.

But before leaving Rome there was another precaution to take. So long as Niger had the support of the Egyptian army, he was in a position, like Vespasian in 69, to restrict the corn-supply, and if he were able to extend his control to the corn-growing districts of Africa, the capital would be in a serious position. To prevent this, Severus seems to have ordered detachments of the legion III Augusta to proceed from the Numidian frontier to the more eastern parts of the African province, where their presence would not only protect the corn-supply but also, by threatening Egypt, prevent the legion there, II Traiana, from sending any effective help to Niger.

 

II.

 THE CIVIL WARS AND PARTHIAN EXPEDITIONS

 

Early in July 193 Severus left Rome by the Flaminian Way to follow the road that led to the Danube at Singidunum and Viminacium and thence through Upper Moesia to Thrace. He selected this northern route in order to keep in touch with the forces disposed along the Danube, and to call out the full strength they could mobilize for the Eastern campaign. But it was not the shortest route to the East, and there was the danger that Niger might block his passage to Asia by occupying Byzantium, and even turn his whole position by moving upon Rome along the Via Egnatia, the direct route from Byzantium to the Adriatic. To meet this danger orders were sent to the legions in Moesia to march direct into Thrace, while part of the Illyrian army which had been led into Italy may have been shipped across the Adriatic to Dyrrhachium to advance eastwards by the Via Egnatia. As it happened, the governor of Asia, Asellius Aemilianus, had already occupied Byzantium fir Niger, and was advancing upon Perinthus,   when the first of the Severan troops arrived. These were defeated with heavy loss, but Aemilianus was not in positions to maintain control of the straits, and he withdrew to Byzantium. To mask the stronghold a siege corps was detached under the command of one of the legionary legates of Lower Moesia, Marius Maximus, while a force was transported across the Propontis to Cyzicus. There Aemilianus, who had recrossed the Bosporus to intercept it, was defeated and killed.

Having thus gained a footing in Asia, the Severan army advanced eastwards into Bithynia, whence the main roads crossed the peninsula to Cilicia and Syria. The news of the battle of Cyzicus had made the province waver in its support of the Eastern claimant, and Nicomedia declared for Severus, while its neighbour and rival, Nicaea, became the headquarters of Niger. A force sent forward from there to hold the pass that ran along the southern shore of the Ascanian lake between Cius and Nicaea was decisively defeated. It was now the beginning of 194.

The victorious army was commanded by Severus’ general, Tiberius Claudius Candidus, and it would appear that the force led by Severus himself through Pannonia and Upper Moesia had not reached Bithynia in time to take part in the battle. Its arrival not long after is the probable explanation of a sudden move on the part of Niger; he withdrew to Syria to raise reinforcements, making no further attempt to hold the route across Asia Minor beyond leaving a force to defend some fortifications which he had already erected on Mt Taurus in the narrow pass of the Cilician Gates. The Severan army, now at full strength, must have arrived there by March (194). Swollen by the spring rains and the melting of the snow, the stream which flowed through the defile swept away the fortifications. The position was at once abandoned by its defenders, and the Severan army descended into the plain of Issus.

In Syria, Niger had found that his retirement was regarded as an acknowledgment of defeat, and he was distracted there by the dissensions and jealousies that discover themselves in a failing cause Laodicea, envious of the favour enjoyed by its rival Antioch as the headquarters of Niger, declared for Severus, and by the same venture Tyre sought to win a future advantage over its rival Berytus. Both cities were heavily punished for anticipating the course of events. But by now misgiving had spread to the troops, or their commanders, in more than one of the Eastern provinces, and Niger could no longer count on the legion in Egypt or on the legion in Arabia. For reinforcements he had to look to Syrian volunteers, and especially to the townsmen of Antioch, and it was with a motley host that he set out for the north on hearing that Severus had passed the Cilician Gates. His army did itself no discredit on the plain of Issus, where the final battle of the war was fought, but in the end victory rested with the Illyrian legionaries. It would now be about April of 194. Niger rode back to Antioch, but fled from the city when it surrendered. According to Dio, he was making for the Euphrates in the hope of finding refuge with the Parthians when he was overtaken and killed. By the order of Severus his head was sent to Byzantium to be displayed to the townsmen as an invitation to cease fighting for a cause already lost, but they continued to man their walls and for two years more postponed their punishment.

Meanwhile Severus was in Syria distributing rewards and penalties. Laodicea becomes a ‘colonia’ with the Ius Italicum. The elevation of Laodicea was the humiliation of Antioch, which was indeed ‘attributed’ to the rival city, which now displaced it, though not for long, as the official capital of Syria. The Palestinian city of Neapolis forfeited its political existence for its support of Niger. Cities which had supplied him with funds had to pay a fine of four times the amount, while those which had suffered by resisting him, such as Laodicea and Tyre, were handsomely indemnified. Senators who had favoured his cause had their property confiscated and were banished, while his adherents in general were treated with merciless severity, until it was found that refugees from his army were being driven across the Tigris to take service with the barbarians, whereupon a general amnesty was declared. Many of these refugees were skilled mechanics who taught their new masters the use of armour and the manufacture of arms. By such instruction, Herodian notes, the Romans made the barbarians more formidable enemies. It is a remark that admits of a wide and various application to the history of the Roman frontiers, but the incident has more than a military significance: it shows that the imperial frontiers, long before they failed as military lines, were ceasing to be spiritual boundaries. There had been correspondence between Niger and the Parthian king, one of whose vassals, Barsemius of Hatra, had sent Niger a force of archers. It was not only the military integrity of the Empire that Severus was vindicating when, after his triumph over his rival, he led an army across the Euphrates.

There were indeed good military reasons for the expedition. The Parthian king, Vologases IV, had held out promises to Niger, but had not sent him any actual help. Apparently he saw another way of profiting by the civil war, and we may recognize his influence at work in an attempt made by certain of his vassals to shake off the control which the Roman government had exercised in Mesopotamia ever since the expedition of Lucius Verus. Roman garrisons in Mesopotamia had been taken prisoner, the important stronghold of Nisibis had been besieged, and Osrhoene had renounced Roman suzerainty. Severus decided to take advantage of the occasion, and of the internal weakness of Parthia at this time, to make a settlement of the Eastern frontier by resuming, in some measure, the annexationist policy of Trajan. He may have crossed the Euphrates about September (194). By the early part of 195 he had punished Osrhoene for its defection by reducing it to a province under the charge of a procurator. Having advanced eastwards to Nisibis, he ordered his generals to overrun the territory of the Skenite, or Mesopotamian, Arabs, and then sent them upon an expedition across the Tigris into Adiabene. Before the end of August he had assumed the titles of Arabicus and Adiabenicus.

Besides making Osrhoene a province, he had prepared for the formation of a province between Osrhoene and the Tigris by the erection of Nisibis into a colony and the establishment there of a resident procurator; and the fact that the titles Arabicus and Adiabenicus, when first conferred, were each combined with the title of Parthicus (Parthicus Arabicus, Parthicus Adiabenicus) indicates that the operations of 195 were regarded as steps towards a settlement of the whole problem of Parthia and the Eastern frontier. But before the end of the year ‘Parthicus’ disappears from each of the titles, as if the Emperor thought it politic to withdraw the implied threat to Parthia. He even gives up the idea of holding the newly added province of Osrhoene, which he restores to the native ruling family of the Abgars. The reason of this sudden suspension of his plans was that all available troops were wanted for the West, from which he had received disquieting reports of Albinus.

To Severus, who had two sons and a wife as ambitious as him­self, the arrangement by which the governor of Britain became Caesar and presumptive successor can only have been a temporary device to ensure himself against a challenge in the West while he carried on his Eastern campaigns. Albinus, on the other hand, appears to have hoped that Severus would not go back on their agreement, which he himself seems to have accepted from a genuine desire to avoid an appeal to arms; and he would probably have allowed Severus to continue undisturbed to complete the settlement of the Parthian problem if he had been left to his own devices. But the very qualities which inclined him to accept the position assigned to him by Severus invited interference by the Senate. The two men were both Africans, but with a difference. Severus, though he had senatorial connections, was of a native family of no more than equestrian rank, and he himself had aroused misgiving in the Senate by his character and pretensions, whereas Albinus belonged to the senatorial nobility by descent, and he had been an obedient pupil in the school of Marcus Aurelius, whose policy of deference to the Senate he might be expected to resume. And intervention by the Senate was encouraged by the knowledge that the British legions, as they had shown in the reign of Commodus, were ready to proclaim a candidate of their own. It soon became known to Severus that leading senators were in correspondence with Albinus, and were urging him to march to Rome. Before the end of 195 Albinus himself had realized that Severus had no intention to abide by their agreement, and he committed himself to a declared hostility by taking measures to secure his position. Severus’ reply was to have him proclaimed a public enemy by the army in Mesopotamia. With this act a new civil war begins. The news had reached Rome by 15 December, when the people assembled in the Circus made an organized demonstration against the prospect that now confronted them. It cannot have been long after this that Albinus was proclaimed Augustus by his troops.

It was probably during this first period in the East that Severus took the precaution of dividing Syria with its army of five legions into two provinces, Syria Coele (north Syria, including Commagene) with two legions, and Syria Phoenice (south Syria) with one. Before he left for the West he received the news that Byzantium had fallen. This was not now a very important event in itself, but it gave him an opportunity of displaying to his army a good omen for the success of the coming campaign against Albinus and of giving to his enemies a conspicuous warning. In 193 Byzantium had opened its gates to Aemilianus, and Severus now ordered its magistrates, as well as the soldiers within its walls, to be put to death; and besides confiscating the property of its citizens, he deprived it of its ‘ free ’ status, and indeed ‘ attributed ’ it to Perinthus as he had ‘attributed’ Antioch to Laodicea. To complete its humiliation he razed the principal buildings and demolished its walls. By this, Dio complains, he ‘destroyed a Roman stronghold and base of operations against the barbarians from the Pontus and from Asia.’ But no one knew better than Severus the military value of Byzantium, and the restoration of the city was begun as soon as the demonstration of ruthlessness had served his turn.

The long siege and defence of Byzantium impressed the imagination of contemporaries. ‘For three whole years,’ says Dio, ‘it had resisted the armaments of almost the whole world.’ It would appear that the historian exaggerates in time as well as circumstance. The siege, which had begun in the autumn of 193, must have ended well before the autumn of 196 if Dio is right in saying that the news of its fall reached Severus while he was still in Mesopotamia; for he had recrossed the Euphrates on his way to the West in time to be in Thrace by 27 May, the birthday of his younger son Geta.

He celebrated the occasion ceremonially with military games, as became a formal act in a dynastic programme. This programme was carried further when he reached Viminacium, the capital of Upper Moesia. The previous year, when he was still in the East, he had announced himself to have been adopted into the family of Marcus Aurelius, so entering a line of deified emperors; and he had made good an awkward gap in the series by causing his army to proclaim the deification of his Antonine predecessor and ‘brother,’ Commodus, whose memory had been condemned by the Senate. The dynastic legitimation and religious sanction which he had thus associated with his rule were now formally communicated to his elder son, Septimius Bassianus, known as Caracalla; he was proclaimed Caesar by the army in place of Albinus under the name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

Meanwhile Albinus had crossed the Channel with the bulk of the British garrison—three legions and auxiliaries—and had gained a victory over a Lupus who was apparently legate of Lower Germany. This would bring a great accession to his strength, for the Lower Rhine and Belgic Gaul seem still to have been the chief recruiting-ground for the auxiliaries of the British army. But Gaul was not unanimous in his support, and Treves appears to have been held against him as he passed south into the valley of the Saone. He established himself at Lyons, where the garrison, the Thirteenth Urban Cohort, came over to his side, though the governor of Lugdunensis refused to recognize him and quitted the province. On the other hand, he had the support of the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, L. Novius Rufus, who had a legion, VII Gemina, at his disposal. And in the West generally, the prevailing opinion was ready enough to credit him with the political virtues set forth in the coinage which he now issued from a mint at Lyons.

But Severus knew that the real field of political action was the Senate House at Rome, where the party of Albinus was predominant and only awaited a favourable occasion to avow itself and assume control. He therefore decided, probably at Poetovio, to leave his army and to hasten south to Rome. At the same time he detached a force to hold the western passes of the Alps, so closing to Albinus the direct routes from Gaul into Italy and keeping open for himself communication between Rome and the main body of his own army, which he sent forward into Gaul through Noricum and Raetia. At Rome he obtained from the Senate a denunciation of Albinus as a public enemy. A dedication by himself to the deified Nerva as his ancestor, and the issue of a coinage which was not content to proclaim conventional virtues but advertised the gifts and games with which he now gratified the populace, were further moves in a political campaign which closed before the end of the autumn with a ceremonial departure, preceded by public vows for his safe return. Taking the available strength of the City garrison with him, he set out to rejoin his army, which by now had advanced into Gaul.

From Poetovio westwards the army seems to have followed a route through Noricum and Raetia along which Severus, with cynical calculation, had put the roads into good repair the previous year; this crossed the Noric Alps, to Salzburg, from which it ran by Augsburg to Windisch. From Windisch the direct route to Lyons ran by Avenches to the valley of the Upper Rhone, but the strategy of the Severan army seems to have been to envelop Lyons by striking northwards into the Sequani country and following the valley of the Doubs by Besançon to the Saône at Chalon, for the first indication of its presence in Gaul points to Tournus, only some fifteen miles down stream from Chalon and about sixty miles north of Lyons.

At Tournus (Tinurtium) the Life of Severus places a first vic­tory won against Albinus, and the fact that Severus assumed two imperial salutations (the ninth and tenth), apparently in close succession, before he left for the East on his second Parthian expedition, implies that an important success had preceded the concluding battle at Lyons. It is in itself improbable that his army would be allowed, without a struggle, to take command of the valley of the Saone, for this meant the almost complete envelopment of Albinus, who was already shut out from Italy by the occupation of the Alpine passes and now found himself cut off from his base in northern Gaul and Britain. He was, in fact, virtually shut up in Lyons, and it was in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, presumably on the line of the road from Tournus, on the right bank of the Saône, that the final battle took place on 19 February 197. It ended in the decisive defeat of Albinus, who put an end to his life when he found that he was surrounded and escape cut off.

It was hardly to be expected that his army would be able to withstand the solid strength of the Danube legions. Like the Syrian legions in the army of Niger, the British garrison can only have been the nucleus of a composite force, if Dio is right in saying that in numbers the army of Albinus equalled that of Severus. Large contingents must have been raised in Gaul. Since the civil wars of 69 the localization of the several army groups had been so intensified by local recruiting that each of them now carried with it, in any political action which it might take, a large civilian population, not only from the neighbourhood where it was stationed but from the wider area whence it drew its recruits. If such regional feeling encountered resistances within its own range, these were not due to any attachment to the centre but were merely symptoms of a smaller within a larger particularism. Neither Dio nor Herodian emphasizes the wars of 193—7 as a violation of a common patriotism, and Herodian presents the combatants rather as regional or racial groups than as members of the same State. Native of a Punic town in Africa, Severus would be no less conscious than an Eastern like Herodian of the strength and danger of regional feeling, and he must also have been aware of the absence of any Roman patriotism powerful enough to react against it effectively. Both in the East and in the West he had seen individuals and communities favour the nearest claimant to the throne from no motive but self-interest, or acquiesce from mere supineness. If he treated them with much the same severity as the active combatants, they had given him reason to believe that the only means of holding the Empire together was military constraint, and even, in the immediate circumstances, a systematic terrorism.

Lyons was handed over to the soldiers, who sacked and burned it, while the cohort on garrison there, XIII Urbana, was replaced by detachments from the four legions on the Rhine. The head of Albinus was sent to Rome, as Niger’s had been sent to Byzantium, as a warning to those who persisted in their hostility. The warning would be addressed particularly to the senators, upon whom it seems to have produced an immediate effect, for an inscription proves that they sent an embassy to Severus at this time. The embassy was sent to Germany, which shows that Severus himself was in the north directing the measures being taken against those who had favoured Albinus in Britain and in Gaul. It is to this period that Herodian assigns the division of Britain into two provinces. The fact that these were so delimited as to divide the garrison between them indicates that the object aimed at was the same as in the partition of Syria—the prevention of a military challenge such as had come from Albinus and Niger. Since the Rhine legions had long been divided between two provinces, there was now no formidable army in the West under a single command.

Master of the West as well as of the East, Severus proceeded to carry on a systematic persecution of his political enemies, which was continued all over the empire for ten years with a relentlessness that provoked grave disorders. But the principal object of his resentment was the Senate. He had taken a considerable risk to secure its decree of investiture, and with that he believed he had the right to expect that opposition anywhere would be discountenanced. Yet an actual majority of its members had continued to favour Niger or Albinus, and by this hostility had negatived the effect of the official decree upon the general opinion.

Early in June he rode into Rome at the head of a large body of troops. There was no surprise when he took the occasion of the first meeting of the Senate to address to it an oration in which he announced his own policy by commending the severity of Marius, Sulla and Augustus. He put the policy into action by sentencing to death twenty-nine of the senators who had supported Albinus. The confiscated estates of these and all other political enemies, in the East as well as in the West, passed into a newly instituted exchequer, the res privata which was at the personal disposal of the Emperor. He had need of abundant funds; besides making another distribution to the populace of the capital, he gave a donative to the army and increased the pay by one-third. To the legionaries he granted also a formal recognition, hitherto denied them, of unions contracted with local women while on active service, and he extended to the under-officers (principales) as well as the centurions the privilege of wearing the gold ring, which had been the badge of the equestrian order. This did not now confer upon them equestrian rank, but it was a mark of the Emperor’s intention to make the army a recruiting-ground for the order, and therefore for the imperial civil service. The scheme of government which he had in mind was one which should be based upon the army and should rise through the equestrian hierarchy to find its point of unity and control in the emperor’s sacrosanct authority, derived from a series of deified ancestors and transmitted by dynastic descent. He compelled the Senate to decree the deification of Commodus which the army had proclaimed in 195, to confirm the title of Caesar and the Antonine name conferred upon Caracalla by the army in 196, and to add the title of imperator destinatus.

Before the end of the summer of 197 the Eastern campaign was resumed. Vologases, seeking to recover the ground lost to the east of the Euphrates and to placate the resentment of his vassals at the Roman encroachment, had overrun Mesopotamia and laid siege to Nisibis, and Severus had decided to complete the settlement of the Eastern frontier. Part of his army, no doubt the main body, would have been sent on from Gaul to follow the line of the Danube. The force which he had led to Rome was transported by sea from Brundisium. On the approach of the Roman army, Vologases raised the siege of Nisibis and withdrew. Thereupon. Severus returned to the Euphrates, down which he proceeded south-eastwards. The advance had now assumed the character of a triumphal procession; Seleuceia and Babylon were entered without challenge, while the feeble resistance which Ctesiphon offered merely gave an occasion for plunder to the troops and for a massacre of the inhabitants.

This unresisted advance into the heart of Parthia, a region which there was no intention of occupying permanently, was in reality a demonstration, which reached its visible conclusion when the Parthian capital lay in ruins. It was a demonstration intended to impress not only the Oriental princes but also the population of the Empire. By the title of Parthicus Maximus which he now assumed Severus announced to the Roman world a military triumph such as might be expected to obliterate the memory of the civil wars, and he made use of this auspicious moment, with his customary sense of the occasion, to accomplish the last act of his dynastic programme. The army proclaimed Caracalla joint Augustus with himself, and transferred the title of Caesar to his younger son Geta.

It was now early in 198. In a region where supplies for an army were hard to find, it was advisable to return by a different route from that by which he had advanced; he led his troops northwards for some distance up the Tigris, and then struck westwards into Mesopotamia. Here he encountered unexpected resistance at Hatra, which he made two unsuccessful attempts to take, the second in 199. In the course of that year, however, the campaign as a whole was successfully concluded. By impairing the prestige of the Arsacids, as it turned out, he had prepared the way for the more formidable power of the Persian Sassanids, who were soon to displace them on the throne of Parthia. But at least he now made good a claim which Dio attributes to him in 195; he created a great bulwark to the Euphrates frontier of Syria. Osrhoene, it is true, he was content to leave in the grateful hands of Abgar IX as a client kingdom, but he enclosed it within a province of Mesopotamia so delimited as to provide an outer line of defence which left the Euphrates at Circesium to follow the valley of the Chaboras to its junction with the Djaghdjagh at Thannuris, whence it ran eastwards by Singara to the Tigris, the upper course of which it then followed northwestwards. Resaina, where the routes from the Euphrates crossings at Zeugma and Nicephorium converged on the way to Nisibis, became a ‘colonia.’ Nisibis itself, a ‘colonia’ since 195, was the capital of the new province. The procurator there was presently succeeded by an equestrian prefect who was governor of the province, and equites also were given command of the two recently enrolled legions, I and III Parthicae, which formed the garrison.

Meanwhile Severus himself must have left Mesopotamia, after the second siege of Hatra, about the middle of 199, for by the end of the year he was in Egypt, after having spent some time in Syria, Palestine and, perhaps, Arabia. On this journey he pursued his policy of conciliating provincial opinion, but, now as always, policy was combined with personal considerations. Tyre, which was raised to a ‘colonia’ with the ius Italicum , and the ‘colonia’ of Heliopolis which was now given the same fiscal privilege if it had not already received it in 195, were both cities which had declared for him in the civil war. If in his treatment of Syria as a whole he was able to forget that it had supported Niger, it was because, with the removal of his rival, he became conscious of the claim it had upon him as the native land of his wife Julia Domna. The remains of imposing buildings, both sacred and secular, testify that it entered now upon a new period of prosperity. From Syria he may have gone to Arabia by Palmyra, which probably received its rank as a colonia iuris Italici in this reign. He visited Palestine, and there also he gave the cities reason to be grateful. Sebaste (Samaria) was made a ‘colonia,’ while in Judaea Eleutheropolis and Diospolis (Lydda) date the beginning of their era as cities from 199, and on the coinage which they now issue bear the Emperor’s name as an honorary title. And this was a flourishing period for the synagogues.

From Palestine Severus went by sea to Egypt. It would be in obedience to his instructions, or in deference to his known wishes, that Arrius Victor, the epistrategos of Lower Egypt, instructed the strategoi of the nomes to see that the burden of maintaining the Emperor’s suite and soldiers should not fall unfairly upon the native population. Severus recognized that the condition of the villagers at this time was bad enough without the addition of a fresh burden owing to exactions and violence on the part of imperial officials, and he issued regulations to protect them against such abuses in future. On the other hand, the institution of a council in the metropolis of each nome seems to have been intended primarily to make a larger number of the richer class liable for the performance of local and imperial liturgies. It was now also that Alexandria was given a council of the municipal type. Another episode in the history of Alexandria that is associated with the name of Severus is the departure of Clement, the head of the Christian catechetical school there, as the result of action taken against the Christians in Egypt, as elsewhere, in accordance with an imperial constitution, or constitutions (201-2), which sought to put a stop to Jewish and Christian propaganda by making converts liable to severe penalties. In 201 the Emperor sailed from Egypt to Antioch, where he gave the toga virilis to his son Caracalla, now in his fourteenth year, and designated him consul with himself for 202. When they entered upon office at the beginning of the year, they were still at Antioch, which was restored to its former dignity in commemoration of the event.

Soon after, Severus set out upon the return journey to the West, following in the reverse direction the route by which he had come east to the victory at Issus. We know from Herodian that he visited the legionary headquarters of Moesia and Pannonia. An inscription recording that he and Caracalla reconstructed the canabae of the legion VII Claudia at Viminacium suggests that he was especially interested in the remodelling of the civil settlements attached to the legionary camps which would now be necessary as the result of his grant to the legionaries of legal recognition of the unions they contracted with native women, and the permission this carried with it to live with them and their families. The increased importance of such settlements is seen in the fact that, in the reign of Severus, two of them, those at Carnuntum and Aquincum, both previously ‘municipia,’ received the status of ‘coloniae.’ His movements in this region are reflected also in an improvement of the road-system, especially in Pannonia, Noricum and Raetia. One of the stretches of road now repaired, that from Celeia to Aquileia, would be on the route by which he entered Italy. Since he had reached Sirmium by 18 March, he had time to be in Rome by 13 April, the anniversary of his proclamation at Carnuntum, and presumably the opening day of the festival of his Decennalia, which he celebrated this year (202).

 

III.

THE PERSONALITY AND POLICY OF SEVERUS

 

His entrance into the city, like all the more public acts of his reign, was well timed. His impressive achievement in the East, soon to be commemorated by the arch which still looks down upon the Forum, enhanced the celebration of his Decennalia, while the stability which nine years of success had given to his rule seemed to be projected into the future by the marriage of his son Caracalla to Plautilla, the daughter of his Praetorian Prefect, C. Fulvius Plautianus, like himself an African. But if the seven days festival of April 202 was the culminating point of the reign of Severus, it also brought the career of Plautianus to a climax which challenged the eminence of the Emperor. Plautianus had been Prefect, and almost continuously sole Prefect, since 197 (or earlier). After being honoured by Severus with the consular insignia, he was given a seat in the Senate and obtained the consulship itself in 203, with the Emperor’s brother, P. Septimius Geta, as his colleague. He now exercised a power unequalled even by that held under Tiberius by Aelius Sejanus. The fact that his enmity drove Severus’ masterful wife, Julia Domna, to take cover in the company of philosophers is a measure of the influence he had asserted over Severus himself by an overpowering force of personality. And if relations between the two men became strained, and not for the first time, yet the Emperor does not appear to have been able to treat his Prefect with decision, and an occasion which presented itself in 203 for his personal intervention in Africa may have been welcomed as offering an escape from an ascendancy which he was unable to confront.

Ever since the time of Marcus Aurelius the desert tribes had been seriously troubling the African provinces and had even carried their raids into Spain. To ensure a stricter policing of the frontier, Severus had been developing in Tripoli the system, begun by Commodus, of establishing outposts beyond the limes on oases commanding the caravan routes from the interior. On the Numidian frontier also outposts were being established, probably as a preliminary to extending effective control to the line of the Oued Djedi (Nigris), while in eastern Mauretania (Caesariensis) a new limes was formed by a line of forts along the rim of the high plateaux dominating the province on the south. In Tripoli the extension of the frontier system seems to have involved operations against the desert tribes.

The military base for Tripoli as well as Numidia was the headquarters of the legion III Augusta at Lambaesis. A number of inscriptions which indicate the presence of Severus there in 203 testify to his concern to improve the amenities of military life and to his interest in the erection or reconstruction of buildings by which camp and canabae were being adapted to the changed conditions. Already the settlement had received a municipal constitution; under Severus or Caracalla it becomes a ‘colonia,’ like the settlements at Aquincum and Carnuntum on the Danube. And it was in the reign of Severus that the military area of Numidia was separated from proconsular Africa and made an independent province, of which the legate of the Third legion was henceforth governor. Civil life also benefited by the Emperor’s personal interest in the African provinces. Many communities became cities of municipal or colonial status, while others which were already coloniae received the privilege of the Ius Italicum. Among these was the Emperor’s birthplace, Leptis Magna, which he also adorned with new buildings. And cultural life was, no doubt, stimulated by the presence of the distinguished intellectuals whom he assembled from every land.

By the end of May 204 he had returned to Rome to be present at a celebration of the Secular Games. To inaugurate the new era thus announced Caracalla and Geta were nominated consuls for 205. The first notable event of the year was the work of the elder brother. Jealous of the power of Plautianus and impatient of his control, he produced evidence, probably concocted, of a plot against the Emperor, and himself. Summoned to the palace on 22 January, Plautianus indignantly denied the accusation, and Severus was not unwilling to believe him; but Caracalla intervened, and the Prefect was killed by an attendant. His daughter Plautilla was banished to Lipari, where she was put to death on her husband’s accession six years later.

Even after the removal of Plautianus, Severus did not assume such a role in the life of the capital as to recover the attention of the historians. In the narrative of Dio the most prominent figure between the years 205 and 208 is a certain Bulla Felix, the leader of a gang of six hundred bandits who waylaid travellers on the roads of Italy for two years (206—207). Bulla himself was no ordinary brigand, but his trade at this time was all too common. During the civil wars the mobilization and dispersal of large armies had flooded the empire with deserters and refugees, while the subsequent persecution by Severus of his political enemies had driven many of its ruined victims to desperation. Tertullian’s reference to the tracking down of brigands throughout all the provinces seems to have been suggested by the circumstances of the time. In the East the imperial police-gangs so harried poor and rich alike, innocent as well as guilty, that they soon found themselves confronted by brigands of their own making. In Egypt their activity aggravated evils caused by an oppressive system of liturgies and requisitions, which was driving the inhabitants of the villages to abandon their homes and take to brigandage; nor had the measures taken by Severus when in Egypt provided an effective remedy, for successive Prefects continued to issue edicts directed against brigandage and against exactions which provoked it. In Baetica and Mauretania the procurators had been given special powers to facilitate confiscation. It is not surprising that from regions as far asunder as Africa, Asia, and the Rhineland there is evidence of disorder still more serious than brigandage.

The interior condition of the empire must have given Severus more concern at this time than the safety of the frontiers. The East had been made secure against the Parthians. On the Rhine and Danube there was no immediate prospect of trouble, and we learn of no activity on either frontier more serious than an adjustment of the eastern boundary of Dacia by which the Trajanic limes along the Aluta to the Red Tower pass was replaced by a more easterly line, reinforced by a wall, which left the Danube below the junction of the Aluta and ran to the Transylvanian Alps at Brasso. In Britain, it is true, the defensive system had collapsed after the withdrawal of the garrison by Clodius Albinus, but order was now being restored there by Alfenus Senecio, and it was not till 208 that the Emperor himself set out for the island to crown the work of his legate by a punitive campaign.

Meanwhile he spent most of his time in Campania, for the life of the capital was demoralizing for his sons and probably distasteful to himself. He busied himself, was Papinian (Aemilius Papinianus), one of the two Praetorian Prefects whom he had appointed in place of Plautianus. Other members of the council were Paul and Ulpian. The association of the Emperor with these great jurists enriched the law with numerous constitutions which made many of its rules more equitable and reinforced the humanitarian tendency which had shown itself under the Antonines and which was to influence the growth of the law throughout the whole period of the Severan dynasty; for although Papinian, on the death of Severus, was dismissed by Caracalla, who soon afterwards had the satisfaction of seeing him killed by the Guard, Paul and Ulpian survived into the reign of Severus Alexander to give continuity to the imperial legislation.

The humanitarian tendency of the jurists, as we shall see, was so directed by the Emperor as to serve a political policy. There was a political motive also when he chose to indulge his native taste for cruelty. If the execution of certain prominent senators like Quintillus and Apronianus showed him to be ready, during these last years in Italy, to give audience to dubious informers and to listen to stories of dreams and magical practices as evidence of treasonable ambition, this was not malice looking for pretexts but a credulous apprehension of opposition to his rule. And more than any of his predecessors Severus regarded his own authority as the guarantee of political unity. For, with a fateful harmony, his own nature and experience had conspired with the necessities of the time to suggest to him a structure of the State in which the keystone was the religio-dynastic power of himself and his family.

The picture of Severus which has been transmitted by the historians is made up of qualities which they have occasion to remark upon in their narrative of his wars, but they are the qualities discernible also in his civil policy. Like the conduct of his wars, this bears the impress of a single personality, which found in its associates, even in the least tractable among them, congenial influences and appropriate agents. It is noted by Dio that, until the decisive encounter at Lyons, Severus had not been present at any of the battles of the civil wars. But he was always the motive and directive force. The rapidity and range of the movements of his troops reflected his own decision of character and his power to plan with foresight and upon a large scale. When he took command himself, as at Lyons and in his foreign wars, his presence was the more felt because he expressed a dynamic personality with a conscious sense of effect. There was calculation even in his vices—his cupidity, his unscrupulousness and his vindictive cruelty.

Cruelty as well as perfidy was commonly attributed to the race from which he was sprung, and there were some who called him a Punic Sulla. The African town of Leptis Magna, where he was born in 146, was a Phoenician foundation which still put up Punic inscriptions in the Imperial period; and he himself spoke Latin with a Punic accent. His consciousness of his origin and his race is proclaimed in his coinage and is evident in his policy. To such a man the Roman tradition was alien. He was possessed of great intellectual energy and curiosity, and he had acquired, in his provincial fashion, a considerable degree of Latin culture, but he did not comprehend Roman institutions in their rooted complexity, as these were understood by men who were themselves part of the same growth. He judged the Roman world of his day by his native instincts and his personal experience, and with a realism unembarrassed by historical sympathies or scruples he developed certain tendencies which he found there into a simplified and logical scheme of government.

The privileged position of Italy as the historic nucleus of the Roman State he disregarded as an anomaly. He assimilated the troops there to the frontier garrisons by establishing a legion, II Parthica, on the west bank of the Alban lake at Albano, by recruiting the Praetorian Guard from legionaries, drawn mostly from the Danube, the East and Africa, and by reinforcing the equites singulars, a personal bodyguard of the emperor instituted by Domitian or Trajan and composed of men chosen from the auxiliary cavalry regiments. With the exception of the Urban Cohorts and the City Watch, the army in Italy no longer represented Italy in arms, but composed an external coercive force at the disposal of the emperor.

In carrying out this levelling policy, however, he did not pro­ceed merely by depressing the status of Italy but also by elevating that of the provinces. He particularly favoured Syria, the home of Julia Domna, and his own native Africa; but for the provinces generally he displayed a solicitude which awakened in the local communities a revival of activity expressed and commemorated by the erection of monumental buildings, commonly dedicated in his honour. It was not that he simply continued the Antonine practice of requiring from the officials of the central government a high standard of administration: certain of his measures were designed to place the provinces on the same level as Italy. The rule that Punic or Celtic, or indeed any native language, could be used in legal documents is known to us from a jurist of this period. To provincials Severus granted a larger measure of the relief from the burden of maintaining the imperial post which the Italian towns had enjoyed since the time of Nerva. In allowing, or confirming, to the collegia tenuiorum in the provinces permission to associate without special authorization he was extending to them a privilege which those of Italy had possessed at least since the time of Hadrian. If he revived in Italy the alimentary institutions, which had been neglected or suspended under Commodus, he gave to those in the provinces, which had hitherto been of a purely private character, an official recognition and protection by placing them under the charge of the provincial governors. But his policy showed itself especially in grants to many local communities of citizen status, which placed them politically on the same level as the Italian towns, while to some of them, notably in Syria and Africa, he gave the Ius Italicum, which assimilated their territory fiscally to the soil of Italy.

The same policy is seen at work at the centre of government. For his own major officials the Emperor looked by preference to Syria and other Eastern provinces and to Africa; it was usually natives of these and the Illyrian provinces who were now selected for the equestrian commissions, and it was mostly soldiers from the same provinces who were promoted to the higher grades of the legionary centurionate, which now qualified, like the equestrian commissions, for entrance into the imperial civil service. The composition of the Senate was similarly affected. The sons of primipili received senatorial commissions as tribune laticlave and the provincial element in the Senate was so increased, mostly by the introduction of Orientals and Africans, that the Italian members were reduced to a decided minority. But the effect of this change was social and cultural more than political, for the Senate had already been brought effectively under imperial control in the exercise of such functions as it still retained, and it was now to be eliminated as far as was possible from the scheme of government.

Even a senator so solicitous of the dignity of the order as Cassius Dio has only an historian’s reason to offer for the continuance of the senatorial magistracies—a regard for tradition and constitutional continuity. So far as administration was concerned, it had long been recognized, even by those who belonged more fully than either Dio or Severus to the central tradition, that with the growth of an imperial civil service the survival of senatorial privilege involved a complicated and clumsy dualism, and the unification of administration through the displacement of senators by equestrian officials was a process that had been going on since the time of Augustus. This process was continued by Severus systematically.

He broke with the established practice of confining legionary commands to senators by placing the three newly enrolled ‘Parthian’ legions under the command of equestrian prefects. We have seen that one of these legions, II Parthica, was stationed in Italy at Albano, and with the Praetorian Cohorts, the associated equites singulares the City Watch and the Urban Cohorts, there was now an army of over 30,000 men in Italy commanded entirely by equestrian officers of the Emperor with the exception of the Urban Cohorts, which, as the police of the capital, remained under the charge of the City Prefect, who was a senator. The two remaining ‘Parthian’ legions were stationed in Mesopotamia, and this reconstituted province, like its legions, was entrusted to an equestrian prefect instead of the usual senatorial legate, on the model of the system which Augustus had applied to Egypt and its legionary garrison as ‘one of the secrets of despotism.’ And the practice was now begun of sending a procurator as acting governor to Imperial provinces which had hitherto been governed by a senatorial legate, a far-reaching extension of the existing practice by which the senior procurator of a province, senatorial or Imperial, was occasionally appointed to act temporarily as governor when the proconsul or legate was absent or died during his term of office.

A complete elimination of senators, however, from provincial commands which had long been reserved to them was not at once possible, and elsewhere Severus contented himself with reducing the importance of such functions and the freedom of their exercise. He resumed the policy of breaking up provinces into smaller units: we have seen that Syria and Britain, the provinces from which Niger and Albinus had made their challenge, were each divided into two commands, and that the military area of Numidia was separated from proconsular Africa and erected into an independent province governed by the legate of the legion which garrisoned it (III Augusta). Andin all provinces alike the freedom of the senatorial governors was restricted by the activity of imperial procurators.

The increased activity of the imperial procurators in the provinces was especially due to an enlargement of the imperial sources of revenue and a re-organization of the financial administration. To meet the difficulties bequeathed to him by Commodus and to cover his own lavish expenditure Severus had tried the usual expedient of debasing the currency, the silver content of the denarius being reduced to about 50 per cent. That this fresh debasement, when exploited by speculation, was liable to provoke local crises is proved by a decree of the Senate of Mylasa (in Caria), which shows that there it drove the undepreciated local currency out of circulation and caused a sharp rise in prices; and Mylasa cannot have been alone in this experience. But a rise in prices does not seem to have become general, and Severus did not find it necessary to have recourse to large or frequent emissions of coinage, partly because improved material conditions increased taxable capacity, partly because of the wealth that passed into his hands from a new source. This was the confiscated property of those who had supported Niger and Albinus. For its administration a new treasury was instituted, the res privata principis. The patrimonium had long tended to become confused with the fiscus, and now it gradually ceased to have a separate administration. The new treasury enabled Severus to restore the fiscus to solvency by relieving it of certain burdens, notably the increased pay now given to the soldiers, but administratively it was sharply distinguished from the fiscus by being treated, as its name indicates, as the private property of the emperor. The procurator in charge of it took rank alongside the rationales of the fiscus, and such was its importance that its institution was a decided step, in one department, towards identifying the State with the person of the ruler. And finance was a department which impinged everywhere on other fields of administration. Drawing its revenues from estates in all parts of the empire, the res privata gave employment to an army of procurators whose functions, with those of the fiscal procurators, encroached from all sides upon the sphere of the senatorial governors.

A more direct encroachment by the imperial civil service is seen in the enlarged powers given to the Praetorian Prefects, a matter in which the ambition of Plautianus may have done much to draw out the policy of the Emperor. The control now exercised by the Praetorian Prefecture over the Prefecture of the Annona for the better provisioning of the army was a re-adjustment within the civil service itself. It was by the extended jurisdiction assigned to it that the Praetorian Prefecture encroached on the functions of the senatorial magistrates. The ordinary jury-courts (quaestiones perpetua) which had continued to meet under the praetors or other senatorial presidents since the Republican period, now ceased to be held. Since the jurisdiction of the Senate itself was in practice confined to cases remitted to it by the emperor (mostly cases concerning its own members), the higher jurisdiction passed almost entirely to the imperial tribunal. To deal with the increased jurisdiction the circuit within which the City Prefect tried cases as the emperor’s representative was limited to Rome and one hundred miles around, and the rest of Italy was subjected to the jurisdiction of the Praetorian Prefects. Hitherto they had exercised a summary jurisdiction in cases arising out of their duties of police. Now they had delegated to them, in civil as well as criminal cases, a general jurisdiction which not only covered Italy, outside the sphere of the City Prefect, but also included the hearing, vice imperatoris, of appeals from the provinces. After the death of Plautianus, Severus returned to the practice of appointing two Praetorian Prefects. The fact that one of these was the jurist Papinian indicates the new scope of the office. By this change juristic science was made more directly than before an instrument of imperial control and justice was assimilated to castrensis iurisdictio.

Papinian succeeded Plautianus as vice-president of the emperor’s council (the consilium principis). The senatus consultum was now rarely employed as an instrument of legislation, and the jurists of the council therefore sought to give to the imperial constitutions something more than the validity as interpretations of the law which had always been accorded to them by a clause of the law of investiture. Ulpian was a native of Tyre, and Papinian also was perhaps an Eastern, but in asserting that the decisions of the emperor had ‘the force of law’ (legis vigorem) they contrived to find justification for the doctrine within the limits of the Roman constitution by discovering legislative power to be inherent in his imperium. By its influence upon the imperial constitutions, which were framed in accordance with its advice, the council not only guided the growth of private law but did much to shape public policy and direct administrative action.

The emperor and his council, in fact, now resembled a general and his staff, with the equestrian civil servants as their executive officers. This simplification of government on a military model was accompanied by a militarization of the civil service itself. It was recruited not only from men of equestrian family or of the upper class in the municipal towns, as under the Flavian and Antonine emperors, but also from professional soldiers who had risen, mostly from the ranks, to one of the higher grades of the legionary centurionate. Both elements were now mainly of provincial origin, chiefly Illyrian, African or Oriental, but the administrative service, working by established rules, was not easily deromanized, and those who passed into it through the centurionate—and this was the element which tended to predominate—had been formed through long years in a traditional discipline. Raised above the humble class in which they were born by some capacity for civil administration, such men fitted into, and indeed consolidated, the hierarchic structure of Roman official life, and if, in their uncultured hands, the administration lost finesse and flexibility, the military qualities and summary methods which it now acquired were not unsuited to the conditions of the third century.

The absorption of legionary centurions of the higher grades into the equestrian service, military or civil, and their increased employment in extraordinary commands, created a new demand for these officers, which was met by freer promotion from the ranks of the legions themselves. This was not the least of the favours by which Severus improved the conditions of military life. The story is told by Dio that on his death-bed he advised his sons to enrich the soldiers and disregard all others. But this expresses the mind of Caracalla better than the larger policy of Severus, which identified the army with the more virile elements throughout the empire and aimed at a stricter regimentation of the population as a whole. It was a population too large and various to be capable of the patriotic devotion necessary to support a burdensome political system by voluntary energy, and the citizenship, so far from awakening such energy by its progressive extension, had lost its virtue by expansion and had ceased to animate in provincial life a directing element attached to the centre. It is significant that the discrimination which the Roman law had always observed as between privileged and unprivileged persons was ceasing to be a distinction between citizens and non-citizens, and was being reformulated, under the terms honestiores and humiliores, as a distinction between the upper official class and the mass of the population. Besides senators and equestrian civil servants, the honestiores included the decurions and magistrates of the cities, whose obligations, local and imperial, were now exacted with a methodical rigour, which was directed especially against the more wealthy among them. Citations in the Digest from the jurists of this period relating to the municipal dekaprotoi (decemprimi), and the more frequent mention of them in Eastern inscriptions dating from the early third century onwards, indicate that the change was now taking place by which, from being the occasional recipients of burdensome honours, they became personally responsible, as representing the council, for the regular financial obligations of their community.

In the West as well as the East municipal administration had long been an increasing burden for a restricted number because of the exemptions granted by successive emperors to certain classes; but whether exempted by imperial constitution or simply by their lowly social condition, the humiliores, with the exception of the proletariate of the great cities, who had little or nothing expected of them but goodwill, had had public duties and obligations of their own to fulfil; and it is to the Severan jurists that the Digest refers for their systematic formulation. A stricter control was exercised by government officials over the guilds of merchants and shippers who did service for the annona (mercatores frumentarii, olearia, navicularii), while the guilds which undertook to provide a fire-brigade in their city (fabri, centonarii, dendrophori) were reminded that their exemption was confined to working members, and did not apply to wealthy adlecti seeking an escape from municipal burdens. If exemption from such burdens was now extended by Severus to soldiers who had served their time and to the coloni on imperial domains, the veterans had military obligations imposed upon them, while the relief granted to the coloni was to ensure that the imperial treasury should receive its full share of the fruits of their labour. And the peasantry in general, besides providing labour, had to support requisitions in kind and, in the imperial provinces, especially in the frontier areas, had to supply the recruits for the army, and in particular for the garrisons of their own neighbourhood.

It was indeed upon a militarized peasantry that this structure of the State was based. The documents which attest the emperor’s concern to protect the rural population from the oppression of officials only serve to show the variety of obligations for which it was made liable; and if he encouraged it, by grants of political status, to form itself into communities, that was because the communal organization provided a means of exacting these obligations, just as the collegial organization was now being employed to ensure the services due to be rendered by the trading and industrial population. Many of the peasant communities, indeed, were assimilated to military garrisons; such were the Thracian foundations which, like Forum Pizi, served as stations for the cursus publicus or for the Annona, and the fortified castella in which the peasantry were being grouped in the frontier area of Numidia. And in resuming the earlier practice of founding settlements of veterans, or of settling veterans in existing cities, he gave to these new or reinforced communities, along with the colonial name, much of the military character and function which the name had originally implied, either as elements in the frontier system or as supports to the central authority, now represented by himself and his dynasty.

To soldiers on active service, on the other hand, Severus gave something of a civil capacity by permitting under-officers to form collegia, by regularizing the unions formed by the men with local women, by permitting them to live with their families in settlements attached to the camps, by stabilizing such settlements and giving to some of them colonial status, and by extending the practice of assigning land to frontier units to be given out to the men in allotments. By this assimilation to one another of the rural population and the troops, frontier defence was passing into the hands of a peasant militia, and the difference between the military and civil elements of the State was defining itself territorially as a division, and in some measure an hostility, between the rural areas near the frontiers and the urbanized regions of the interior.

Severus is censured by Herodian for destroying military disci­pline by pampering the soldiers. It is true that, in spite of his personal hold over them, he occasionally had trouble with his troops, but there is nothing to prove that the army lost in efficiency during his reign. Modern historians, judging the Severan system by the military anarchy which followed upon the end of the dynasty, have been inclined rather to blame it for confirming the localization of the frontier armies and so facilitating usurpations. But no one had better reason than Severus to balance the political danger of military particularism against the exigencies of frontier defence. That he judged it expedient in the circumstances of the time to follow a dual policy appears from a comparison of his treatment of the army in Italy with his treatment of the frontier garrisons.

The forces in Italy, as now represented by the reconstituted Guards and by the legion stationed at Albano, he had changed from an Italian army to a denationalized army, with no attachments except to his own person, and organized in counter­balancing units commanded by his equestrian officers. The increase in the number of the Guards and the addition of the legion not only reinforced the military support of the imperial authority at the centre of the Empire but raised to a formidable strength the force now available to accompany the emperor when he took the field; and the extensive repairs which Severus and Caracalla carried out on the imperial road-system improved communication between Italy and the northern frontier as well as between the frontier garrisons. But though provision was thus made for military concentrations in emergencies, Severus confirmed the existing system by which, in normal circumstances, localized provincial armies, now limited, with one exception, to two legions, were responsible for the guard of their own sector of the frontier.

In increasing the employment of the small, highly nationalized units described as numeric and in adding especially to the number of those levied in the East, Severus did not change the practice of sending them to serve on frontiers distant from their place of recruitment. For the formation of such units, largely by forced enlistment, and the maintenance of their native composition and character were a means of removing from certain unromanized areas disorderly or quarrelsome elements, or of employing at suitable points troops with special aptitudes, such as the Syrian numeri to which he entrusted the guard of the Saharan frontier of Numidia. And there was an obvious military reason why some of the regular auxiliary units also, such as the various corps of Syrian archers, should continue, in spite of their wide distribution, to draw their recruits from the area where they were originally raised. But for all other units, legionary as well as auxiliary, he developed the existing practice of recruiting for local service. The recent increase of the soldiers’ pay may have been found necessary, especially since a general rise in prices seems to have occurred in the reign of Commodus, to attract recruits in sufficient number to maintain the system of voluntary enlistment, and for the same reason it may have become more necessary than ever to offer local service as an inducement. But in associating the frontier garrisons more closely than before with the land in their neighbourhood and its native population, Severus may not have been thinking merely of the effect upon recruiting. When Severus Alexander continued the policy of transforming the frontier troops into a peasant militia, one of his reasons, according to his biographer, was that the men would fight the better for having land of their own to defend. Septimius Severus seems to have believed that such local attachments would also stabilize the frontier garrisons, and make them less ready than a purely professional army to be marched off upon distant political adventures. If the military anarchy that followed the death of Severus Alexander belied this anticipation, it must be remembered that the system by then had maintained internal peace almost unbroken for nearly forty years, and that, with the end of the dynasty, it lost its principle of unity. For, more than any of his predecessors, Severus made the imperial house, as a domus diving the centre of the religion and discipline of the army and indeed of the whole militarized structure which the State had now become.

As an African who had forced his way to the throne of the Caesars by a military pronunciamento and two civil wars, after well over a hundred years of a regular succession, Severus was conscious of the need for a legitimation more potent with public opinion than the reluctant recognition he had extorted from the Senate. It was for that reason that he had professed himself to have been adopted into the Antonine family as son of Marcus Aurelius. It was in the tradition of his race that even a fictitious genealogy, such as he and Caracalla are given in inscriptions, could make a man a true member of a kin, and if there was no precedent in Roman practice for a posthumous adoption, that would be no great difficulty when it was the emperor and pontifex maximus himself who was the subject of it. The support which the Antonine name gave to his dynasty throughout its history is a proof that, in popular opinion at all events, the adoption produced all the effect of a valid act. It made Severus the heir and continuer of a line of deified emperors. This character he assumed with the conviction of a man who regarded himself as predestined to rule. If he did not commission a work which Cassius Dio wrote on the dreams and portents which foretold to him his future greatness, he must have supplied the material for it. He had accepted an assurance that he had a royal horoscope, and he had married Julia Domna as his second wife because she was similarly favoured.

This conjunction of the stars brought together a native of a Phoenician colony and a Syrian who was the daughter of the hereditary prince-priest of the baal of Emesa; and with their accession a Semitic dynasty came to occupy the throne for over forty years. It was as if the spirit of ancient Assyria had taken possession of the palace to make the Empire subject to a bureaucracy which should be the executive of a divine authority transmitted through a dynastic succession. In such a system there would be no place for a Senate or for the principle of delegation by the State, and it was a sign that this notion of government now tended to prevail that the title dominus came to be generally applied to the emperor. For this term, when given its full Value, implied an authority which was undelegated, and which, therefore, as the contemporary Tertullian insisted, presented itself as divine.

Because of this implication, Tertullian notes, the title had been rejected by Augustus when he founded the authority of the Roman ruler on the magisterial imperium delegated by the State. In practice, however, he and his successors had permitted or contrived that it should appear as a power emanating from a domus dominorum to those of their subjects who were accustomed to such a form of government, and it was this notion that tended to become predominant with the Severan dynasty. But the original character of the imperial authority was not easily eliminated. The jurist Ulpian, whose political opinions were formed as a member of Severus’ council, in the very act of asserting the authority of the ruler to be absolute, describes it as conveyed to him by delegation from the State; and this principle implied that the Senate, as the only regular organ of delegation, should survive as an essential element of the constitution, however reduced its administrative role might be. If Severus himself made his army the mouthpiece of his dynastic scheme in the early part of his reign, he took the . precaution of having the military proclamations formally confirmed by the Senate; and even the army spoke, in theory, for the State. And it was anxiety about the general assent to the dynastic succession on which he had set his heart that made him seek to cover up the mutual animosity of Caracalla and Geta with protestations of ‘ Concordia’ on the coinage, and finally decide to remove them, with their mother, from the temptations and gossip of the capital to the discipline of the camp. He looked to Britain for a military success which he might use for political purposes, as he had used his Parthian triumph ten years before. By the prominent place given to his sons and especially to Caracalla, the coin-issues commemorating the British campaigns agree with Dio and Herodian in suggesting that in his personal intervention there the ageing emperor was thinking more of his dynastic project than of conditions in Britain, where his legate, Alfenus Senecio, seems to have had the situation well in hand before he himself crossed to the island in 208.

IV.

SEVERUS AND BRITAIN

 

The withdrawal of the British garrison by Albinus in 196, besides precipitating a civil war, had left the province at the mercy of its enemies, who did not fail to take advantage of the opportunity. The activity of Severus and his legates in Britain was therefore directed to two ends—the lessening of the danger of another challenge from a British governor, and the restoration of the defensive system.

Herodian’s statement that Britain was divided into two provinces is confirmed by Dio and a number of inscriptions, where the provinces appear as Britannia Superior and Britannia Inferior and as so delimited that the legion II Augusta, which had its headquarters at Caerleon in South Wales, and XX Valeria Victrix at Chester were in Upper Britain, while the York legion, VI Victrix, was in the Lower province. As in the later arrangement represented by the Notitia Dignitatum, York would be the base for the system of the Wall and the supporting forts behind it, except that those in south Lancashire, as far north perhaps as the Ribble, would no doubt be controlled from Chester. As Lincoln was included with York in Lower Britain, the boundary between the two provinces seems to have run north-westwards from a point south of Lincoln to a point north of Chester. This division would imply that Lower Britain would normally be a praetorian province governed from York by the legate of the Sixth legion, who would henceforth rank as a provincial legatus pro praetore. Such seems to have been the position of the Claudius Paulinus who appears in an inscription from High Rochester as legatus pro praetore in 220, whose headquarters are given elsewhere as ad legionem sextam, and who was apparently of praetorian rank.

But if the immediate sphere of the consular legate was now defined as Upper Britain, with its two legions, he would exercise some measure of control over the praetorian province, where detachments of his legions were always liable to be employed, and he would presumably take command there when circumstances required a large legionary concentration in the north. Such circumstances prevailed more or less continuously throughout the reign of Severus, and this would account for the fact that the two legates of Severus whom our evidence proves to have been active in the north, Virius Lupus and Alfenus Senecio, were both consulars and must therefore be presumed to have been legates of the upper province, if Herodian is right in attributing the division of Britain to the year 197 and if the arrangement indicated by Dio and our epigraphic evidence was the original one.

Virius Lupus appears in Dio as dealing with the tribes beyond the northern frontier and he is mentioned in two inscriptions from Yorkshire, one of which dates from 197 or the early part of 198. The situation which confronted him was a serious one. The whole military system in the north, from the Wall and its outposts to the legionary bases of York and Chester, had been laid in ruins. The Yorkshire inscriptions tell of repairs done at Ilkley and at Bowes, and it would be under Lupus that the headquarters at York were restored. But it would appear that the depleted units of his province had not yet been brought up to normal strength, for Dio tells us that he was reduced to purchasing peace from the Maeatae, a name by which the tribes of southern Scotland were collectively known at this time.

After 204, the year in which Severus returned to Rome from Africa, there is more evidence to show that active measures were being taken to deal with the situation. An inscription of 205 tells of successful operations in Brigantian territory, and Dio, writing of the year 206, alludes to victories in Britain. This activity is reflected in the coinage of 206-7, which it is especially connected with Caracalla, who seems to have been in Britain at this time. But the restoration of the defensive system appears to have been mainly the work of Alfenus Senecio, who is mentioned as consular legate in a dedication to Victory and is known from other inscriptions, one of which dates from 205-7, to have rebuilt forts over a wide area in the north.

Two of these come from the Wall forts of Birdoswald and Chesters. Housesteads, also on the Wall, has yielded fragments of an inscription which mentions the name of Severus, while on a rock near Brampton legionaries have recorded that they were quarrying stone there in 207. Together, these inscriptions indicate that Severus was responsible for the restoration of the Wall and its stations which excavation has shown to have followed upon a wholesale destruction. Dio complains of Severus that he associated with his own name buildings which he had merely repaired, and the vanity of the Emperor and his dynasty in this regard, or the desire to flatter it, may well have left some trace in the historical tradition. At all events, Aurelius Victor and Eutropius found it stated in the source which they employed that Severus was the actual builder of a wall in Britain, and from Victor it passed into the biography of the Emperor in the Historia Augusta, to recur in later allusions to Britain in ancient writers and to misdirect in modern times, from Camden onwards, the interpretation of the Roman remains between Tyne and Solway. It is known now that the building done there in his reign was a work of restoration. In this Senecio included the outpost of Risingham in Redesdale. Bewcastle also, some six miles north of Birdoswald, and High Rochester, on the southern margin of the Cheviots, were reconstructed about this time. In southern Scotland an outpost to the western end of the Wall was provided by a restoration of the fort at Birrens, in Dumfriesshire, though this may not have taken place until after Senecio’s departure.

The restoration of the defensive system was not confined to the northern area. The walls of Chester were now rebuilt, and Wales was partially re-occupied after having been virtually evacuated for more than half a century. There was much reconstruction at Caerleon. On the north-west coast the fort at Carnarvon was restored, and repairs were done to the road from Carnarvon to Chester. At Caersws, in Montgomeryshire, and perhaps at Brecon, both key positions on the lines of communication from the coast to the interior, there is some evidence of habitation in the Severan period, too meagre to indicate a regarrisoning of the forts, but enough to suggest that they may have served as stations for road patrols. There is no reason to believe that the Welsh tribes had been giving trouble, and the distribution and character of the evidence points rather to a measure of vigilance which anticipated possible raids from the Irish, who may indeed have taken a hand in the recent disorder.

But it was in the north, beyond the Maeatae, that Severus believed the ultimate source of trouble to lie, and he decided to make Caledonia his objective when he crossed to Britain in 208 to take command in person. Herodian tells us of bridge-making and other preparations for the campaign. That these involved some preliminary operations in the field can be inferred from the coinage of this year. There Caracalla still plays the leading role, but in the issues of 209 Severus himself comes into the foreground with the actual advance into the north. He is said by Dio to have approached the extremity of the island, which may well mean that he reached the Moray Firth, but though Dio and Herodian both magnify the difficulties of the campaign, they have nothing definite to say of the movements of his army. No trace of them is discernible until the estuary of the Forth is reached; there the coin-finds from Cramond tell unmistakably of activity in the early third century. It has therefore been suggested that Severus moved his troops to the Firth of Forth by sea. Confirmatory evidence comes from the mouth of the Tyne at South Shields, where it has been found that the fort which protected the harbour was developed in the reign of Severus into an important store-base. Denarii of Severus of this year figuring Neptune and Triton may refer to the transport of an army by sea. We are on surer ground when we turn to the evidence of Severan coins found in Scotland. Outside Cramond,these consist of a few hoards from Fife, Kinross and Kincardineshire. They seem to indicate an advance into the Aberdeen low­lands from the Firth of Forth. Indeed, they suggest that Severus may not have followed the route that ran north from Camelon, but may have crossed the Forth from Cramond into Fife and Kinross, and joined the Agricolan route about the Tay, or at some point between there and Camelon, by crossing the Ochils or rounding their western flank. Whichever route we suppose him to have followed to the Tay, the view that he transported his troops by sea to a base on the Forth suits the narrative of Dio, who gives Caledonia as his immediate objective, and refers operations against the Maeatae to a subsequent campaign.

When the operations of 209 were over, Severus raised Geta to the rank of Augustus, and all three Augusti assumed the title of ‘Britannicus,’ as if they regarded the Caledonian campaign as decisive. It resulted, Dio tells us, in the Britons being compelled to cede a considerable part of their territory. This suggests that from a base at Cramond troops may have been stationed along the line of the Wall from Forth to Clyde, which had been evacuated a generation before. If none of the excavated forts on the Wall has yielded coins or other objects of Severan date, this negative evidence is hardly conclusive against an occupation which cannot have lasted much more than a year; and it is possible that the second, and more perfunctory, of the two restorations which have been noted in these forts, and which has been explained as a mere episode in their abandonment early in the reign of Commodus, may in reality represent a brief re-occupation in 209—211. If there was some re-occupation of the Forth-Clyde line at this time, the territory which would thus be cut off would be that of the Maeatae, and we know from Dio that for some reason they suddenly awoke from the quiescence into which they had been bribed by Virius Lupus. In 210 Severus sent a force into their territory upon a campaign of merciless repression. Caracalla must have been in command to judge by his prominence in the coinage which commemorated it.

In 211 the Emperor apparently looked forward to an immediate return to Rome. But the trouble in Britain was not yet over. The Caledonians had decided to come to the aid of their kinsmen, and the Emperor made up his mind that he must once more take the field himself. While he was busy with preparations, he died at York on 4 February. Caracalla at once made peace with the enemy. If Severus’ design was to conquer the whole island, as Dio says, it had come to nothing. It did not even result in an occupation of any part of enemy country, for Dio tells us that any troops that had been posted there were withdrawn. On the other hand, the long freedom which the province was now to enjoy from barbarian inroads must be attributed in a large measure to the effect produced by the northern campaigns of the last years of Severus. Some credit must be allowed also to the vigilance that was exercised under his immediate successors. And this was a time when a new development was taking place in Britain, as else­where, at the legionary fortresses. Excavation at York has indicated that the troops there were ceasing to be quartered in the barracks, and similar evidence has come from Caerleon. The disuse of the barracks would mean an access of importance for the adjoining settlements, and it will have been in the Severan period that the settlement at York received the status of a ‘colonia.’

V.

CARACALLA

 

In the coinage of 211 Caracalla and Geta are still connected with military events in Britain, and it would seem to have been late in the year before they left the island for Rome, where they deposited the ashes of their father in the mausoleum of the Antonines and celebrated his deification. Caracalla’s passion to be sole ruler, which had made him await his father’s death with impatience, now made intolerable to him the nominal equality which Geta enjoyed by his recent elevation to the rank of Augustus; nor did the brothers require the added motive of jealousy for hating one another. Such was their mutual dread and animosity that they themselves proposed, according to Herodian, that they should be separated by the waters of the Propontis, with Europe and North Africa to be ruled by Caracalla, the Asiatic provinces and Egypt by Geta. But this was not to the mind of their mother, who felt their proposed partition of the Empire like a threat of personal mutilation to herself, and who seems to have believed that she could maintain between them some semblance of the ‘Concordia’ which the coinage still proclaimed. Her sons were under no illusion as to each other’s intentions, and they took their precautions accordingly. At the end of February 212, however, Geta was persuaded to meet his brother in their mother’s apartment in the palace, where Caracalla, by pretending a desire for reconciliation, had induced Julia to call them together. Centurions whom he had instructed entered the apartment, and when Geta ran to his mother for protection he was murdered in her arms. If any of the frontier armies were inclined to show hostility to Caracalla, they soon thought better of it. In Italy the Alban legion threatened trouble for a moment, but it was quieted by a promise of increased pay. It would be influenced also by the decided attitude of the Praetorians, who were persuaded by a liberal donative to recognize Caracalla as sole emperor. The Senate could do nothing but accept Caracalla’s story of a plot formed against his life by Geta. To celebrate his escape from this alleged plot he issued an edict of amnesty in favour of all who, for whatever reason, had been condemned to exile, but Geta’s associates, and many who were merely suspected of looking upon his murder with disfavour, were treated as his accomplices and put to death. Among them was the jurist Papinian. The agents of the imperial secret service, the speculatores and frumentarii, spread everywhere a sense of insecurity by an assiduous espionage. Geta’s name was ordered to be erased from all monuments, and the surviving inscriptions of the period testify by their mutilation to the rigour with which the order was executed.

Julia accepted the situation, and endeavoured to control and direct the behaviour of her elder son. We are told that he had been tractable as a boy, but he was not now easily advised. Though he was only twenty-five years of age when his father died, he had already been Augustus for thirteen years, and this premature possession of power had nourished a despotic temper which a natural shrewdness and a sharp tongue made the more formidable. After the murder of Geta his degeneration was rapid. Along with cruelty and duplicity he had inherited, in an exaggerated form, the religiosity of his family, and the consciousness of his unnatural act afflicted him with superstitious terrors, which drove him to have recourse to dubious sophists, whose prescriptions encouraged an addiction to magical practices. Ill health contributed to the nervous apprehension in which he lived. His mind became unbalanced. His habitual mood of sullen and suspicious moroseness would sharpen into a craving for bloodshed which the slaughter of the arena could not appease and which would drive him into a homicidal fury in which revengefulness appears to have been confusedly combined with religious and moral motives. From a megalomania in which he saw himself as another Achilles or Alexander the Great he would fall into a childish preoccupation with trifles which held up the course of ordinary business.

It was fortunate that his interest in government was fitful, and that he was inclined to leave practical matters to his mother or to his council. The council continued to direct government according to the principles in which its members had been trained under Septimius Severus. Western Hispania Citerior, including the headquarters of the legion VII Gemina at Leon, appears to have been made a separate province. It was probably also before the end of Caracalla’s reign that a consular was appointed, virtually as governor, ad corrigendum statum Italiae, and if the office was still a temporary one for which occasion had been given by the prevalence of brigandage, it anticipated the regular institution of the correctura, and therefore marked an important stage in the assimilation of Italy to a province. In continuing the levelling policy of Severus the council would meet with no opposition from Caracalla, who himself reproduced the paternal type as in a distorted mould. The father’s dislike of the Senate showed in the son as an open contempt. He affected the blunt speech as well as the dress and habits of a plain soldier, and to the militarist policy which he inherited he gave a more brutal form. ‘No one ought to have money but myself,’ he is reported to have said, ‘and I must have it to give to the soldiers.’ Actually, he raised the pay of the legionaries from 500 to 750 denarii, with corresponding increases for the other branches of the service.

This increase of fifty per cent, in the pay of the soldiers, along with the frequent donatives with which Caracalla indulged them, soon turned the surplus which Severus had left in the treasury into a deficit. He followed his father’s example of depreciating the coinage. The weight of the aureus was reduced, and alongside the denarius a new silver coin was put in circulation, the ‘Antoninianus,’ which appears to have been rated as a double denarius, though it weighed little more than a denarius and a half, and contained no higher a proportion of pure metal than the older coin now did. Demands upon the rich and upon the cities for aurum coronarium and other extraordinary contributions became more frequent, and he increased the regular taxation, raising from five to ten per cent, the duties on manumissions and inheritances, and suppressing in the case of the latter the exception in favour of near relatives.

Since its imposition by Augustus the duty on inheritances had been payable only by those who possessed the Roman citizenship. According to Dio, it was in order to increase the revenue from this duty that the citizenship was extended by the ‘Constitutio Antoniniana’ of 212. Dio writes as if this conferred the citizenship upon the whole of the free population then inhabiting the Empire, but a mutilated text of a Greek translation of the edict mentions a class of dediticii as being in some way excluded. The retention of the Latin term in a Greek version current in Egypt implies that it had a recognized technical meaning, defining a political category not primarily Eastern. That there was such a category or status is shown by the fact that the Lex Aelia Sentia of a.d. 4 placed certain freedmen ‘dediticiorum numero.’ A mark of this status was incapacity to rise to the citizenship, and this disability, and the desire to maintain it, would account for the express exclusion of dediticii from the benefit of the edict. We know of no class of this status at the time of the issue of the edict except the freedmen of the Lex Aelia Sentia, but the retention of the status or category meant that new classes could be assigned to it subsequently; and, in fact, we encounter at a later date a non-citizen class of dediticii other than the freedmen referred to, as well as a non-citizen class which continued to arise as the result of defective manumission

But those immediately excepted from the benefit of the edict as dediticii (whether or not they included others than the freedmen of the Lex Aelia Sentia) were apparently few, and Ulpian, like Dio, can describe the edict as applying generally to the (free) population of the Empire. Caracalla announces in the preamble that he is showing his gratitude to the gods of the State for their protection (in the alleged conspiracy of Geta) by bringing them new worshippers on a scale worthy of the divine majesty. The notion of the cives Romani as a body which perpetuated the worship of the tutelary gods of the State had been weakened by the vogue of more personal cults. In the re-assertion by Caracalla of a mutual bond between deity and the recognized members of the community we may suspect the influence of the Semitic idea, especially as the official religion, as the coinage shows, was now being given the Syrian, or Semitic, form of solar worship.

But Caracalla is presenting as a thanksgiving to the gods a measure which recommended itself on other grounds. Naturally no financial motive is mentioned, especially as money was a matter which he was secretive about; he professed, Dio tells us, to be doing an honour to the subject population of the Empire. The grant of the citizenship would indeed be little more than an honour. Though it opened the way into government service for an increased number of provincials, especially Easterns, it can have had little other practical effect. In criminal law the privileges that had once distinguished the citizen from the non-citizen were now confined to one class of citizens, the honestiores, and even they could no longer claim as a right to be referred from the courts of provincial governors to the tribunal of the emperor. Neither in criminal nor in private, law was there any abrupt movement towards a unitary system, a tolerant accommodation between the Pom an rules and non-Roman institutions in their local varieties continuing to be the practice of the provincial governors, as directed by juristic opinion embodied in Imperial instructions.

It is true that by approximating the Empire formally to the politico-philosophical ideal of a universal community of equal men the edict impressed the imagination of later ages, but even in the political sphere it merely marked the end of a process. In practice it made so small a change that it was not much noticed by contemporaries, and officially it was made so little of that it has left hardly any trace upon the coinage. No doubt the very slightness of its effect testifies to the magnitude of the development of which it marked and symbolized the completion. But the policy of enfranchisement, once the controlled instrument of a liberal statesmanship, had come by now to express merely an inevitable recognition of the increasing preponderance of the provinces over a dwindling Italy. The citizenship had long been ceasing to serve as the repository of a national (Italic) sentiment, and the levelling of its boundaries came easily under an Oriental dynasty to which Roman institutions, seen from the outside, presented themselves as facile elements for the play of grandiose conceptions.

Although the name of Caracalla is thus associated especially with a memorable act in the civil history of Rome, his personal ambition was directed rather to the achievement of military glory. He was obsessed by the memory of Alexander the Great, of whom he believed himself to be a reincarnation; he assumed the title of ‘Magnus,’ and dreamed of Eastern conquests which should show his affinity with the great Macedonian. But an immediate summons to military action came from nearer home. Between the Upper Danube and the Upper Rhine the debris of tribes which had once dwelt about the Elbe had recently formed into a confederacy, known as the Alemanni, which now began to threaten the Roman frontier. Caracalla crossed the Raetian limes in August of 213, and by the following month he had concluded a successful campaign by a victory on the Main, which he commemorated by assuming the title of ‘Germanicus Maximus.’ Besides building or restoring forts and repairing roads and bridges, he constructed (or completed) the stone wall (the ‘Teufelsmauer’) which replaced Hadrian’s palisade on the Raetian limes, and the mound and ditch (the ‘Pfahlgraben’) which supplemented the palisade along the Upper German sector.

It was probably now that he took a liking to the caracalla, the garment from which he got the name that he is known by. This was a Celtic (or German) tunic, which he lengthened and wore as a close-fitting skirted coat. He insisted with such effect upon its use among the populace of the capital that from this time onwards it plays a continuous part in the history of Roman costume. It was also in this campaign apparently that he acquired, probably at Baden Baden, his faith in the potency of Apollo Grannus, the Celtic god of healing, whom it was his practice to invoke in the ill health which afflicted him.

Ill health, so far from keeping him inactive, provoked him to restlessness, and in the spring of 214 he was again on the move. He seems to have spent some time on the Danube, and it was probably now that he carried to its completion his father’s policy of limiting the larger military commands to two legions by so re-adjusting the boundary between Upper and Lower Pannonia as to bring Brigetio, the headquarters of the legion I Adiutrix, into the lower province, which was henceforth governed by a consular legate, whose two legions balanced the reduced command of the consular legate of the upper province. There was the more reason for this precaution that the Danube was merely a stage on a march to the East. Vologases V, who had succeeded his father in 208/9, was threatened by his brother Artabanus, and the situation appeared to Caracalla to offer an opportunity for effective intervention. When he passed into Thrace and found himself near the borders of Macedonia, at once, we are told, ‘he was Alexander,’ carrying the impersonation so far as to enrol a corps of Macedonians, whom he armed like Alexander’s spearmen. The winter he spent in Nicomedia, training his Macedonians in the formation of the phalanx and carousing in a fashion that accorded better with the tradition of his hero than with the state of his own health. Julia Domna, watching the behaviour of her son from under cover of her coterie of philosophers, emerged to take charge of official business. By the time they arrived at Antioch, about May of 215, Caracalla was in a condition of nervous agitation which unfitted him for serious military operations. As it happened, Vologases, conscious of the precariousness of his own position, was careful to avoid giving a pretext for hostilities. Sending an expedition into Armenia under his freedman Theocritus, who led the troops to disaster, Caracalla himself left Antioch for Alexandria, where he directed personally a carefully contrived massacre of the inhabitants. According to Dio and Herodian, they had incurred his displeasure by certain pleasantries at his expense, especially on the forbidden subject of the death of Geta. This may have sharpened his exasperation, but the nature of the measures which he took to ensure their good behaviour while he carried on his projected campaign in Parthia indicates that there had been a serious outbreak of sedition, aggravated by the turbulence of fugitives from the villages.

The winter of 215—216 was again spent at Antioch. About May 216 Caracalla sent the kings of Osrhoene and Armenia friendly invitations to visit him, and, when they complied, kept them prisoners; and Osrhoene was then incorporated in the province of Mesopotamia. By now the situation had changed in Parthia, where Vologases had been displaced by Artabanus (V). At the moment the new ruler was in no better case than his brother had been to oppose invasion. He had no choice, however, but to refuse a demand from Caracalla for the hand of his daughter, since this was only another way, as he knew, of demanding his kingdom; for Caracalla, in his role as a second Alexander, indulged the ambition of uniting Romans and Parthians under a single diadem. In the summer of 216 he marched through Mesopotamia, crossed the Tigris, and advanced to the eastern borders of Adiabene. He never saw an enemy, Dio tells us, and the only effect of his demonstration was to provoke preparations for resistance. He retired into winter quarters at Edessa to organize an expedition for the following year, but his influence with the troops was waning, and the knowledge of this not only gave heart to the enemy but encouraged conspiracy among his officers. In the spring of 217, when he was in the neighbourhood of Carrhae visiting a sanctuary of Luna, he was assassinated (8 April) at the instigation of one of his Praetorian Prefects, M. Opellius Macrinus, who had good reason to fear for his own safety since a prophecy that he was to become emperor had reached the suspicious ears of Caracalla.

VI.

 MACRINUS AND ELAGABALUS

 

As it happened, the prophecy came true. For want of a better candidate Macrinus was proclaimed emperor by the troops engaged in the Eastern expedition, and accepted by the other armies. He was at once recognized by the Senate, which, at the moment, was too much relieved by the removal of Caracalla to look closely into the qualifications of the man who had supplanted him. In reality Macrinus had much to recommend him to the Senate. He was known as a conscientious lawyer with a regard for precedent, and if he was the first eques, and the first Mauretanian, to become emperor, these disabilities, along with his personal diffidence, seemed to promise that he would be amenable to senatorial influence. This anticipation he confirmed by his attitude to the Senate and to Italy, while at the same time he sought to win the general goodwill by annulling the changes which Caracalla had made in the duties on inheritances and manumissions. This conciliatory policy was not without its effect upon civilian opinion, but with the troops he was not so successful. It was as a lawyer that he had been appointed Praetorian Prefect, and he had no capacity or taste for military operations. He forestalled a threatened outbreak in Dacia by returning hostages who had been taken by Caracalla, and put an end to the Armenian war by granting the diadem to one of the sons (Tiridates) of the king whom Caracalla had imprisoned. In Mesopotamia, which the Parthians had invaded, he met with a reverse near Nisibis in the summer of 217, and after protracted negotiations he had to pay a considerable sum to Artabanus to obtain peace. Though the troops had no more stomach for fighting than he had himself, they resented this ill-success against an enfeebled enemy, and their dissatisfaction was aggravated by their being deprived of privileges which they had enjoyed under Caracalla and by the cutting down of the rate of pay to that fixed by Severus, a reduction which was to apply to future recruits only, but which aroused the suspicions of the men on service. With so many units concentrated in the East, in close touch with one another, disaffection had the means to spread, and it communicated itself the more easily that the troops were predisposed to it by their veneration for the Severan dynasty and for the Antonine name borne by Caracalla, to whom they now looked back with regret. Macrinus had to comply with their demand that Caracalla should be deified; he himself took the name of Severus, and in proclaiming as Caesar, and soon after as Augustus, his nine-year-old son, Diadumenianus, he conferred upon him the cognomen of Antoninus.

But there were representatives of the Severan household living who would not allow the Antonine name to be so easily wrested from them, and who saw in the feeling of the troops an opportunity to recover the imperial dignity. Julia Domna had not long survived her disappointment at the apparent ruin of the dynasty brought about by the death of Caracalla, but her sister, Julia Maesa, had two grandsons to sustain a desperate hope. By her marriage to a consular of the name of Julius Avitus (now dead) she had had two daughters, Soaemias and Mamaea, each of whom had a son. The elder of the two boys, Varius Avitus, then fourteen years of age, was the son of Soaemias and a Syrian, Varius Marcellus, who, after a distinguished equestrian career, had been made a senator. The younger, Gessius Bassianus Alexianus, ten years of age, was the son of Mamaea and a Gessius Marcianus, also a Syrian, who had held various procuratorships. Maesa had been ordered by Macrinus to retire with her daughters to her home in Syria. She could hardly have wished for a better base of operations. Here she enjoyed to the full the prestige which her family derived from its hereditary priesthood of the venerated baal of Emesa, an office now discharged by Soaemias’ son, Varius Avitus, known henceforth as Elagabalus by identification with the god and credited with a personal beauty which enabled him to look the part. With the soldiers he had additional recommendations in the wealth of his grandmother and in the rumour, which she herself spread about, that he was in reality the son of Caracalla; and not far off, at Raphaneae, was the headquarters of the legion III Gallica. The boy was taken to the camp by night through the contrivance of Comazon Eutychianus, who was apparently Prefect in charge, and on 16 May 218 at sunrise, the auspicious hour for the young priest of baal and his Syrian followers, he was proclaimed emperor under the name which his reputed (now to be his official) father had borne, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Under the command of his tutor Gannys a considerable force marched upon Antioch. Twenty-four miles to the east of the city, on 8 June 218, it defeated Macrinus, who had been deserted by most of his troops. He attempted to make his way in disguise to Italy, but was arrested at Chalcedon and soon afterwards was put to death. The same fate befell more than one legate in the East who ventured to challenge his youthful successor.

The events which led to the proclamation of Elagabalus display at work the influences which were now controlling the government of the Empire. From the confused interplay of circumstances and personal motives two forces disengage themselves as decisive—the army and the Severan household. The assertion of the dynastic principle in an Oriental form had secured for the women of the imperial family a power more unchallenged than had been allowed to a Livia or an Agrippina under the Julio-Claudian emperors. Augusta, mater patriae, mater senatus, mater castrorum, Julia Domna had accumulated more titles of dignity and devotion than any empress before her, and she had represented her son in affairs of State. Soon her sister, Julia Maesa, also Augusta, will be acting officially for her grandson, Elagabalus, and even intervening in the deliberations of the Senate. But their private action was more important than their public activity, now that the concentration of government within the palace had subjected it to the play of personal influences.

If these Syrian women knew how to enjoy and indeed (by all accounts) to abuse their opportunities, they knew also how to suffer, and the pliancy and tenacity of personal ambition were strengthened in them by their attachment to their dynasty. The dynasty which they held together not only maintained internal peace almost unbroken for nearly forty years, but gave to those years a character in which it both expressed itself and drew out the logical consequence for Roman culture of the imperial achievement and policy. The palace where they held court at Rome was a meeting-place of East and West, and the Oriental element, now entrenched within the Roman citizenship and government, invaded also the whole field of Roman culture and religion. This is a matter to be dealt with elsewhere in this volume, though there is one incident in the religious interchanges which must be given a place here because it is almost the whole story of the reign of Elagabalus.

In letters written from Antioch to Rome in his name Elagabalus was made to assume the various imperial titles without waiting for the decree of the Senate, but the implied denial of the Senate and People as the source of his authority was modified by conciliatory promises. Here we may recognize the hand of Julia Maesa, despotic by policy as by family tradition, but experienced and wary, with two astute advisers in Gannys and Comazon. By the middle of July Elagabalus had been recognized by the Senate, and with this the stage was set for his appearance at Rome.

The following month Maesa and Soaemias sailed with the young emperor to Bithynia, where they spent the winter (218—219) at Nicomedia. Here Elagabalus insisted upon celebrating in public the bizarre ritual of his cult, in which he made a resplendent but very un-Roman figure. This perturbed Maesa, who knew the capital and could judge how such performances were likely to be received there. Remonstrance only provoked a furious resentment which resulted in Gannys being killed.

A slow progress through the Danubian provinces brought the procession to the gates of Rome in the late summer or the autumn of 219. The imperial family was accompanied by a troop of expectant Syrians, not many of whom can have been disappointed. Some of them entered the Senate to reinforce the Oriental element already preponderant there, and to help to justify the Emperor’s description of its members as his mancipia togata. Comazon, Praetorian Prefect in 218, was consul in 220 with the Emperor as his colleague, and more than once was Prefect of the City. For his career there was no precedent, but about precedent the Emperor cared nothing. He bestowed equestrian and even senatorial offices upon his favourites without any regard to the qualifications required by Roman administrative rules.

The Western provinces, it is true, appear to have suffered little. There was peace upon the frontiers, which suggests that the military command was vigilant, and there are many inscriptions which tell of activity in the construction of roads and the erection of buildings, civil as well as military. In the East the provinces benefited more by the favour of an Oriental emperor than they suffered from any defects in his governors; and in any case the Eastern cities always felt the Roman method of efficiency as a constraint and responded with resiliency when the tension was relieved. A great abundance of local coinage shows that their economic activity was never more lively than in this reign.

It was within Rome itself that the Orientals looked mostly for their opportunities, and it was the central administration that suffered. Within the palace the imperial freedmen wielded a power such as they had not possessed since the first century, and offices were systematically sold. A barber, we are told, became Prefect of the Annona; the department had to be reorganized by Elagabalus’ successor. The same appears to have been true of the financial system. But though the fiscus was put in charge of an Emesene of low character, the confiscations which Dio complains of, the increased exaction of crown gold, and the general disorder into which the imperial finances fell may have been due less to the rapacity or incompetence of officials than to the foolish liberality by which the Emperor sought to win popular applause.

To Elagabalus Rome was merely a more conspicuous field for his accustomed activities. He had his priesthood formally recognized by the Senate, included it among his official titles and proclaimed it upon his coinage. The black conical stone which was the material embodiment of his god was brought from Emesa to the capital; where it was enthroned in a shrine erected on the Palatine alongside the imperial residence. Rumours of secret sacrifices there and ritual murders were willingly believed by many who regarded with a suspicious distaste the chants and ceremonies with which the god was honoured in public, notably on the occasion of a procession at midsummer, when he was conveyed to a temple in the outskirts of the city in a chariot devoutly led by the Emperor himself and accompanied by a magnificent cortege, in which senators and knights were expected to consider it an honour to take part. Presently a female companion was found for him, first in Minerva, and then, more conformably to his character and to the family tradition of his priest, in the Punic Tanit, and the nuptials were duly celebrated as a public festival. The Emperor himself divorced a Julia Paula to marry the Vestal Virgin, Aquilia Severa, excusing the sacrilege by claiming for the marriage a religious function. In effect, he appears to have thought of it as an earthly rendering of the celestial union. This notion of ritual analogy, of evoking by representation the energies of the powers that controlled nature, was nowhere more active than in the cult of the Syrian baalim and their female counterparts, and the boy’s function as priest would stimulate and indeed consecrate the sensualities and perversions which we read of in Cassius Dio and in the biography in the Historia Augusta. Rome was not now unfamiliar with the naturalistic religions of the East nor incredulous of the efficacy of their rites, but it was not prepared to see its emperor serve as their minister. The incongruity of a circumcised Augustus, who abstained from the flesh of swine to perform with a ritual purity the obscenities of a Syrian cult and who paraded in public tricked out in the effeminate finery prescribed by its ceremonial, offended a public opinion which was not exacting in morals but expected a traditional decorum from its rulers.

The offence was aggravated by Elagabalus’ claim of supremacy for the provincial cult of which he was priest, and his placing in the shrine of his god, as tokens of sovereignty, the symbols of other deities. The acceptance of the sovereignty of the god would have given a powerful religious sanction to his own rule, but to attribute to him a policy of strengthening the imperial authority by attaching it to a solar monotheism would be to magnify and indeed invert the significance of his action, which was little more than an exhibition of childish egotism and of the contentiousness of Syrian baal-worship. Nor was the tendency for the solar cults to become  unified directing itself to a true monotheism, but rather, through syncretism, towards an abstraction or a pantheism; and it was an intellectual movement. Among the mass of solar devotees the recognition of an affinity between their cults did not diminish mutual jealousy or local exclusiveness. Not even a priest who was also Roman emperor could identify the solar religion with one of its local forms. Still less could he make his baal ruler of the Roman pantheon. The established religion was too closely interconnected with official and popular life for any serious displacement or readjustment to be made without such a disturbance of rooted institutions and inveterate habits as would not be supportable without a profound change of the general conscience. So far from inducing such a change the baal of Emesa by its pretensions provoked a reaction of traditional feeling which expressed itself in the nickname of ‘the Assyrian’ contemptuously applied to the emperor who was its priest.

The women of the imperial family became aware of an ap­proaching crisis. Julia Maesa, resolved to save the dynasty if anything should happen to Elagabalus, played upon his impatience of affairs of State as distracting him from his priestly preoccupations to induce him to adopt his cousin Alexianus under the name of Marcus Aurelius Alexander and to associate him with himself in the government as Caesar. He soon became aware that the effect of the adoption was to organize against himself the favour with which his cousin was generally regarded, and twice he attempted to procure his assassination. This aroused the Praetorians to action, not perhaps without the instigation of Mamaea and the connivance of Maesa, and on March 11, 222, he and his mother were killed in the palace. His body was dragged through the streets to the Aemilian bridge, where it was thrown into the Tiber with a weight attached to it. The god was involved in the condemnation of the Emperor’s memory and the annulment of his acts. In the form of the black stone he was sent back to his home, where, however, his prestige was apparently undiminished, and perhaps enhanced, by his Roman adventure.

CHAPTER II

THE SENATE AND THE ARMY