099 - What Evil Have I Done

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Hello and welcome to the History of Roam, episode 99, What Evil Have I Done? So the Praetorians had pulled off the perfect crime. They had murdered an emperor and replaced him with a man whose only claim to the throne was that he had promised to pay them all a boatload of cash. Yep, they were set for life and nothing could touch them. They were, after all, the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard. While Commodus reigned, the various cabals of corrupt imperial officials who came and went over the years had wielded near absolute power over the people and the Praetorians had been the iron hand keeping them all in line. So perhaps the last twelve years had made the Guard a bit myopic. What they were forgetting was that Commodus had paid enough attention to the provincial legions that they never really considered rebellion. Plus, he was the son of Marcus Aurelius, who was the son of Antoninus, who was the son of Hadrian, who was the son of Trajan. The legitimacy of his rule was never really in question. Maybe his antics left something to be desired, but it's not like anyone could really mount a legal brief proving that they had more of a claim to the throne than Commodus, son of Marcus, son of Antoninus, etc., etc. But now, well…

In their hubris, the Praetorians had missed the fact that killing Pertinax and putting Julianus in power meant that all bets were now off. It did not take long for the Praetorians to realize their mistake. Word spread quickly about what had happened to Pertinax and what had happened after he was dead. The leading governors across the empire, each on their own initiative, refused to recognize Julianus as lawful emperor, and instead simply got down to the business of deciding who they wanted to replace Julianus with. Coincidentally, the answer each one of them came up with was the same—me.

In April 193, Claudius Albinus, Septimius Severus, and Pescinius Niger, each stood at the head of their armies, and, vowing to revenge the murder of Pertinax and restore dignity to the empire, they were each hailed emperor by their assembled troops. Well, technically Albinus refused the title emperor, but the effect was the same. This meant that unless they could come to some sort of agreement with one another, this trifecta of pretenders meant only one thing—a civil war. And I don't want to give anything away, but guess what? They don't really come to an agreement with one another.

As quickly as word reached the legionary camps that Julianus was emperor, word came back to Julianus that, yeah right, wanna bet? But having mortgaged a great deal of his honor in buying the imperial throne, Julianus was not prepared to just give it up at the first sign of trouble. He was an experienced commander and administrator. Now was the time to muster all that experience and fight to keep what he had paid for. He rightly concluded that Niger and Albinus were too far away to pose an immediate threat, but Septimius Severus in Pannonia? That right there was most definitely an immediate threat. The discipline of the Danube legions and the quality of the Roman roads meant that if he wanted to, Severus could march his army to the gates of Rome in a matter of weeks. Severus had to be neutralized immediately.

So for the crime of treason against the new emperor, Julianus, again with armed soldiers literally standing over the Senate's shoulders, induced the body to declare Severus a public enemy and pass a sentence of death against the rogue general. Severus meanwhile wasted no time breaking camp. He knew, just as Julianus knew, that he was the closest of the provincial generals to Rome. If he moved fast, he would be able to beat Albinus and Niger to the punch, and, invoking the old possession is nine-tenths of the law thing, dare them to challenge him, not Julianus, for control of the capital. Plus, once Julianus the dishonorable usurper was ousted, and our beloved Pertinax avenged, a lot of the rhetorical wind would go out of their arguments.

Gibbon estimated that, with the prize of supreme power in sight, that Severus pushed his troops to the limit and marched them at a clip of about twenty miles a day toward Rome. As he was on the move, Severus had a Machiavellian brainstorm. His next closest rival, geographically speaking, was Albinus up in Britain. Albinus was an excellent commander, and the British legions, while lacking some of the prestige of Severus' Danube troops, was still a formidable army. There was little doubt, though, that in the end, Paschenius Niger, who would be able to muster the full resources of the rich Eastern Empire, would prove to be Severus' more formidable opponent. So Severus sent a note up to Albinus, who was also, by the way, the youngest of the three, promising that if Albinus backed Severus' emperor, Severus would name Albinus Caesar, effectively making him the heir apparent. Albinus, in part because it satisfied his personal ambition, but also in part because aligning with Severus would head off civil war, agreed to the terms, and just like that, Septimius Severus had locked up the whole Western Empire.

Whether he was aware of these further developments is unknown, but it didn't really matter. Julianus was already stricken by the justifiable fear that he had nothing at his disposal that could match up against the three Pannonian legions. Tossing in the British troops was really just piling on. So still scrambling for any means of survival, he sent a group of senators north to convince the Pannonian troops with a bundle of carrots and sticks that they ought to abandon their leader's cause. However, doubting that the delegation would have much of an effect, Julianus also sent some hand-picked men on a secret mission to just assassinate Severus and be done with him. By hook or crook, Severus had to be stopped before he reached Rome, or else Julianus was doomed. While he waited to hear how his various missions turned out, he set what men he had, that is, the Praetorians and the urban cohorts, to work fortifying the city and drilling for battle to keep their minds from dwelling on the fact that they were all probably dead men.

Severus passed into Italy without meeting any resistance and occupied Ravenna, home of the Imperial fleet, simply by showing up and announcing that he was now occupying Ravenna. With eventual victory all but assured, Severus was finally met by the various delegations sent by Julianus to talk him out of it or kill him or whatever. The assassination squad was detected long before it got close to Severus, and failed to penetrate the general's outer circle, let alone his inner one. The senators, though, were allowed to meet the general and make their case. Far from convincing Severus to abandon his cause or the troops to abandon Severus, the group heard what Severus had to say, namely, that Julianus did not stand a chance and that he was about to become emperor. They immediately switched sides.

The desperate Julianus then ordered a token force north to try to halt the incoming Pannonian legions, but they were brushed aside with hardly a fight. The only notable thing about the skirmish is that it was the first time Romans had fought Romans in 124 years. It would not, by any means, be the last. As he continued south, towns and cities threw their doors open to Severus and hailed him emperor. So not only had Julianus failed to stop Severus, but his rival was picking up steam and shrouding himself in something of an aura of inevitability. Panicked, Julianus sent a message north to his rival, declaring that he would be open to discussing some sort of power-sharing agreement. But Severus knew what the score was, and he flatly rejected the offer.

He stopped about seventy miles north of Rome in late May 193, and prepared for his final march on the city. He didn't want to take it by force, though. After all, he was about to have to leave these people, and if he wanted to stay in office longer than Julianus, he couldn't kick things off by making a bloody mess of the capital. So he opened negotiations to isolate Julianus and remove him from power peacefully. He started by informing the Praetorians that they would not be punished if they agreed to hand over the men who had killed Pertinax. After about seventeen seconds of debate, they agreed to the terms and delivered Letus and the others to Severus' men. Without a man to beat around the bush, Severus had them all killed immediately. This show of murderous resolve convinced all the men surrounding Julianus that the time to abandon the doomed foe-emperor was right about now. The Praetorians informed the Senate that they no longer supported Julianus, and on June 1, the Senate responded by declaring Severus the lawful emperor and Julianus an enemy of the state.

The exact circumstances of Julianus' fate are variously told, but the most common version is that the defrocked Julianus, now left miserably alone in the palace, was apprehended by a company of soldiers, marched into a private chamber, and beheaded. His last words were recorded as the pitiful, but not entirely unjustified, plea. What evil have I done? Whom have I killed? He was either fifty-six or fifty-eight years old, and had ruled Rome for a grand total of sixty-six days.

With Julianus deposed and both the Senate and Praetorians declaring him their sovereign, Septimius Severus became emperor of the Roman Empire. His claim to power was not totally secure, and there is still much to be done, but I don't think I am giving anything away when I say that he will successfully outmaneuver his rivals, and in the process, found a new imperial dynasty that will rule Rome more or less uninterrupted for the next forty-two years. It was, when you get right down to it, quite a feat for an obscure half-Punic, half-Roman equite from Libya.

Lucius Septimius Severus had been born in 145 in the province of Africa, right at the beginning of the Golden Age of Antoninus. His father was a native, though thoroughly Romanized, African of equestrian rank, but his mother was Italian and related to a prominent Roman family. Though his own immediate family was not particularly influential, his father apparently never held political office, he had two cousins back in Italy, Uncle Publius and Uncle Gaius, who would both serve as consuls during the reign of Antoninus. Gaius Septimius Severus, in particular, would be the bridge young Lucius used to cross over from obscurity to prominence. The details of his youth are not particularly well known, but he was educated as much as a minor provincial family could afford, and by the time he was seventeen, his expressed interest in making more of himself than his father had, led Uncle Gaius to recommend him to the new emperor, Marcus Aurelius. But despite the endorsement, giving some young provincial a special leg up wasn't on Marcus's to-do list at the time, and so Severus languished in a sort of limbo, waiting patiently to reach the minimum age to serve as quaestor, when it was hoped that Marcus would appoint him to office, and simultaneously enroll him in the senate. This obviously did not mark him for greatness, as most men destined for the purple had all these age requirements waived, and had already served as consul by now. But then again, Severus wasn't aiming to be emperor, he was simply shooting for prominence.

Things actually got a little bit worse for young Severus in the mid to late 160s, as he waited patiently for the expected assignment. The Antonine plague infected Rome, and Severus prudently, if a bit dejectedly, left the diseased capital and returned to Africa, where things were safer. He had left home with high hopes, and now he was right back where he had started, with nothing to show for it but a few wasted years. But the plague, which seemed like it might be the final nail in the coffin of whatever grand ambitions Severus secretly harbored for himself, actually turned out to be the defibrillator that brought those ambitions back to life.

In addition to being a human tragedy of enormous proportions, the plague had the practical effect of creating many a vacancy in the imperial government. Just as the Second Punic War, and specifically the disaster at Cannae, had cleared out most of the rising stars of the old patrician families, and opened the door for men of merit wherever they might be found, so too did the Antonine plague leave room for men who likely never would have been granted a second look, had the old aristocracy not been dropping like flies. I think Pompeianus benefited from these conditions, Pertinax certainly rose higher than he otherwise would have, and young Severus, nobody provincial, would soon find his application for membership in the Senate readily granted, and important business happily heaped upon his shoulders.

But even here, Severus's career progressed in fits and starts. He was assigned a proquestorship in the Spanish senatorial province of Bidica, but soon after taking up the posting his father died, forcing Severus to return home to assume the mantle of paterfamilias. While he was gone, which means we can infer this was around 172 or so, the Moors invaded Spain and threw the region into crisis. The Senate handed control of Bidica to the Emperor, and in trade, the Emperor granted the Senate authority over the island of Sardinia. So when he was ready to return to duty, Severus was redirected to the moderately hostile backwater of Sardinia, rather than the lush and wealthy coast of Spain. But Uncle Gaius still saw promise in the young man, though it should be admitted he was not quite so young any more. He was serious and dedicated, and so when Gaius Severus was assigned the proconsulship of Africa, he picked his younger cousin to serve on his staff.

In 175, the now thirty-year-old Severus married a local African girl, and though they were married eleven years, she would die in 186, no children resulted from the union. Around that same time, he was the recipient of imperial favor, and appointed to serve as one of the now entirely honorary Tribune of the Plebs back in Rome. For the decade that followed, he would find himself fully in the Emperor's good graces, and assigned a key political and military post across the empire, mostly in Spain and Gaul. When Commodus succeeded his father, Severus was close enough to the imperial family that Commodus trusted him, without being so close that Commodus felt threatened by him. Shortly after Lucilla's failed plot to kill her brother, though, Severus did temporarily fall from favor, when he botched, perhaps intentionally, the job of tracking down one of the conspirators who had fled east. But this was a minor blip on Severus's now firmly established record, and before too long he was called back into service.

In 186, Severus's first wife died, and he set himself to finding a new partner, this time one he hoped would help catapult his career to the next level. Belief in astrology and divination was as strong in the empire as it had ever been, and Severus in particular bought into the whole system completely. He was informed by some mystics that there was a woman in the east who was destined to marry a king. So Severus immediately went forth to track her down and marry her. The woman in question was a Syrian named Julia Domna, who was descended from a line of kings established by Pompey during his initial political reorganization of the east in the 60s BC. Though her family's royalty had long been stripped away, her father was a high priest in the small but important mystery religion that dedicated itself to the worship of Elagabal, god of the sun. Severus talked his way into an engagement with the woman who was destined to marry a king, and in the summer of 187 the two were wed. The marriage would prove to be a happy and fruitful one. Julia would go down as one of the more beloved empresses of all time, and apart from earning praise for her intelligence, wit, and political savvy, she was also a tireless promoter of the arts, philosophy, and poetry. Though she did her best to stem the tide, her work was largely a losing battle against a Greco-Roman culture that had stagnated, and felt content to worship past masters rather than cultivate their generation's own voices.

In 188 Severus' first son, Lucius Septimius Bassianus was born, and in 189 a second son, Publius Septimius Geta, followed. Though the elder son would be known during his own life as Lucius, we know him today by the nickname that was rarely uttered in his presence, but which I'll use to refer to him from here on out, Caracalla. The feud with his younger brother Geta, the means by which he resolved said feud, and the tyrannical regime he subsequently oversaw following his father's death, would become the stuff of legend, and Caracalla provided most, but not all of the reasons we usually call the Severan dynasty, the troubled Severan dynasty. Before we move on from Severus' growing nuclear family, though, I should mention that his new sister-in-law, Julia Misa, will soon become a major player in her own right. It was her young grandsons, whom we know as Elagabalus and Alexander Severus, who will round out the ill-fated Severan dynasty. Both fourteen at the time of their respective ascensions, Julia Misa will wield considerable influence behind the scenes, and in her heyday, was the most powerful Roman woman the empire had ever seen since the time of Agrippina.

His family growing happily and rapidly, though what it grew into was an entirely different story, Severus finally received that bright feather political men still strove to put in their caps, despite its ultimate irrelevance, by being named consul in 190. As you'll recall, though, his consulship was even more irrelevant than most, his naming coming as it did in the middle of Cleander's scandalous list of twenty-five for the year. The following year, Severus was assigned to the key governorship of Pannonia, which brings us back to where we just began, the assassination of Commodus, the murder of Pertinax, the elevation of Julianus. Severus was willing to accept Pertinax, and so kept his men in check during what had to be at least a slightly chaotic period following Commodus' demise, but Julianus? Julianus was not to be accepted, nor tolerated, nor even resigned to.

Commodus was to be removed. Severus entered Rome in June 193 as the acknowledged master of the Roman Empire, king in all but name, just as the oracles had predicted. His first act was to order the disgraced Praetorian guard to assemble unarmed on a plain outside the city walls, where they were surrounded by his own armed troops. The Praetorians were no doubt thinking that Severus' promise of no recriminations was about to be revealed as just a clever expedient, and that they were all about to pay the ultimate price for their greed and hubris, but Severus instead simply ordered them to disband. That is, the Praetorian guard was abolished. The now former members of the guard escaped with their lives, but found their livelihoods stripped away in an instant.

In place of the old Praetorians, which had been an assembly of mostly Italian, mostly well-to-do soldiers, who treated the posting as purely ceremonial and little more than an opportunity to live high on the hog at the Empire's expense, Severus instituted a new order of Praetorians. This one would be four times as large and be made up of provincial soldiers. Rather than a social club for pampered Italians, the guard was reconstructed to be the premier military unit in the Empire, and served as the ultimate reward for excellent service in the legions. Promotion of the Praetorians was, in other words, now open to any soldier who earned the right. The effects of this reconstruction were threefold.

First, it further increased the distance between the citizens of Rome and their emperor. Rather than the barrier separating the two being made up of armed Italians, who at least looked like the citizens of Rome and talked like them, and were in many cases related to them, the barrier was now made up of a motley group of uncouth provincial soldiers who shared nothing in common with the citizenry of the capital. From this point on, basically, no one had a cousin in the guard anymore, who could, you know, bend the rules a bit now and then. The second ramification of the Praetorian reorganization was that it wound up draining away talent from the provinces. When the best soldiers are promoted up to a posting in Rome, well, they're not around to help dig trenches anymore, or lead men in battle, or generally ensure that the borders remain secure. Though only one of many factors that led to the disastrous barbarian invasions of the next century, it certainly didn't help that all the best men were stationed in Rome, rather than on the Danube, when the Goths came calling. Finally, when the old guard was disbanded, they took with them the last few Italians still serving in uniform. The Roman legions were now no longer, in any sense, Roman legions. From here on out, wherever you looked, you saw foreign faces under those helmets. The Romans themselves were now content to let others do the fighting for them. This abandonment of their martial heritage is high on the list of potential reasons why the Western Empire ultimately fell.

But as of yet, these reorganizations were still just a glimmer in Severus' eye. He had been recognized by the Senate and the Praetorians, but so what? So had the late Didyus Julianus. Pescennius Niger was still in Syria, still in control of the resources of the Eastern Empire, and still showing every indication that he was planning to become emperor himself. Claudius Albinus was temporarily sated, but Severus knew that Albinus would not be so docile when the new emperor revealed his plan to double-cross his supposed heir, and instead name his sons Caracalla and Geta co-Caesars.

Next week, Severus will face down his two rivals in a three-way battle for power that will finally unlock the Pandora's box of civil war that the Romans had successfully kept shut for 125 years.