105 - The Last Princeps

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 105, The Last Princeps. The reign of Alexander Severus was the calm before the storm. The clouds had begun to gather with the death of Marcus Aurelius, and they had only grown darker and more ominous as the empire endured first commodus, then a succession of imperial assassinations, then a three-way civil war, then a humorless military dictatorship run by Septimius Severus, and then finally the cruel debauchery of his heirs. When Elagabalus was killed by the Praetorian Guard in 222, it seemed like the lightning and the thunder and the rain was about to start. But then a curious thing happened. The dark clouds just sort of hung there in suspended animation. No thunder, no lightning, no rain. Not yet, anyway. For thirteen years, the Roman Empire was granted a stay of execution. The provinces flourished, the rule of law prevailed, and the burdens of life were eased. But in the end, it was just a stay of execution, not a full pardon. And when Alexander Severus was assassinated in 235, the thunder and the lightning and the rain finally arrived.

When discussing the very worst emperors in Roman history, it is common to point out that the most striking similarity between Caligula and Nero and Commodus and Caracalla and Elagabalus was how young they all were. The old man of that group is Caligula, who was all of twenty-five when he came to power. In fact, when you go back through the roles, there are basically no examples of a Roman leader under the age of thirty being anything but a trainwreck. The exception that proves the rule was, of course, Scipio Africanus, and he appears to have used up almost all the wisdom and talent the gods had ever planned on granting the under-thirty set. In 222, though, Alexander Severus, ascending to the throne at the age of thirteen, broke this string of underage trainwrecks. Somehow, he managed to scrape together whatever leftover residue of youthful competence Scipio had not sucked up for himself, and he used it to rule the empire with something approaching wisdom for more than a decade.

Probably the biggest determining factor in Alexander not becoming a horrible trainwreck was his mother, a fact that I'm sure will make every mother out there nod their head in agreement and make every teenager out there roll their eyes in annoyance. But guys, it's true. As different as Alexander was from his cousin, so too was his mother, Julia Mamia, different from her sister. Julia Mamia loved her son and wanted him to be happy, but was not so indulgent that she just let him do whatever he wanted. She took very seriously the fact that, as emperor, Alexander had very serious responsibilities. She had seen up close the corrupting power of, well, power, and so did her best to shield her son from its worst effects. As we will see, Julia Mamia was no saint, and her own faults would become a big problem for the regime, but she was smart enough to know that her son would never last in power if he was allowed to give himself over to the pleasures of power while abdicating the responsibilities. And, of course, standing over Julia Mamia's shoulder the whole time, making sure that she did right by her son, was her mother, Julia Misa, who would be damned if she was going to let some hormonal teenager blow the deal for her a second time.

At thirteen, Alexander had neither the experience nor the education to run the government all by himself. Even with his mother and grandmother pulling the strings, there was simply not yet enough innate authority emanating from the boy to hold the regime together. So Julia Mamia went out a-calling on the most influential families in Rome and quickly organized a governing council composed of sixteen widely respected Senators. This had the effect not only of granting the new regime access to wisdom and experience they would not have been able to conjure on their own, but more importantly, it had the effect of co-opting the Senate. Bringing these sixteen Senators into the imperial fold meant cooling a potential hotbed of sedition and buying Alexander time to get on his feet. But, and this is where the Severans really played it smart, the governing council did not become just some blue-ribbon photo-op. They were given real, actual authority, and every day debated and resolved the real issues facing the empire. Alexander sat at their head, and as Emperor he had the final say in everything. But the men of the council were not only listened to, they were usually deferred to. The Senators on the council acquitted themselves admirably, and Alexander was able to sort of ride his advisor's good sense all the way to Legitimacy City.

He was lucky to have among their number two men of note who helped steer the ship of state wisely during these early years. First, the great jurist Gnaeus Domitius Aeneas Ulpianus, who we know today as Ulpian, and the historian Cassius Dio, whose 80-volume History of Rome has provided a lot of the material that your humble podcast is based upon, especially these last few episodes. I'll deal with Cassius Dio a bit more in a second, but right now I want to focus on Ulpian, who was the predominant force during Alexander's first year in office. He had been born around 170, and had risen quickly up the political ranks until he became a member of Septimius Severus' advisory board. He remained a high-ranking imperial official after Severus' death, and somehow managed to emerge from Caracalla's regime with his reputation intact. In fact, his reputation was so intact, that when Elagabalus took power, Ulpian was banished from Rome, for fear that he would prove to be a pain in the new emperor's far less virtuous backside. With Elagabalus' death, Ulpian was immediately recalled by Julia Mamia to serve on the council she was putting together to run the government for her son.

Upon his return, Ulpian was named Praetorian Prefect, and tasked most especially with untangling the knot of corruption and vice that had infected both the army and the imperial bureaucracy. Well above and beyond his distinguished political career though, Ulpian is best known as a legal scholar of the first order. Throughout his life, he wrote endless commentaries on the laws of the empire, and his work was so highly regarded, that when Justinian was compiling his definitive body of civil law, the writings of Ulpian represented a full third of Justinian's Digest, the companion book to his more formal Justinian Code, which compiled authoritative legal opinions and gave them the force of law. But despite the esteem within which he was held by emperors, he wound up despised by the Praetorian Guard, and unfortunately was about to meet his mortal end.

The first order of business for the council was to reverse the complete takeover of Rome by the sun god known as Elagabal or Sol Invictus, and reinstate traditional Roman religion. As we will see down the road, this did not mean banishing the sun cult completely, it just meant that any temples expropriated by Elagabalus were returned to their original deities. Indeed, the worship of Sol Invictus remained popular, and as previously noted during the History of Rome Christmas Special, the popularity of the Feast of the Unconquered Sun perhaps played a role in the Christian decision to celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25th. Once the council got Rome right with the gods, they then went through the roles of the bureaucracy, and reviewed every single man Elagabalus had appointed during his four years in power. Those found to be unqualified or corrupt, which is to say, practically all of them, were immediately purged and replaced by men of far greater merit. Before Alexander's first year in office was up, the Romans were back to performing the religious ceremonies they had always performed, and the government was back in the hands of men who knew what they were doing.

Following the initial obvious moves to strip away the layers of Elagabalus' legacy, the council then set about instituting more ambitious reforms. Because they were not just dealing with the tainted legacy of Elagabalus, they were also dealing with the tainted legacy of Caracalla. Caracalla, you will recall, had declared everyone in the empire a citizen so that they would all qualify for taxes that as mere subjects they had been exempted from. This had put an enormous financial burden on the provinces, and was slowly eating away at their local economies. The big problem was that money that should have stayed at home was being shipped to Rome. Local municipalities were having a hard time raising revenue, and local merchants were having a hard time finding anyone who could afford their goods and services. And it's not like the money headed to Rome was being sent back in the form of imperial reinvestment. No, it was just landing in the emperor's pocket, and God knows what he was doing with it. So soon after the governing council was formed, they initiated a mass cut of the insanely high tax rate that had been levied on the provinces. They balanced this reduction in imperial revenue by simply cutting back on all that lavish God-knows-what that Caracalla and Elagabalus had been up to. But their spending cuts, while well-intentioned, struck a nerve that was dangerous to strike, the army. The troops had been taught to expect salaries and donatives and bonuses that far exceeded what the treasury could actually afford. So when Alexander and his governing council attempted to realign military spending and fiscal reality, well, let's just say that the average soldier didn't care much about fiscal realities, he just knew that some skinflint back in Rome was holding out on him. The army had been corrupted completely by the unsustainable excesses of previous emperors, and now that someone who could tally up a debit column and a credit column and then compare the two was in charge, the army was in for a rude awakening.

But actually, what happened was more like the governing council was in for a rude awakening when they discovered what happened when they tried to reduce soldier pay. The pushback claimed its first victim in 223, just a year after Alexander took office. Despite Ulpian's merits, or perhaps because of them, the Praetorian Guard quickly came to hate him for his annoying combination of frugality and discipline, and after a year of watching their privileges whittled away, the rank and file of the Guard finally snapped. We don't know what the last straw was, but in early 223, there is no other way to put this, the Praetorians went berserk. For three days, Rome was engulfed by riots between the Praetorians, who clamored violently for the head of Ulpian, and the general population, who loved him and attempted to defend him from the much better armed Praetorian cohorts. Unfortunately though, the civilian mobs were broken up on the third day, and Ulpian was left exposed. He managed to make it to the imperial palace, but despite the entreaties of Alexander, the soldiers murdered Ulpian right there at the feet of the young emperor. Their bloodlust sated, the Guard returned to their camp and calm returned to the city.

Unfortunately for Alexander though, and much to his embarrassment, there was little he could do about the riots or the murder. If he tried to come down on the Praetorians right away, they would just kill him as they had Elagabalus, and find someone new to rule the empire. Though he was popular with the Guard, he was not popular enough, and he knew it, so he had to endure the humiliation of watching his own bodyguards disobey direct orders, beat and kill innocent civilians, and then murder his chief advisor right in front of him. He identified the leaders of the insurrection though, and in time, he promoted them away from Rome to positions in the provinces, where they were duly punished for their past crimes. Once Ulpian was disposed of though, the Guard seemed to return to their senses, and Alexander's regime appeared safe for the time being. But they were soon dealt another blow, and in 224, Julian Mesa, the guiding light of the Severan comeback, died, leaving Alexander without his most cunning advisor, and leaving his mother in sole charge of Alexander's emerging character.

In guiding her son, she took the most direct route she could think of, and physically limited the young emperor's access to those whom she did not approve of. The sycophants who always wind up circling power like flies around garbage, were kept out of the palace, and Alexander was only allowed to spend time with teachers and senators and advisors who had been pre-screened by Julia. Also well aware that idle hands are the devil's plaything, she refused to allow Alexander to simply lay about in the palace all day. Instead, she forced him, not necessarily against his will, as it is difficult to distinguish his will from his mother's at this point, to go down to the Forum and preside over the daily legal trials. As emperor, he was expected to be the supreme judicial authority in the empire, and he needed to get himself acquainted with the rigors of doing a good job at it. Naturally, he was advised by expert lawyers when making his decisions at first, but in time he learned how to be an impartial judge, and throughout his reign, he always paid careful attention to his duties as the final arbitrator of justice.

224 AD is also notable for another significant development in the history of Rome, and, for that matter, the history of the world, the collapse of the Parthian Empire and the rise of the Sassanids. For 400 years, the Parthian Empire had successfully ruled the remains of the old Persian Empire, and when it was united, it was more than a match for their neighbor to the west. But their devolved governmental structure and highly contested dynastic struggles meant that more often than not, the Parthian Empire was not united. In the early 200s AD, a royal family down in the southwest of the empire—that is, they were among the kings who the Parthian king of kings ruled—began to get ambitious about their fortunes. They muscled out other aristocratic families and pretty soon were the dominant power in the region. With the Parthian royal family engaged in yet another dynastic struggle back in the eastern half of the empire, the eldest son of this family, a man named Sharpur, established an almost completely autonomous kingdom near the Red Sea. After a dynastic struggle of their own brought his brother Ardashir to power, the new king forced neighboring provinces to swear fealty to him and his family. Now that he was operating across borders, the Parthian king finally took notice of what was going on and sent one of the neighboring governors to crush Ardashir. But Ardashir won the battle handily. So the Parthian king decided he needed to go put this upstart in his place and personally led an army to do just that. But in the ensuing battle, Ardashir not only crushed the Parthian army, but killed the king in the process. In 224, Ardashir entered Ctesiphon and had himself crowned king of kings.

With Ardashir's victory, the Parthian empire as it had been known came crashing down, replaced by what we call today the Sassanid empire. The name Sassanid likely derives from the name of Ardashir's grandfather who was the one who initiated the ambitions of the family. For the next 400 years, the Sassanids would rule an empire that at its height would extend from Egypt to India and from Saudi Arabia to Russia. We will have much more to say about the Sassanids as we move forward, so for now I'll stick with the particular machinations of its first king, Ardashir. Not unlike Vologases, who kicked off a war with Rome in the 160s AD because he took his string of domestic victories as proof that he was indestructible, Ardashir was similarly convinced of his own irresistibility. Following his crowning as the new king of kings, he marched around the old dominions of the Parthians and established his own far more centralized authority. By 230, he felt secure enough at home to begin looking beyond the frontier. No one would ever accuse Ardashir of thinking small, and when he surveyed his new country, he believed that what was really his birthright was all the territory that had once encompassed old Persia. This meant Syria and Egypt, and really, everything possessed by Rome as far west as the Hellespont. So yeah, he believed big. But I'll come back to Ardashir and his coming invasion of Rome next week, and for now we'll get back to Alexander as he tried to hold his own empire together.

In 225, probably figuring that it was never too soon to begin producing legitimate heirs, Julia Mamia arranged for her now 16-year-old son to marry the daughter of a prominent senator. But soon after the wedding, Julia discovered something horrible. Alexander actually liked his wife, and wanted to spend time with her. This of course cut into Julia's own time with the emperor, and was no doubt all kinds of threatening to her position as the preeminent woman in Alexander's life. So in 226 or 227, Julia made a move to restore balance to the universe. First, Alexander's father-in-law was accused of trying to turn the Praetorians against the young emperor, and for this crime, he was executed. Whether or not he actually did what they say he did is still an open question. And then second, in the aftermath of the scandal, Alexander's wife was exiled to Libya. The emperor was heartbroken, but he refused to go against his mother's wishes.

This inability to stand up to his mother was the downside of Alexander's naturally mild temperament. This temperament was mostly great for the empire. He never slaughtered people at the drop of a hat, or plundered estates whenever the fancies struck, or started wars for no reason. But he also could never bring himself to challenge his mother, even when she began to become a liability. For these reasons, the reign of Alexander, as good as it was in comparison to his predecessors, was not all roses. Though the dark storm clouds still seemed to be biding their time, they were also constantly swirling and shifting, and generally making everyone nervous. Alexander's move to try to correct the exorbitant pay of the soldiers was a source of constant concern, as uprisings and mutinies broke out to the tune of at least a couple of rebellions a year. These incidents were kept local and isolated, and put down one by one as soon as they cropped up, but there was definitely something to worry about in the pattern of often violent disobedience in the legions. Making matters worse was the fact that the Praetorians were not exempt from mutiny, as they had already so amply demonstrated when they rioted against Ulpian. So the imperial family had to remain on guard, not just against insurrection in the provinces, but also insurrection in their own backyard.

This fear took down the second great member of Alexander's governing council in 229, when Cassius Dio was exiled from Rome following threats by the Praetorians that they had grown tired of the sarcastic historian. Dio had been born in 155 in Bithynia into a wealthy family, and after enrolling as a senator during the reign of Commodus, he served in a variety of administrative posts during the reign of Septimius Severus. He became so trusted by the emperor that his political career was capped by stints as the governor of both Africa and Pannonia, two of the most important provinces in the empire. After Severus' death, Dio seems mostly to have retired from public life, and spent the bulk of his time completing an 80-volume history of Rome. Written in Greek, the history begins with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy and went right up to the present day, that is, the reign of Alexander. The only fragments remain of the monumental work today. The history by Cassius Dio is one of the most important resources we have in piecing together the story of the Roman Empire.

When Alexander and with him some semblance of sanity came to power, Dio returned to public life to serve on Alexander's council, and it is said that he was held in particular esteem by the young emperor. That esteem is what made it so difficult for Alexander to react to the latest threats emanating from the Praetorian camp. The guard did not like Dio, and they wanted him gone. But at first, Alexander tried to buck them and back his favorite historian. To demonstrate his loyalty, he and Dio shared a consulship in 229, but that only inflamed the guard even further. Facing a bloody coup or abandoning his friend, Alexander was forced to choose the latter. Following their shared consulship, Cassius Dio was sent back home to Bithynia, where he died soon after. But Alexander would not have long to mourn for his dead advisor.

In 230 AD, word came of a shocking development in the east. The new king of Parthia—wait, is it even still Parthia anymore?—had suddenly decided that he was going to invade Roman territory. He had gathered a massive army on the banks of the Tigris, and was making periodic raids into the empire. And this wasn't small-time banditry either. By the looks of things, the new monarch of the east was planning something huge. Next week, Alexander will get his first taste of war. After the young emperor fails to settle things peacefully, he will need to muster an army to take on the most serious foreign threat to the empire since the days of the Marcomannic Coalition.

But before we go this week, I want to let you all in on something that the history of Rome has been working on for the last few months that is so close to being finalized that I'm going to go ahead and reveal its existence now, a little bit in advance of a formal announcement that I'll be making very soon. No, it's not a book. Not yet. But how about this? An official History of Rome, Roman History tour. All I'm going to say about it right now is that if you've ever thought about wanting to plan a Roman History-themed vacation and were thinking maybe May 2011 sounded like a good time to go, well, then you should hold off for a minute on booking tickets until you have a chance to check out the details of the official History of Rome, Roman History tour. Those details will be coming shortly and I can't tell you how excited I am about it because, with a little luck, I'll see you in Rome.