The Auction and the Severan Reconstruction

The Second Auction of the Empire192–197

The dynasty of Marcus ended as the dynasty of Augustus had, in a bedchamber, and produced the same discovery on a larger scale. Commodus — thirty-one, ruling through favorites, fighting in the arena as Hercules Romanus, renaming the months and the legions after himself — was strangled by his wrestling-partner on the last night of 192 after the poison in his bath failed, and the year that followed reran 69 with the Praetorians' price now openly posted. Pertinax, the elderly city prefect who had risen from a freedman's household through the Marcomannic wars to the throne, attempted discipline and was killed in the palace after eighty-seven days; and there followed the scene the tradition preserved as the Republic's final obituary: the Guard on its camp wall taking bids for the empire from two candidates below, Sulpicianus the murdered emperor's father-in-law against Didius Julianus the millionaire senator, the purple knocked down at twenty-five thousand sesterces a man to the higher offer. Julianus reigned sixty-six days, cursed in the streets. The armies answered as in 69 and with the same geography: Syria proclaimed Pescennius Niger, Britain Clodius Albinus, and Pannonia — the heaviest concentration of force on earth since Domitian's day — proclaimed its governor, Lucius Septimius Severus of Lepcis Magna in Africa, who reached Rome first, executed Julianus, disbanded the Praetorian Guard entire and reconstituted it from Danubian legionaries, and then fought the two civil wars his accession required: Niger destroyed at Issus in 194 on the ground where Alexander had beaten Darius; Albinus at Lugdunum in February 197 in the largest battle Romans ever fought against Romans — Dio's figure of a hundred and fifty thousand a side is the tradition's arithmetic, the day's near-loss and Severus's own unhorsing are not, and the sack of Lyon that followed removed Gaul's greatest city from the first rank permanently. Between the wars the reign's eastern campaigns opened: Osrhoene and northern Mesopotamia annexed as a province in 195, the Parthian capital taken again in 197–198 — Ctesiphon sacked, a hundred thousand captives claimed, the emperor's Parthicus Maximus — and Hatra, twice besieged in 198–200, twice holding, the desert city's second defeat of a Roman emperor. The Editor marks the strategic settlement: the frontier advanced to the Tigris approaches with Nisibis as a fortress-capital, two new legions (I and III Parthica) raised to hold it, and Parthia left so weakened that within a generation its own vassals overthrew it — the volume's sharpest instance of a victory that manufactured a worse enemy.

Enrich the Soldiers197–235

Severus's reconstruction was the militarization of the state, executed deliberately and defended without embarrassment; the dying advice the tradition puts in his mouth — agree with each other, enrich the soldiers, and despise everyone else — is the reign's program whether or not he said it. Pay was raised substantially for the first time since Domitian and again under his son; the marriage-ban on serving soldiers was lifted, legalizing the vici outside every fort and converting the frontier garrisons into rooted communities; the primipilate opened wider paths into the equestrian order, and equestrian prefects began commanding the new legions — the beginning of the senatorial order's displacement from military command that the next chapter completes; the Praetorian Guard was quadrupled in size and Italy garrisoned by II Parthica at Albanum, a legion within a day's march of Rome; and the annona militaris began the conversion of taxation-in-kind into the army's supply system. The costs were met by confiscation, by the deliberate debasement of the denarius to roughly half fine silver, and by an administrative expansion that the jurists of the reign — Papinian, Ulpian, Paul, the greatest generation of Roman law, serving as praetorian prefects and secretaries — organized into the machine the crisis would run on. The reign's last campaign returned to Britain: 208–211, Severus with his sons and a great army driving into Caledonia in the punitive war Dio describes as a march against an enemy who would not stand, its logistics still visible in the marching-camp chains north of the Tay, its object (annexation, or the demonstration Dio thought it) unachieved when the emperor died at York in February 211. What followed ran the Severan cycle to its end: Caracalla murdered his brother Geta in their mother's arms within the year, bought the army with another pay rise, granted universal citizenship to the empire's free population in 212 — the Constitutio Antoniniana, an act of taxation, patronage, and genuine consequence, the completion of the process this compendium has watched since the Social War — massacred in Alexandria in 215, campaigned inconclusively on the Danube and against Parthia, and was stabbed at a roadside latrine near Carrhae in 217 by an officer he had slighted, at his praetorian prefect Macrinus's contrivance. Macrinus, the first emperor never to have been a senator, bought peace from Parthia after the drawn battle of Nisibis and was destroyed the next year by a boy: the fourteen-year-old priest of Emesa proclaimed as Caracalla's son, Elagabalus, whose four years of religious revolution at Rome ended with his own Guard killing him and his mother in 222; and his cousin Severus Alexander's thirteen years — administered by his mother Julia Mamaea and the jurists — closed the dynasty in the volume's decisive twin crisis. In 224–226 the Sasanian revolution replaced the Arsacids: Ardashir I, from Fars, overthrew Artabanus IV, founded a centralized empire with an official Zoroastrian ideology and an announced claim to all the lands of the Achaemenids, and struck at Mesopotamia. Alexander's eastern campaign of 231–233 was mismanaged and mutinous; the Rhine crisis that followed drew him north; and at Mogontiacum in March 235 the army — offered negotiation and subsidies instead of a war — killed the twenty-six-year-old emperor and his mother in their tent and raised its own senior officer, the Thracian ranker Maximinus. With that murder the Principate's convention that emperors came from the governing class ended, and the fifty years the next chapter narrates began.