Dr. Alex Imrie

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219 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Dr. Alex Imrie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · Emperor Macrinus: Usurper of Rome · 17 Nov 2024 podcast

And the sources, while they may exaggerate slightly, they agree that he probably killed around a quarter of the city's population before leaving. I mean, it's a remarkable contrast. That emperor giving everybody citizenship... and then laying waste to one of the foremost cities of the empire before he leaves. It's a remarkable story of kind of extremities, I would say, as Caracalla's reign.

And then his final months are spent on campaign against Parthia.

Yeah, I mean, family dynamics are complicated in the Roman imperial period. I mean, I suppose you could make that argument for any monarchical or autocratic system. What goes on within the family dynamic is an absolute mystery, and that for me as well is one of those big mysteries. If Di was correct that she was in the room at the point of Geta's murder, then

It is, to our modern sensibility, absolutely unthinkable that she could then go on and be the faithful servant and the administrative figurehead of this regime for another four and a half, five years. It is utterly, utterly remarkable. I mean, Dio paints her in a very particular way, as I'm sure Matilda will talk about later. He depicts her as being kind of power-hungry in her own right.

So there's a little bit of a complicating factor in how our ancient literature talk about Julia Domna in as much as She's a powerful imperial woman, and she can't really shake that baggage from some of these rather conservative men. But it is, to this day, one of these big mysteries. How on earth did they work that out? It's a very difficult dinner table situation thereafter.

I think our sources give us a very particular version of who this individual is. But often he is a foil either to the violent extremity of Caracalla or he is just the pre-runner to the later Severan era. I mean, often when you read even textbooks about this era, you'll have the Severan era and Macrinus will barely get a mention, such as the kind of limited amount that we know of him.

In terms of his background, we know that he was born in the Roman province of Mauritania, so on the North African coast. And this is something that will become important for his story later. He was not from a senatorial family. He was not from a highly aristocratic family. He was a member of the equestrian order, so that second property class of Rome.

And I don't want listeners to think that this is a kind of... middle class, for want of a better description. These people are still often obscenely wealthy, it's just that they don't have the family bloodlines of the senatorial order. The equivalent, some said they're like the knights or something, is that right? Absolutely.

I mean, the name, the Ordo Equestria, the Equites, it really all has that kind of equestrian knightly vibe to it, and historically it was, you know, these people could afford horses to engage in warfare with. But certainly by Macrinus' time, it is just a large social class within Roman society. And so this is the kind of context into which he's born.

Dio and Herodian are fairly much in agreement that he is trained as a lawyer. And I think it's Dio who tells us that he's maybe not the most inventive legal mind out there, but he is quite diligent in his following of the law. And this seems to bring him into the orbit of the Praetorian prefect in the early 3rd century, Plotianus, infamous for his attempted coup later on against the Severans.

Yes, we talked about him in the last episode, didn't we? Yes. We did, yep. So sort of the internal problems that the Severan household faces in the 3rd century, a lot of it comes down to this Plotianus figure. And according to Dio, Macrinus is quite lucky, actually, not to be tarred by association and kind of gotten rid of after the Plotianus affair.

But it seems that for a while he kind of holds junior magistracies thereafter. I think the one office that Dio tells us Septimius Severus allows him after is kind of like a traffic superintendent on the Via Flaminia. So it's a little bit of a kind of step down from working in the Praetorian prefect's office.

Well, that's how I like to imagine it. I'm sure it was probably much more administrative, but I do like to imagine him as a kind of glorified traffic cop for a few years in the wilderness. But he eventually, as Severus's reign goes into Caracalla's, his career seems to steadily increase again. He occupies a number of procuratorial posts and ends up as Praetorian prefect himself.

So in early 217, Caracalla is in the midst of a military campaign against Parthia, against the Parthian Empire. This is something that he had started in 216.

Yes, that's correct. And under the Parthian royal household, we've not quite got to the stage in history where this becomes the much more aggressive Sassanid Persian regime. We're still in the final years of the Arsacid Parthian royal household. Now, the campaign that Caracalla wages has been rather inconclusive to everybody's frustration.

The first campaigning season, 216-17, appears not to have produced a single meaningful clash between Roman and Parthian forces. I think its Herodian gives us this rather convoluted idea of Caracalla trying to outsmart the Parthians at a wedding reception, which is, I think, a lot of historical bunk. But in reality, it's been a frustrating year of campaigning.

Caracalla wages another campaigning season immediately because that's basically his style. That's him. He is a soldier emperor at that point. And it's quite clear, I think, reading between the lines of our sources, particularly Cassius Dio, that this is not going well. The soldiers themselves are starting to get a little bit frustrated, I think, with the lack of any kind of decisive outcome.

And importantly for Caracalla, we've seen a real diminishment in his imperial concilium. That is to say, the group of senators or people that would usually surround an emperor and offer day-to-day advice. The account that Dai offers us is very fragmentary, but it suggests that basically there's only one senator left in that circle at all, this consular guy called Aurelianus.

So Caracalla is in the field, mired down in a campaign which doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Macrinus is there as Praetorian prefect, but it seems that there is a much smaller circle around Caracalla at this point as well, as everybody seems to be getting increasingly fed up with him as an emperor as much as a commander.

Yeah, Caracalla has been in the midst of this rather frustrating campaign. It seems visiting a number of kind of local sites and towns and religious sites. And he's been to a lunar deity near the site of Cari, which, you know, those of you that maybe know Roman Republican history know that that is a kind of disastrous area for Rome generally.

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