Dr. Alex Imrie
speaker
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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And as he's not alone, there are a couple of other regional governors who are also proclaimed emperor at this point. We have Clodius Albinus in Britain, and we have Piscinius Niger in Syria, both at the head of multi-legion forces. But Severus being on the Danube frontier is physically the closest, and this allows him to perform what is effectively a lightning march on the capital.
And Dio and Herodian, the sources tend to agree that he meets very little resistance on the way. This is, on the one hand, a marker of maybe Julianus' rank unpopularity with pretty much everybody.
But it's also an indicator of just how much military force Severus has behind him on that frontier, being able to persuade not only his own legions, but a couple of neighboring governors to back his cause as well. There's very little to oppose him at this point, but his children are at risk. They could be taken hostage, I would imagine.
That would be the most likely outcome of events if Julianus had been able to take custody of them.
Severus is absolutely victorious over Darius Julianus in an extraordinarily short period. As I say, he marches from Pannonia, meets basically no resistance, enters into Rome. He receives the quick acclamation of the Senate. Julianus is cast away, he's declared a public enemy and is murdered in the imperial palace in relatively short order.
Then Severus has a successful march into the capital itself. Now it's interesting here that Dio and Herodian offer us slightly different takes on that. In one telling we have Severus marching in full armor, his army behind him, a very unsubtle image of imperial power projected.
But in another telling, he stops at the gates almost and then changes out of his armor into a toga and comes in in a very civil mode of introduction to the Roman capital. The reality is, though, the armies behind them in either case doesn't really matter what he's wearing. There is very little ambiguity about who or where the real power resides.
And so it's no surprise, really, then, that the Senate, I think, opt to support his claim in the year 193. Now, Severus will spend the next four years fighting civil wars. Albinus and Niger will not give up without a fight.
So he goes against Piscinius, Niger, and Syria first. He spends the first year and a half of his reign waging a war to the east against the Syrian legions, which he manages to conclude relatively swiftly, relatively successfully. And it's at that point that Caracalla becomes really important to our story.
Well, Caracalla first. It probably changes his life, I would say, more than Geta's in the short term, because he is used by his father to consolidate the Severan dynasty as a nascent regime. He's also really put into the firing line because it is Severus elevating Caracalla to the rank of Caesar in 195 that causes the second civil war that Severus has to fight.
So at the end of his campaign against Niger, Severus retroactively adopts the entire Severan family into the Antonine household. It's a very bizarre political conceit to kind of retcon the history, which bolts his family onto that of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. So that he has lines of legitimacy, it seems, going every direction. His rule is unassailable on terms of legitimacy.
Now, the problem for Severus is that in doing that, in putting his son to the fore like this, he has basically broken a treaty with Clodius Albinus, the governor of Britain. He had made this treaty in 193 with Albinus to name Albinus his heir apparent, his Caesar, as a way of buying off that rival to the west to allow him to wage a war in the east.
It's clear that in 195, with Niger defeated, Severus feels no need to hold on to that treaty for any longer. And Caracalla is the vehicle. He is the weapon that is used to signal to Albinus that Albinus is getting no bite of the cake anymore and it's war. And he's less than 10 years older this time, Caracalla. So he is just being used by his dad. Yeah, he's not even 10.
He's just before his 10th birthday, probably is when he is named the Caesar and the heir apparent. Now, again, that's quite a bold statement to have a child as your heir apparent. And it's exactly that. He's used as a tool to signify that the Severan regime is ready to stand on its own feet and will brook no alliances with other factions anymore. And it triggers a bloody civil war.
196 through 197, we have a fairly intense campaign where it seems that Claudius Albinus... brings most of the military power from the British Isles over into Gaul, and ironically meets Severus in battle at Lugdunum, at Leon, where Caracal is born, the year 197. And Cassius Dio tells us that this has about 150,000 men on either side, duking it out on the fields outside Leon.
And this is the largest single Roman land battle in history, if we believe Dio's numbers.
That's right. I mean, partly we just don't hear about Geto tremendously much, and that, it seems, is a literary choice on the part of the authors, I think, in order to accentuate or emphasise maybe the role of Caracalla within the imperial succession, etc., at least initially.
The literary portrait is one thing, but the reality is that Severus doesn't actually give Geta any role or any constitutional importance at that point. When he elevates Caracalla to Caesar, Geta gets nothing, really, at all.
And when eventually after the civil war against Clodius Albinus is concluded, Severus goes and wages another war against Parthia, basically I think to recoup some booty and some material gain and to focus all his legions on an external enemy. At the end of that campaign, he elevates Caracalla again to become Augustus, so a co-emperor with him.
That's probably the early days of the year 198, and that's timed, it seems, to coincide with the anniversary of Trajan's Day of Accession, his Diaz Imperio. So Severus, again, is trying to play all the propagandistic games and using his children to attach his regime to all of the best and all of the best-liked facets of Roman imperial history over the preceding centuries.
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