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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So Caracalla is made Augustus at that point, and it's only then that Geta's brought in and given anything, and he's made Caesar at that point. So although there's only 11 months separating the brothers, Caracalla is far more senior in the line of succession than Geta is at this point.
So yeah, so on the point of terminology, yes. Caesar and Augustus begin as names from within that Julian family line, so Julius Caesar and Octavian Augustus. They take on relatively rapidly. official titles, or they become rather, relatively rapidly, official titles. Augustus just refers to the emperor and Caesar refers to the heir.
And you're right, when Caracalla is made an Augustus in 188, that is a shared position now with his father. And this evokes, it seems, the shared empire of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.
This is something that I think, again, Severus is well aware of the visual language of this kind of move and is exploiting that to elevate this idea of an Antonine link between his family and that of Marcus Aurelius.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've seen Severus called the master of the arts of revolution. He is just somebody who, if he's not incredibly skilled personally with PR, he certainly has somebody within his court that knows what they're doing because he is really terribly good at it. And this whole Antonine association isn't just a kind of passing reference.
It becomes a core pillar of the visual language of this regime as a whole. And that's something that really comes to characterize Caracalla and Geta in the late 190s into the early 200s, we have Caracalla and Geta appear on coins, appear in statuary, and they are presented as young Antonine children. They have this kind of cherubic facial feature going on.
They have this lovely, soft, fluffy hair style kind of thing happening. And importantly, on coins, if it weren't for the titles... I think many people would struggle to distinguish between the two. So, I mean, that's another interesting facet of this in as much as while Karakal is definitely given more constitutional authority, nominally, I mean, he's a child, how much is he actually doing?
In terms of the propaganda that the regime is pushing out and the mass media that they're pushing out, the Severan children are almost indistinguishable. And I think that's by design.
I think Severus is saying with this that he has two children, that the future of the dynasty is assured, and that these two brothers are, while they may have different stations, they are indivisible and almost indistinguishable from one another. That's how close they are. That's how wonderfully loved up the Severan family is.
Now, it's interesting in that we have further evidence that Severus wants to use them in this idea of a vast program of family unity being promoted. The two boys feature very prominently, for example, in the secular games of AD 204. This is a large cultural set of games that has gone on from the earliest phase of the Imperial era.
It has huge religious overtones and the Imperial family usually plays a significant part. Severus has every single one of his family members play a significant role. They each lead different sections and delegations of this set of games. Beyond the family propaganda, though, we have a sense that not all is well in the house of Caesar.
We have a sense that the two boys, while being very close in age and while being presented as indivisible princes, just don't get along. I mean, the pair of them just don't seem to enjoy each other's company, and we have early early signs that they're intensely competitive with one another.
Although much of this will only come out in our sources when the sources get onto the middle point of that first decade in the 200s. Because what happens before is that attention is focused on the problematic Praetorian prefect, Plotianus. Because it seems, at least in Daiwa's telling, that Plotianus
a prefect who is alleged to have staged or attempted to stage a coup in the year 205 to overthrow the Severan household, Dio claims that he's almost like a pressure valve that holds the boy's competition in check. It's only when this troubling Praetorian is eliminated and executed that the boys' rivalry really starts to accelerate and explode because there's nothing to hold it in check.
There is no external force that the boys are both focused on rather than on each other.
So in the early phase, it seems that both boys just, as you might expect young princes to have, sizeable entourages who seem to just encourage their worst impulses. They are a bunch of yes-men. Spoiled teenagers as well, I guess, aren't they? Absolutely. Well, this is it. They are teens.
And I think that's something that even scholars sometimes overlook, the fact that they are probably just quite natural teenagers themselves. Moody and hormonal and not very predictable. And yet they are facilitated by huge entourages who encourage them to compete with one another. This is seen in Dao, for example, where we have them at the chariot races.
If one boy, one teen, one prince chooses one faction, Dallar will be sure to pick an opposing faction because, God forbid, they pick the same faction. And it seems to intensify and the public rivalry that grows between the two boys gets even more visible. Daioh tells us, for example, of one occasion where the two boys themselves were engaged in chariot racing.
One presumes just through the middle of the capital and there's a chariot crash and Caracalla breaks his leg in that competition. And Severus is lauded at that point for kind of just ignoring the two of them and getting on with his work. But it's an indicator that this is a public problem now for Severus, and it gets increasingly embarrassing as the first decade of the 200s draws to a close.
And this image of Caracal and Geta chasing through the streets after one another in their chariots actually put me in mind of the animated Prince of Egypt cartoon. I don't know if any of your listeners will remember that when the Ramesses and the Moses characters basically destroy an ornamental city in their chariots. That's very much the image I got from this.
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