Matilda Brown

The one thing that I guess I would add is just my quick review of the sources this morning. Macrinus is really pushed as the legal nerd Praetorian prefect, along with his co-prefect, who is sort of the military commander. So even under Caracalla,

he's viewed as this kind of pencil pusher, dorky lawyer, which stands very much in stark contrast from the Macrinus figure that I've seen in these Gladiator trailers. And I just can't get enough of it. It's been cracking me up. But yeah, I mean, that legal history, that's really what we know of him.

And I think the thing that has been interesting to me thinking about sort of the interaction with women is whether this bureaucratic role that he's always had

puts him in any contact with the imperial women earlier in the reign and there's no way that we can tell but it would make sense if they sort of ended up working on some of the same objects maybe they certainly would have known one another but they're helping with the bureaucracy and all of that so funny like the legal nerd of the two and of course you've highlighted there's you know there are two praetorian prefects aren't there which is a nice interesting other factor to highlight

I would say about that much. My favourite, I can't remember which source it's in specifically, but we get this very detailed narrative of Caracalla's ultimate demise. There's a lot that kind of begins to boil under the surface. We get in Dio, we get a letter from Rome is sent to Julia Domna reporting a prophecy that Macrinus and his son, Diadumenianus, will take the purple.

And another letter simultaneously sent by Julianus from Rome to Macrinus. So we have these two letters speeding across the empire. And Domna, who was sorting the mail like a good mother administrator in Antioch, opens this letter and goes, my God, my son is going to get assassinated and she is too late. Caracalla meets his fate. He's traveling and I believe this is in the dio.

Alex, you'll have to correct me here. He stops and says, I need to relieve myself and then gets stabbed in the back, which is a hell of a way to go.

There's different narratives. My favorite one is Herodian tells us he weeps over the body and is so sorrowful.

All the while has organized this from the get-go and then sends the ashes of Caracalla back to his mother. in Antioch, where she promptly says both sons are gone and ends her own life. Alex, I'll let you get into the intricacies of the better narrative.

So we need to go back because the first narrative that I told you, that's the one that's in Herodian. Dio tells us a totally different story. Julia Domna learns of her son's death, according to Cassius Dio. She's in Antioch. And Macrinus sends her a letter and he says, you can retain your title as Augusta, can stay empress, you can retain your Praetorian guard. So she keeps the imperial bodyguard.

You can do whatever you want. Just stay there. And she does. And she, according to Dio, she considers ending her life. And then she sort of gets it together a little bit and starts scheming with the soldiers who are around her. And then eventually dies of breast cancer before anything can be taken anywhere. But this is an incredibly important moment.

If what Dio is reporting is true, this is really unprecedented or nearly unprecedented for Roman empresses. The only precedent that we have is Domitia, Domitian's wife, who is reported, rumored to have been involved in his assassination and may have had more new imperial portraiture created under Trajan and left up around Trajan's forums.

She continued to be celebrated as an empress and sort of retired in luxury with her brickworks in Italy. That is the only precedent we have. So why Macrinus would decide to keep this woman on with a title, which did not happen for Domitia. She retired without the title. We know this from the inscriptions from her brickworks. She keeps the title. She keeps the Praetorian Guard. She is still...

for all intents and purposes, Empress of the Roman Empire. And this is something that's very perturbing. I think to anybody who looks closely at this period, there's this huge question of why. And Alex and I were talking about this prior to sitting down with you, and we still have not really been able to wrap our minds around it. It is part of why I kind of wanted to bring up

Is it just that they know each other because they've been in these bureaucratic circles? Is it that Macrinus is like, well, I just like this woman. Does he already know that she's dying from cancer?

So I'll leave her alone, you know. Does he know that she's dying of cancer? And so he wants to, you know, he presents himself as an, he adopts the name Severus to present himself as a continuator of the Severan dynasty. He elevates himself on Septimius Severus's birthday.

Is he trying to use her to create this continuity with the Severans sort of artificially knowing that she's really not going to last that long? It's a big question mark. It's really, really interesting. This doesn't happen with any other empress at any point, especially for one who is so incredibly influential and involved in the running of the empire.

And Macrinus really shoots himself in the foot here because he allows Julia Domna to survive. And she eventually dies, I think, a couple of months after her son, probably in the summer of 217. And all around her are her family, her older sister and her older sister's two daughters, each of whom have a son.

And she sends this family back to Emesa, the familial sort of home place, which is sometimes described as sort of a backwater in Syria, but has a massive temple to the deity, the solar deity Elagabal. And Julia Maesa promptly enrolls both of her grandsons in this priesthood.

which is the ancestral priesthood that her family has belonged to and has tons of money and tons of property at her disposal. And Macrinus, thinking that this won't be an issue for him, allows them to kind of retire.

And Maesa immediately starts scheming and brings in nearby legions and starts bribing them and sort of fomenting a new Severan dynasty, a coup, to put her grandson, Elagabalus, on the throne.

Yeah, it's her big sister.

Sure. We have her elder daughter is named Julia Soamias. These are all women with the name Julia, and so it gets very confusing. Her elder daughter is named Julia Soamias, and she has a son who is the future Emperor Elagabalus. And then her younger daughter is named Julia Mamea, who also has a son who is the future Emperor Severus Alexander.

And at this point, all of the men in the family, the husbands of Julia Soamius and Julia Maesa certainly have died. And so, you know, one reason that Macrinus would not view them as a threat. These are women without sort of any male familial support. And the husband, it appears that Julia Mamea has a second, she's in her second marriage to somebody who,

Well, it's wonderful to be back, Tristan. Thank you so much for having us both. And of course, I know you from my uni undergrad days. This really all is coming full circle. I've had the pleasure of having Alex as a colleague now for years, in addition to being taught what I know on the third century by him. So You know, I'd like to push that compliment back.

has not really had a formidable career that would make him a threat to Macrinus's fledgling reign.

Any excellence I have is purely due to him.

Yeah, born around 208. So he would be about 9, 10 years old.

He's made the critical mistake of underestimating Julia Domna's big sister, who he's sent back to her power base. This family are the descendants of the priest kings of Emesa, so they already have tremendous regional influence there. Also, Julia Domna had, at the very beginning of the reign of Septimius Severus, already been aligned with the military pay on the coinage issued in the East.

We see the very first coinage issued with liberalitas, you know, military distribution reverses struck in her name. So when Julia Maesa comes in and she says, I'm going to give you guys money, I think that it probably makes a lot of sense to people that she really will pay up. They're used to the women in this family giving the military lots of money.

So she comes in and she says, I have these two grandsons, and they have both been enrolled in the Temple of Elagabal. And from what we hear, the Third Gallic Legion, which is stationed near Emesa,

at Raphaneia are really big fans of the cult of Elagabal and they love to come to the temple and watch the ceremonies and they think that the beautiful young Elagabalus the head priest is really doing a fantastic job and she says oh well by the way he also is the illegitimate son of Caracalla and I'm going to give you a hell of a lot of cash if you put him on the throne and so it works

And on the 15th, the evening of the 15th of May, 218, Maesa and Elagabalus's mother, Maesa's older daughter, Julia Soamius, and her younger daughter, Julia Mamea, and Julia Mamea's son, Severus Alexander, all get snuck in. into the fortress of the Third Gallic Legion at Raffanea.

And then the next morning on the 16th, they bring Elagabalus up onto the ramparts and they say, here he is, the son of Caracalla. He is the legitimate emperor of Rome. And things kick off immediately.

Yeah, hopefully we'll manage to stay cool. We've got this.

No. We have... No. We have his father's gravestone. That was set up by Julius Tuamius. We know that he had a sibling at some point from that gravestone, though we have no record of the sibling in the literary evidence. However, we do have provincial coinage that has Elagabalus on one side, his face. Provincial coinage struck in the east.

And then the face of Plautilla, Caracalla's executed and exiled wife on the other side. So clearly people are really running with this in the Eastern Empire and it seems to be working. You know, he very much is accepted by a lot of these Eastern legions. It takes a little while. It takes a couple of months. But Macrinus' forces respond pretty quickly.

And his Praetorian prefect, Julianus, who's the one who, you know, throwback, sent the letter to Macrinus saying, by the way, there has been a prophecy that you are going to become emperor. We throw back to the beginning of this episode. He immediately marches on Elagabalus' forces. And things with the Second Parthian Legion, I believe, again, throwback to that legion.

Yes, it's been brought east. Things go very poorly. There is an immediate coup outside of Raffanea. His soldiers say, we are going to join the Third Gallic Legion. We're joining Team Elagabalus. And they execute him and they behead him. And they send to Macrinus in Apamea, his head wrapped up with his ring, and they deliver it to him at a dinner.

Yeah, pretty grim stuff. I think it's also, this is the point where as soon as Macrinus learns about El Gabalus' coup, that he declares his son, the young Diadumenianus, to be Augustus. And he also sends a letter to the Senate where he officially declares war on the usurper and his mother and grandmother. And that comes from Dio, who we think would have

heard this letter read out in the senate so that's a pretty incredible moment here where we have the emperor of rome declaring war on a woman and child yeah that's the political faction that he's up against it's quite something it feels like this is the big test room isn't it it's all or nothing i feel a bit sorry for his son who's basically being told yeah you're now

Certainly. I mean, I think that Macrinus is sort of the meeting point of my and Alex's work. Alex is really a Caracolin expert and I have, you know, done my work really beginning with the later Severan Empresses. And so we kind of meet in this middle ground. And for me, at least, this was sort of the last person I would expect to see dramatized on the silver screen.

Yes, this is one of my favorite moments of Roman history. We have, you know, Elagabalus' forces who are about to give up. They're really lagging and Elagabalus is there and he's trying to cheer them on. And what actually succeeds in getting them to put up a fight and ultimately defeat Macrinus and bring Elagabalus to the throne is the presence of Julia Maesa and Julia Soamius on the battlefield.

Oh, fantastic. And they step out of a chariot, and with their cries and lamentations, according to Cassius Dio, they manage to kind of rally all of these soldiers and get them back in the game. And that is how Elagabalus ultimately wins.

But, you know, there's so much to do with him because we don't really know that much about him except for what we'll tell you today. So.

I kind of feel bad for the guy. The Severins were not a terribly, for lack of a better word, nice family. And he seems like he really just kind of wanted to do right by the Roman Empire. And it seems like he kind of was doing right by the Roman Empire during his brief reign.

I think he terribly underestimated the later Severan women and made a massive mistake in underestimating what these women could do and the importance of the Severan bloodline coming through these women. But Perhaps he deserves more attention than he really got, because maybe if we had kept Macrinus, we wouldn't have seen the third century crisis. I don't know, Alex, what do you think?

Well, sure. I think that one of the really critical things that we see happen in this period during Caracalla's sole reign is his mom steps in, Julia Domna, who has been Empress of the Roman Empire for the past however many years that Severus reigned, was there at the moment of assassination when the elder son kills the younger. And after Gaeta's death,

or even before Gaeta's death, she's granted all of these extravagant titles. She's granted more honorary titles than any empress had previously been given. She's named mother of the army camp, of the senate, of the fatherland. She's named Pia Felix. These are titles that have only, those last two had only previously been given to emperors before.

So we're seeing these honors lavished upon her, and we don't really know what those mean. There's some debate in the scholarships But we do get a sense that she's kind of stepping into almost an admin role for Caracalla. She's answering imperial letters. She's traveling across the empire with him and eventually ends up in Antioch as this eastern imperial center. She's answering letters.

She's receiving petitions. She is holding public receptions for all of the most prominent men. The actual text of the dio passage where this comes from the Greek, it says these are imperial receptions. These are official public events. And she's sorting through all of the mail. She's kind of the main admin on board. She's included in letters sent to the Senate.

This looks like a sort of official position. And this is a more, I would say, official recognition from the sources of a role held by an empress like this than we have seen before. So Caracalla is making this movement eastward. He's a military emperor. We see him doing all All of these sort of incredible and horrible things.

And we know that there's got to be sort of a gaggle of administrators around him that are helping him rule this empire as he is leading the army. And his mom is one of them, which is incredible and becomes important to the Macrinus story.

It really is. And it's brutal to think about. Our sources talk about it a lot. How does she cope with this? We are told that she's pushed out of the public eye. And I've never really known how I feel about that description of her sort of disappearance from the public face of the Imperial family following Gaeta's death.

I don't know if it's that Caracalla says, Mom, you got to get the hell out of Dodge because I don't want you here and I need to do this myself. I'm a big boy now. Or if it's really that she needs time to grieve. And we get a little bit of both from the source tradition. But in the end, she kind of steps up and does what she has to, I suppose, for her last remaining son.