Matilda Brown
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Matilda Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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,
has not really had a formidable career that would make him a threat to Macrinus's fledgling reign.
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.
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