Balbinus

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Balbinus ruled the Roman Empire for just three months in 238 AD, a year so chaotic it earned the name the Year of the Six Emperors. He was already in his early sixties when the Senate elevated him, alongside a colleague named Pupienus, to the purple. What drove the Senate to choose him? What kind of man was he, and how did one of Rome's most cultivated emperors come to such a sudden and violent end? His story touches the fractures running through an empire stretched to its limits, a Senate grasping for relevance, and a marble coffin that outlasted all of it.

• 2. A Patrician's Rise

  ›

  Caelius Calvinus, Balbinus's father, served as legate of Cappadocia in 184, giving his son a head start in the machinery of Roman advancement. Balbinus was born a patrician by blood, around the year 178. He also served as one of the Salii, the ancient priests of Mars, a role that placed him among Rome's most venerable religious orders.

  His lineage may have stretched back to Publius Coelius Balbinus Vibullius Pius, the consul ordinarius of 137. If scholars who have conjectured this connection are right, Balbinus was also a distant relation of Julius Frontinus, the first-century politician, engineer, and author. The same family tree may have brushed against the influential house of Q. Pompeius Falco, which sent senators and consuls into the world across the third century.

  His first consulship, the highest civilian office a Roman could hold, is thought to have fallen around 203 or in July 211. His second came in 213, when he served alongside Caracalla himself. That pairing suggests the reigning emperor trusted him, or at least found him useful. By the time 238 arrived, Balbinus had twice held the consulship, governed provinces, and accumulated the kind of social capital that the Senate valued above almost anything else.

• 3. The Senate's Gamble

  ›

  In April 238, news reached Rome that the Gordians, who had briefly claimed the throne, had been defeated. The Senate needed emperors fast. It voted to elevate Pupienus and Balbinus together as co-emperors, an unusual arrangement that recalled nothing so much as the dual reign of 161. Unlike that earlier moment, both men were also made pontifices maximi, the chief priests of Rome's official state cults. In Republican times that combination of offices would have been unthinkable.

  Edward Gibbon, drawing on the accounts of Herodian and the Historia Augusta, painted Balbinus as an admired orator, a poet of distinguished fame, and a wise magistrate who had administered civil jurisdiction across nearly all the interior provinces of the empire. Gibbon also noted that the two colleagues were sixty and seventy-four years old respectively, men of full maturity and experience. Balbinus brought the civilian face to the partnership; Pupienus was seen as the military man.

  The arrangement was already under strain before it could settle. Popular unrest forced the Senate to co-opt the child Gordian III as a third colleague almost immediately. While Pupienus marched to Ravenna to oversee the campaign against the rival claimant Maximinus, Balbinus stayed in Rome, where the sources say he failed to keep public order. The partnership that had seemed so senior and stable was fraying at its seams.

• 4. Distrust and Death

  ›

  After Maximinus died and Pupienus returned victorious to Rome, the two emperors began to distrust each other. The suspicion between them proved fatal. Praetorian Guardsmen, long resentful of a Senate-backed reign that had sidelined them, moved against both men. Pupienus discovered the plot and tried to warn Balbinus. Balbinus did not believe him: he thought the Guard was planning to secure the throne for him alone, not to kill him. He was wrong.

  Both emperors were assassinated by the disaffected Guardsmen, ending a joint reign that had lasted only three months. The minting of the antoninianus coin, which the emperor Elagabalus had ended in 219, had been revived under Balbinus and Pupienus. That revival was one of the few lasting marks the pair left on the empire's machinery before their reign was extinguished.

• 5. The Sarcophagus

  ›

  Balbinus commissioned a marble sarcophagus for himself and his wife, almost certainly while holding the title of emperor. The name of his wife is not recorded. Discovered in fragments near the Via Appia, the monument was later restored, and it stands today as the only surviving example of a Roman Imperial sarcophagus of this particular type.

  The lid carries reclining figures of Balbinus and his wife, and the portrait of the emperor is considered a fine likeness. The carving on the sides of the coffin presents an unexpected image: Balbinus, consistently described in the written sources as the civilian partner in his joint reign, is shown in full military dress. Whether that was his own choice, a sculptor's convention, or a statement of ambitions the sources do not record, the contradiction between the civil administrator of the texts and the armored figure in stone is striking.

  The sarcophagus is held in the collection at the Museo di Pretastato, at the catacombs of Praetextatus, in the Park of the Caffarella near the Appian Way in Rome. An emperor who governed for three months left behind an object that has endured nearly two thousand years, raising questions about power, image, and what a man chooses to carry into death.