Didius Julianus

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcus Didius Julianus became Roman emperor on the 28th of March 193, not through conquest or succession, but by shouting his bids over a wall. The Praetorian Guard had just murdered Pertinax, the reigning emperor, and then announced that the throne of the Roman Empire was for sale to the highest bidder. What followed was an auction that stunned even Rome's most seasoned observers. Who was this man who bought the most powerful office in the world? And what happened next would become one of the most instructive episodes in the long story of Roman decline.

• 2. A Well-Connected Beginning

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  Julianus was born on the 29th of January in 133, according to the historian Cassius Dio, to a family with roots in Mediolanum, the city we now call Milan. His father, Quintus Petronius Didius Severus, came from a prominent local family there, while his mother, Aemilia Clara, was a North African woman of Roman descent from a family of consular rank. That combination of northern Italian and North African heritage was not unusual for a rising Roman family of the era.

  What gave the young Julianus a remarkable head start was his guardian. Domitia Calvilla, the mother of the emperor Marcus Aurelius himself, raised Julianus and used her influence to secure him an early appointment to the vigintivirate. That body was the formal first step on the Roman political ladder toward public distinction. The connection to the imperial household could not have been more direct.

  Around 153, Julianus married Manlia Scantilla. The couple had one child, a daughter named Didia Clara. Both women would later receive the title Augusta when Julianus reached the throne, a detail that underscores how tightly family was woven into the fabric of Roman imperial legitimacy.

• 3. Decades of Service

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  Julianus worked his way through the cursus honorum, the sequence of offices a Roman senator was expected to hold, serving as quaestor, aedile, and then praetor around the year 162. He was then assigned to command the Legio XXII Primigenia, stationed at Mogontiacum, the city now known as Mainz.

  In 170 he became prefect of Gallia Belgica, a post he held for five years. During that stretch he repelled an invasion by the Chauci, a Germanic tribe living in the drainage basin of the river Weser and along the northwestern coast of what is now Germany. That success earned him the consulship in 175, which he held alongside Pertinax. The pairing of these two men as consuls is a detail worth noting: the same Pertinax would later become emperor, then be murdered, setting the stage for Julianus' auction.

  He went on to distinguish himself further in a campaign against the Chatti and governed both Dalmatia and Germania Inferior. After that, he was made prefect responsible for distributing money to the poor of Italy. Modern historians read that assignment not as an honor but as a deliberate political demotion. The reigning emperor Commodus had grown wary of Julianus' accumulating prestige. Julianus was even charged with conspiring against Commodus' life, though a jury acquitted him and punished his accuser instead. He recovered enough standing to govern Bithynia and eventually to succeed Pertinax as proconsul of North Africa.

• 4. The Auction

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  On the 28th of March 193, Pertinax was murdered by the Praetorian Guard. What the guard did next was extraordinary even by the violent standards of Roman political life. They announced the throne was for sale to whichever man would pay the highest price.

  Titus Flavius Claudius Sulpicianus, the prefect of Rome and Pertinax's own father-in-law, was already inside the Praetorian camp, ostensibly there to calm the troops. He began making offers for the throne from within the walls. Julianus arrived at the camp separately, but found the gates barred to him. He dealt with this by shouting his bids over the wall. Hours of bidding followed. Sulpicianus reached 20,000 sesterces per soldier. Julianus, apparently fearing that Sulpicianus would win, then called out 25,000. The guards accepted, opened the gates, and proclaimed Julianus emperor. The Senate, under military pressure, confirmed the proclamation. His wife Manlia Scantilla and his daughter Didia Clara received the title Augusta within hours.

• 5. Sixty-Six Days

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  Julianus immediately devalued the Roman currency upon taking power. Pertinax had raised the silver content of the denarius to 87 percent; Julianus reduced it to 75 percent, nearly restoring the debased level of the Commodus era. But it was not the currency that defined his days in power. It was the contempt of the city he ruled.

  When Julianus appeared in public, crowds greeted him with groans and shouts of "robber and parricide." A mob once pelted him with large stones while he was trying to make his way to the Capitol. News of the hostility in Rome spread quickly through the empire, and three powerful generals each declared themselves emperor in response. Pescennius Niger commanded from Syria. Clodius Albinus led legions in Britain. Septimius Severus commanded the armies in Pannonia and was geographically the closest to Rome. Julianus declared Severus a public enemy and sent senators to persuade his soldiers to abandon him. He dispatched a centurion to kill Severus outright and nominated a new general to replace him. None of it worked.

  The Praetorian Guard had rarely fought in open field battles, so Julianus marched them into the Campus Martius and drilled them in fortification and fieldwork. Severus, meanwhile, secured the loyalty of Albinus by declaring him Caesar, then seized the strategic port city of Ravenna and its fleet. Severus killed Tullius Crispinus, the Praetorian prefect whom Julianus had sent to negotiate and slow the march. Cassius Dio wrote that the Praetorian Guard tried to resist; modern historians believe they simply deserted in mass. Julianus offered to share the empire with Severus. Severus ignored the offer and pressed forward.

  The Senate then passed a motion proclaiming Severus emperor, awarded divine honors to the murdered Pertinax, and sentenced Julianus to death. Deserted by all except one prefect and his son-in-law Cornelius Repentinus, Julianus was killed by a soldier in the palace on the 2nd of June 193, after a reign of 66 days. Cassius Dio recorded his final words as: "But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?"

• 6. What He Left Behind

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  The Senate passed a damnatio memoriae against Julianus, the formal Roman condemnation designed to erase a person from memory. Severus dismissed the entire Praetorian Guard and executed the soldiers who had killed Pertinax, the predecessor whose murder had opened the door to the auction in the first place.

  Julianus' body was given to Manlia Scantilla and Didia Clara, who buried him in his great-grandfather's tomb, located at the fifth milestone on the Via Labicana.

  The currency devaluation he ordered was modest compared to what came after. But he restarted a downward trend that Pertinax had interrupted. The Severan dynasty, which immediately followed, would pursue currency debasement on a far larger scale. That pattern contributed to the hyperinflation and economic upheaval that marked later Roman history.

  The two Germanic tribes he had repelled during his military career, the Chauci and the Chatti, were, as later observers would note, early indicators of far larger migrations to come. Those migrations would continue in various forms until the sixth century. The border victories Julianus won in his military career were real, but they held off only the early edge of a much longer demographic pressure.

  His accession is depicted in the film The Fall of the Roman Empire, where the actor Eric Porter plays him as a scheming henchman of Commodus. Douglas Wilmer plays Pescennius Niger in the same film, and the two characters compete against each other in the auction scene. The Scottish novelist Iain Banks also alluded to Julianus' short reign in his novel The Business, giving the 66-day emperor a small place in fiction more than eighteen centuries after his death.