Macrinus

• 1. Introduction

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  Macrinus, born around 165 in Caesarea - the city now called Cherchell in modern Algeria - became Roman emperor in April 217 without ever having set foot in the Senate. He was a Berber from Mauretania Caesariensis, the son of an equestrian family, and he wore a pierced ear as a mark of his heritage. No emperor before him had risen from outside the senatorial class. No emperor before him would go an entire reign without once visiting Rome. His path to power ran through an assassination, a prophecy, and a gamble on his own survival. His fall, barely fourteen months later, would be engineered by a grandmother with an immense fortune and a fourteen-year-old boy who danced before a sun-deity in a Syrian city. What happened between those two moments is a compressed, violent lesson in the limits of reform - and in how quickly an army can abandon the man it made.

• 2. Rise From Mauretania

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  Caesarea, the provincial capital of Mauretania Caesariensis, was not the usual nursery for Roman emperors. Macrinus received an education there that carried him into the Roman political class, and over time he built a reputation as a skilled lawyer. Under Emperor Septimius Severus he became an important bureaucrat, and Severus' successor Caracalla elevated him further still, making him prefect of the Praetorian Guard. That appointment placed him at the center of imperial power - responsible for civil affairs and close enough to the emperor to travel with him on campaign. His pierced ear, which the historian David Potter links to Berber tribal custom, would have marked him visually as an outsider even as he climbed. The tension between his origins and his office would define everything that followed.

• 3. The Murder at Carrhae

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  In the spring of 217, Caracalla was in the eastern provinces preparing a war against the Parthian Empire, and Macrinus rode with him. According to tradition, a prophecy had reached Caracalla suggesting that Macrinus would one day depose him. Whether or not Caracalla believed it, Macrinus did - and decided to act first. On the 8th of April, Caracalla left the winter camp at Edessa to visit a temple of Luna near the site of the ancient battle of Carrhae. He traveled with only his personal guard. The guard returned to camp with two bodies: Caracalla, stabbed to death on the road, and one of the accompanying soldiers. The soldier later said to have done the killing was Justin Martialis, described as a recruit of Macrinus. Martialis was killed by one of Caracalla's men almost immediately afterward, cutting off any direct testimony. For two or three days, Rome had no emperor. Then, on the 11th of April, Macrinus proclaimed himself - without waiting for the Senate, whose ratification would have to travel by messenger from a continent away.

• 4. Governing From a Distance

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  The Senate accepted Macrinus for two reasons: his removal of the widely disliked Caracalla, and the army's loyalty to him. Yet the senators scrutinized him sharply, troubled less by his Mauretanian ancestry than by the fact that he was not one of them. Their unease deepened when Macrinus began appointing men of similarly undistinguished backgrounds to high offices. He governed throughout from Antioch, never making the journey to Rome - a decision that fed a growing sense of illegitimacy in the capital. The empire Caracalla had handed him was fiscally ruined and militarily overextended, with wars still running against Parthia, Armenia, and Dacia. Caracalla had more than doubled legionary pay, raising it from 2,000 sesterces to 3,000 sesterces a year and stripping the treasury bare to fund it. Macrinus' first task was to stop the bleeding. His chosen solution was to hold the line on pay for existing soldiers while reducing new recruits back to the rates set by Septimius Severus - a distinction the veterans immediately read as a promise of worse to come. He also revalued the denarius, raising its silver purity from 50.78 percent to 57.85 percent and its weight from 1.66 grams to 1.82 grams, mirroring Severus' own monetary policy of 197 to 209. These were careful, technically defensible measures. The army experienced them as a betrayal.

• 5. Diplomacy Over War

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  Macrinus fought an indecisive battle against the Parthians at Nisibis in 217 and then paid a large indemnity to the Parthian ruler Artabanus IV to secure peace. The price was steep but the alternative - a prolonged eastern war with an empty treasury - was worse. Armenia required a different kind of repair. Caracalla had invited the Armenian king Khosrov I to a conference in 216, imprisoned him and his family, and installed a Roman governor in his place. Macrinus undid this by returning the crown and looted property to Khosrov's son and successor Tiridates II, releasing Tiridates' mother from prison, and restoring Armenia to its standing as a client kingdom. Peace with Dacia was made by releasing hostages, though this was likely arranged not by Macrinus himself but by a general named Marcius Agrippa. Each settlement cost something - money, territory, symbolic concessions - and each made the military angrier at an emperor who seemed to prefer paying enemies rather than defeating them.

• 6. Julia Maesa and the Boy Priest

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  Caracalla's mother, Julia Domna, had initially been left alone after Macrinus took power. When Macrinus discovered she was conspiring against him, he placed her under house arrest in Antioch. She was by then suffering from what was believed to be an advanced stage of breast cancer, and she died in Antioch after starving herself. Macrinus then sent Domna's sister, Julia Maesa, back to her hometown of Emesa in Syria. Maesa arrived there with what the sources describe as an immense fortune, accumulated over twenty years at the imperial court. In Emesa lived her fourteen-year-old grandson Elagabalus, who served as chief priest of the Phoenician sun-deity of the same name. Soldiers from the Legio III Gallica, stationed at the nearby camp of Raphanea, visited Emesa regularly and watched Elagabalus perform his priestly rituals. Maesa cultivated these soldiers, spreading the claim that Elagabalus was actually the illegitimate son of Caracalla. On the 16th of May, the Legio III Gallica proclaimed Elagabalus emperor at their camp at Raphanea. The rebellion that Macrinus had triggered by sending Maesa away had now given that rebellion an army.

• 7. Battle, Flight, and Death

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  Macrinus sent a cavalry force commanded by Ulpius Julianus to crush the revolt, but Julianus failed and died in the attempt. A second force, led by Gannys, the tutor of Elagabalus, then marched on Antioch. On the 8th of June 218, roughly 24 miles from Antioch near the village of Immae, the two sides met at what came to be called the Battle of Antioch. At some point in the fighting, Macrinus deserted the battlefield. He retreated into Antioch, where further fighting had broken out, and then fled the city entirely, heading west toward Rome. He reached Chalcedon before being recognized and captured. His son and co-emperor Diadumenianus - who had been just eight years old when Macrinus made him Caesar - had been sent under guard toward Artabanus IV of Parthia. Diadumenianus never arrived; he was captured at Zeugma and killed in June 218. His reign as co-emperor had lasted less than one month, and he was approximately ten years old when he died. Macrinus, on learning of his son's death, attempted to escape his captors, injured himself in the effort, and was executed in Cappadocia. Both heads were sent to Elagabalus.

• 8. Damnatio Memoriae

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  The Senate declared Macrinus and Diadumenianus hostes - enemies of the state - as soon as news of their deaths arrived in Rome, doing so as part of a formal declaration of support for Elagabalus. The declaration set off two separate waves of erasure. The first was official: portraits were destroyed, names were struck from inscriptions and papyri. The second came from the soldiers who had switched sides, who destroyed the works and possessions of Macrinus. The damnatio memoriae against Macrinus is counted among the earliest such sanctions the Senate ever enacted. Many marble busts of him survive in defaced or mutilated form, and a large number of coins bearing his image or that of Diadumenianus were destroyed in the same purge. The survival of those damaged busts is its own kind of testimony - a record of how thoroughly Rome wanted to forget a man who had held power for fourteen months, reformed the currency, made peace on three fronts, and never once walked through the city's gates. His name came from Mauretania; in Cappadocia it was taken away.