Severan dynasty
The Severan dynasty ruled the Roman Empire from 193 to 235, and it began not with a coronation but with a civil war. When the chaos following the death of Commodus fractured Roman authority in what historians call the Year of the Five Emperors, a general from Leptis Magna outfought every rival and seized the throne. His name was Septimius Severus, and the dynasty he built with his Syrian wife Julia Domna would stretch across four decades and six emperors, some brilliant, some catastrophic, and one who was murdered and thrown into a sewer. What made this family so durable, and so destructive? How did a dynasty born in civil war sustain itself through fratricide, foreign invasion, and religious scandal? And what role did the women of the family play in holding it together, long after the men had torn it apart?
Lucius Septimius Severus was born on the 9th of April, 145, in Leptis Magna, a city in what is now Libya, in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis. His family held equestrian rank and carried Libyan-Punic and Italic roots. From that provincial start, he climbed through military ranks under the emperors of the Antonine dynasty, eventually reaching consular rank. In the summer of 187, he married Julia Domna, a Syrian Arab noblewoman, and the union produced two sons, Caracalla and Geta.
When Commodus died and Roman authority collapsed, Severus's legionaries in Noricum proclaimed him emperor in 193. He was not the only claimant. It took him four more years to eliminate his rivals, and the decisive blow came in early 197 at the Battle of Lugdunum, where he defeated Clodius Albinus and secured sole rule. That same year he launched a successful campaign against the Parthians, and between 208 and 210 he campaigned in Roman Britain, rebuilding Hadrian's Wall.
At home, his relationship with the Senate was poor, but soldiers and commoners favored him. He raised soldiers' salaries. He also debased the Roman currency; upon his accession alone, he reduced the silver purity of the denarius from 81.5% to 78.5%. Starting in 197, his praetorian prefect Gaius Fulvius Plautianus accumulated growing influence before being executed in 205, a sign of the tensions the dynasty would never fully resolve.
Septimius died of natural causes in early 211 while on campaign in Britain, leaving the empire to two sons who despised each other.
Caracalla, the eldest son of Severus, was born in 188 as Lucius Septimius Bassianus. The name everyone remembers him by was a nickname, taken from the Gallic hooded tunic he habitually wore. His father made him caesar in 195, renamed him Aurelius Antonius Marcus after Marcus Aurelius, and elevated him to augustus in 198, the same year the younger brother Geta was named caesar.
From the beginning, the relationship between the brothers was hostile. Their father had tried to manage it; Julia Domna, their mother, mediated after Septimius died. It did not hold. In 211, soon after their father's death, Caracalla had Geta murdered. The killing took place in their mother's apartments. Geta died clinging to Julia Domna. Caracalla then purged many of Geta's supporters while winning over his legionaries with lavish pay raises.
Geta had been born in 189 and made co-augustus in 209 or 210. The pairing of joint emperors was not unprecedented; Marcus Aurelius and his brother Lucius Verus had shared power the century before without such violence. The Severan brothers could not manage it.
Caracalla's reign produced two lasting marks on Roman history. He bestowed Roman citizenship on all free inhabitants of the empire, a sweeping legal change whose precise motivations remain unclear. He also built the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, still standing and still striking today. His end came on the 8th of April, 217, when he was murdered near Carrhae while traveling to wage war on the Parthians. The killer was a soldier attached to the Praetorian Guard, acting on the orders of the praetorian prefect Macrinus, who would briefly claim the throne for himself.
Macrinus was born in 164 at Caesarea in Mauretania, the city now called Cherchell in Algeria. He was the first Roman emperor who did not come from a senatorial family. Of equestrian rank and Moorish birth, he rose through administrative and legal work to become a praetorian prefect under Caracalla, which placed him close enough to the center of power to organize a conspiracy against his own master.
After Caracalla's murder in 217, the troops saluted Macrinus as augustus. He made peace with the Parthian Empire, but the terms required paying reparations for the damage Caracalla's campaigns had caused. His soldiers considered those terms degrading. He compounded the problem by a pay policy that gave veteran eastern troops their accustomed higher wages while paying new recruits at the lower scale Septimius Severus had set, satisfying no one fully.
His political position was further weakened by the proximity of Syrian troops to the family of Julia Domna. By keeping rebellious forces in Syria, he inadvertently gave those soldiers contact with a young boy named Elagabalus, the grandnephew of Julia Domna. In May 218, troops camping near Elesa revolted and hailed Elagabalus as emperor.
Marinus moved to suppress the revolt and failed. He met the army of Elagabalus near Antioch and was decisively defeated. He fled with his son to Chalcedon, was captured, and was murdered by his guards before he could even be brought back to Antioch. He never once entered the city of Rome during his brief reign.
Elagabalus was born Varius Avitus Bassianus in 203. He later took the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. The name by which history knows him came from the Syrian sun god Elagabal, of whom he was a priest before he was ever an emperor. At the age of 14, in 218, he was crowned emperor by the Gallic Third Legion.
Two versions of how he came to power survive. In one, his grandmother Julia Maesa, Julia Domna's sister, persuaded the Legio III Gallica to rebel against Macrinus by claiming Elagabalus was actually Caracalla's illegitimate son. She also used her personal wealth to secure soldiers' oaths of loyalty to the boy. In the other version, a man named Gannys, described as a foster father and lover of Elagabalus's mother Julia Soaemias, dressed the boy in Caracalla's childhood clothes and smuggled him into the military camp at night, triggering a revolt by morning. Whichever account is closer to the truth, Elagabalus arrived in Rome as emperor by the summer of 219.
Ancient sources treat his reign harshly, and modern historians have questioned how much of that record can be trusted. Epigraphical and numismatic evidence does confirm that Elagabalus replaced Jupiter with Elagabal as the supreme Roman deity in late 220. He also married a Vestal Virgin named Aquilia Severa, a profound breach of Roman religious convention. His reign produced a tangle of marriages; he later divorced Aquilia to marry Annia Faustina, a relative of Marcus Aurelius, then took Aquilia back before the end of 221.
Julia Maesa, watching her grandson's behavior threaten the family's hold on power, pushed him to adopt his cousin Severus Alexander as caesar and heir in 221. Elagabalus resisted and made several attempts on Alexander's life, which turned the troops against him. In 222, Elagabalus was killed and his body thrown into a sewer. Alexander was hailed emperor the following day.
No account of the Severan dynasty is complete without the women who sustained it. Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus and mother of Caracalla and Geta, held a prominent political role during her husband's reign. When Caracalla became sole emperor, she accompanied him on campaign and managed official correspondence, referring only major matters to the emperor himself. Her sister, Julia Maesa, was the mother of Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea, who were in turn the mothers of Elagabalus and Severus Alexander.
The dynasty's source text calls them all powerful augustae, and the description is accurate in measurable terms. Julia Maesa was personally wealthy enough to bribe an army into loyalty for her grandson. She then recognized, while many around her did not, that Elagabalus's behavior was politically fatal, and she arranged the adoption of Severus Alexander to preserve family power. When Elagabalus tried to undo that arrangement, it was the troops' attachment to Alexander, an attachment Julia Maesa had cultivated, that sealed Elagabalus's fate.
Julia Mamaea guided her son Severus Alexander through his entire reign, beginning when he took the throne at the age of 14. Ancient writers credited that reign with efficiency and compared it favorably to the rule of Septimius Severus, attributing much of its character to Mamaea's influence. She died beside her son in early 235, murdered by his troops in Germany. The dynasty's women had kept it alive through fratricide, religious scandal, and military revolt; in the end, an army mutiny took the last of them together.
Severus Alexander was born Gessius Bassianus Alexianus around 209. In 221, Elagabalus adopted him at the urging of Julia Maesa, making him Marcus Aurelius Alexander Caesar. He became emperor on the 6th of March, 222, the day Elagabalus was killed.
He came to the throne at 14 and ruled under the strong influence of his mother Julia Mamaea. The ancient record praises his governance as orderly and effective. The greatest test of his reign came from the east. The rising Sasanian Empire posed what the sources describe as perhaps the greatest external challenge Rome faced in the third century. In 231, Alexander organized an expedition to Parthia, personally leading it in a nominal sense, and he managed to retain Roman control over the province of Mesopotamia.
His end came not from an enemy army but from his own soldiers. In early 235, he was wintering in Germany to prosecute a war in Upper Germania. His troops mutinied and murdered both Alexander and his mother in their camp. He was initially condemned by his successors, but in 238, his memory was rehabilitated and he was deified.
His successor was Maximinus Thrax, the first in a series of short-lived and frequently violent emperors. That succession is known to historians as the Crisis of the Third Century, and it stretched for fifty years before order was restored through the Tetrarchy under Diocletian. The Severan dynasty had foreshadowed the crisis through its own turbulence; Alexander's death simply opened the door that the dynasty had spent forty years approaching.
Common questions
Who founded the Severan dynasty?
The Severan dynasty was founded by Septimius Severus and his wife Julia Domna. Septimius, born on the 9th of April, 145, in Leptis Magna in the Roman province of Africa Proconsularis, seized power in 193 after emerging victorious from the civil war known as the Year of the Five Emperors.
How did Caracalla become sole emperor of Rome?
Caracalla became sole emperor by murdering his younger brother Geta in 211, shortly after their father Septimius Severus died. Geta was killed in their mother Julia Domna's apartments, and Caracalla then purged Geta's supporters while buying the loyalty of his legionaries with pay raises.
Why was Elagabalus considered a controversial Roman emperor?
Elagabalus, who became emperor at age 14 in 218, replaced Jupiter with the Syrian sun god Elagabal as Rome's supreme deity and married a Vestal Virgin named Aquilia Severa, both serious violations of Roman religious tradition. Ancient sources also accused him of effeminacy and licentiousness, though modern historians question how much of that record is reliable.
What role did Julia Maesa play in the Severan dynasty?
Julia Maesa, sister of Julia Domna and grandmother of both Elagabalus and Severus Alexander, was instrumental in placing and preserving Severan power. She used her personal wealth to secure army loyalty for Elagabalus in 218, then later forced Elagabalus to adopt Severus Alexander as heir when his behavior threatened the family's hold on power.
How did the Severan dynasty end?
The Severan dynasty ended in early 235 when Severus Alexander and his mother Julia Mamaea were murdered by their own troops while Alexander was wintering in Germany to wage war in Upper Germania. His successor was Maximinus Thrax, whose accession began the Crisis of the Third Century.
How long did the Severan dynasty rule Rome?
The Severan dynasty ruled the Roman Empire from 193 to 235, a span of roughly 42 years. The dynasty was briefly interrupted in 217-218 by the reigns of Macrinus and his son Diadumenian before Julia Domna's relatives reclaimed imperial power.
All sources
9 references cited across the entry
- 1JournalChapitre III – Septime Sévère ou la « revanche d'Hannibal »Joël Le Gall et al. — 1992
- 2JournalHadrian’s Wall: 1921-1930R.G. Collingwood — 1931
- 4BookSeptimius Severus: The African EmperorAnthony R.Birley — Taylor & Francis e-Library — 1988
- 6BookThe Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome's Decadent Boy EmperorMartijn Icks — I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd — 2013
- 7Oxford Classical DictionaryOxford University Press — 2012
- 8ThesisChange and discontinuity within the Severan dynasty: the case of MacrinusAndrew Scott — May 2008