Severus Alexander

• 1. Introduction

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  Severus Alexander was born on the 1st of October 208 in Arca Caesarea, Phoenicia, and by the age of thirteen he was ruling the Roman Empire alone. His predecessor, the emperor Elagabalus, had been killed by his own guards, and the bodies of Elagabalus and his mother were thrown into the Tiber river as an act of contempt. Into that vacancy stepped a child.

  Alexander's thirteen-year reign would be the longest of any sole emperor since Antoninus Pius. It would include a war against the rising Sassanid Empire in the east and a desperate, failing campaign against Germanic tribes in the north. And it would end in a tent in Mainz, surrounded by his own mutinous soldiers.

  What made a boy emperor the last man standing of the Severan dynasty? Why did the Roman army that once admired him turn against him with such finality? And what did his death set in motion for the centuries that followed?

• 2. A Grandmother's Gambit

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  Julia Maesa was the sister of the empress Julia Domna, and she understood Roman power as few people of her era did. It was Maesa who had arranged for Elagabalus to be acclaimed emperor by the Third Gallic Legion. When Elagabalus became a liability, she moved again.

  Maesa concluded that her other grandson, the boy then known as Alexianus, had more promise than Elagabalus and was more likely to win the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard. She arranged for Elagabalus to adopt the young Alexander as his heir, and then she arranged for Elagabalus's assassination. On the 13th of March 222, the Roman army hailed Alexander as emperor. The Senate ratified that acclamation the following day, conferring on him the titles of Augustus, Pater patriae, and Pontifex maximus.

  Alexander's birth name is a matter of some scholarly dispute. The historian Cassius Dio recorded the cognomen Bassianus, while Herodian recorded Alexianus. Dio also believed he was the son of a man named Gessius Marcianus, though the scholar Icks has challenged this, arguing the timeline does not allow for it and that Alexander must have been fathered by his mother's first husband, whose name is not known. What is certain is that from the start, the boy who became Severus Alexander was a figure shaped by women who knew exactly what they were doing.

• 3. Governance and Reform

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  Ulpian, one of the most prominent jurists of the era, was brought in under Alexander's reign to oversee the administration of justice. The court around the young emperor also included the senator and historian Cassius Dio as an adviser, and historical sources describe the creation of a select board of sixteen senators, though that claim is sometimes disputed by scholars.

  Alexander also assembled a municipal council of fourteen members to help the urban prefect manage the fourteen districts of Rome. Excess and extravagance at the imperial court were reduced. He restored the Baths of Nero in 227 or 229, and they became known as the Baths of Alexander. On the Esquiline Hill he expanded the imperial residence at the Horti Lamiani, and he built the Nymphaeum of Alexander, now called the Trophies of Marius, at the end of the Aqua Claudia aqueduct. It still stands in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.

  His monetary policy was active. On accession he reduced the silver purity of the denarius from 46.5% to 43%, dropping the actual silver weight from 1.41 grams to 1.30 grams. Then in 229 he reversed course, raising purity and weight to 45% and 1.46 grams. The following year he pushed further, reaching 50.5% purity and 1.50 grams. Taxes were lightened across his reign, loan offices were set up to lend money at moderate interest, and literature, art, and science were encouraged.

  In religious matters he kept an open mind, continuing all privileges extended to Jews and allowing a synagogue to be built in Rome. To that synagogue he gave a scroll of the Torah now known as the Severus Scroll.

• 4. The Discipline Problem

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  In 228, the Praetorian Guard killed their own prefect, Ulpian, in Alexander's presence. The emperor could not openly punish the ringleader without risking further unrest, so he removed the man to a nominal post in Egypt and then Crete, where, as the sources put it, he was quietly put out of the way. The soldiers then fought a three-day battle against the citizens of Rome, ending only after parts of the city were set on fire.

  The historian Dio gave a damning account of military morale under Alexander, suggesting the soldiers would rather surrender to the enemy than fight. The writer Herodian attributed the rot to what he called the emperor's miserliness, partly a consequence of his mother's greed, and a slowness to hand out the monetary gifts soldiers expected. The scholar Campbell pointed to something deeper: the fading prestige of the Severan dynasty itself, Alexander's visible dependence on his mother, and the absence of real military victories at a moment when the empire was facing serious external pressure.

  Alexander had been described by his admirers as possessing simple virtues and moderate behavior, qualities that distinguished him sharply from Elagabalus. But virtue and moderation were not what his legions were looking for as the borders grew more dangerous.

• 5. War Against the Sassanids

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  Ardashir I had built the Sassanid Empire into a formidable force, and in 231 he invaded the Roman provinces of the east, overrunning Mesopotamia and pushing possibly as far as Syria and Cappadocia. Alexander moved to Antioch and organized a three-pronged invasion of the Sassanian Empire in 233. He personally led the main force toward northern Mesopotamia. A second army moved through the mountains of Armenia into Media. A third advanced from the south toward Babylon.

  The campaign did not go as planned. Herodian recorded a series of humiliating Roman setbacks, while the Historia Augusta and Alexander's own dispatches to the Senate claimed victories. The northern force achieved some success in mountainous terrain that suited the Roman infantry. The southern force was surrounded and destroyed by Ardashir's horse-archers. Alexander himself retreated after an indecisive campaign, his army weakened by indiscipline and disease. The northern army suffered further losses during its withdrawal through the cold of Armenia, partly because of a failure to establish adequate supply lines.

  A mutiny arose in 232 when the Syrian legion proclaimed a man named Taurinus as emperor. Alexander suppressed it. Taurinus drowned while trying to escape across the Euphrates. Despite the mixed results of the campaign, Mesopotamia was retaken and Ardashir was unable to extend his conquests further in the short term, though his son Shapur would make gains later in the century. Alexander returned to Rome and celebrated a triumph in 233.

• 6. Death at Mainz

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  In 234, barbarian forces crossed the Rhine and Danube in numbers large enough to cause alarm as far south as Rome. Alexander's soldiers, already worn down by the costly Persian campaign, found their own homes destroyed by the invaders and their mood toward their emperor darkened further.

  Alexander went to the front. He prepared a fleet to carry the army across the river. But his instinct was to avoid battle, believing the mere presence of Roman forces might persuade the tribes to stand down. When that failed, on the advice of his mother Julia Mamaea, he attempted to buy the Germanic tribes off with payments. The legionaries saw this as dishonorable. They concluded their emperor was unfit for command.

  The soldiers turned to Gaius Julius Verus Maximinus, a soldier from Thrace with a formidable personal reputation who had risen from a peasant background to a prominent military position. In early March 235, inside a tent at Moguntiacum, the city now called Mainz, Alexander met with his generals. A Germanic servant entered and called for the emperor's death. Many of the troops joined in. Alexander's attendants fought back but could not hold them off. Within minutes, Alexander was dead. His mother Julia Mamaea, who was present in the same tent, was killed by the same group.

  Their bodies are traditionally believed to have been buried together in the mausoleum called Monte del Grano in Rome, the third largest mausoleum in the city after those of Hadrian and Augustus. A large sarcophagus found inside the tomb in the 16th century is now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori Museum.

• 7. Crisis and Consequence

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  Alexander's assassination did not simply end a reign. The decades that followed brought civil war, foreign invasion, and the collapse of the Roman monetary economy, a period historians call the Crisis of the Third Century. That crisis lasted nearly fifty years, and it was Alexander's death that opened the door.

  Maximinus had built his case for replacing Alexander by contrasting his own military toughness against what he called Alexander's cowardly failings. But in seizing the power to remove their emperor, the legions had established a precedent that would destabilize Roman rule for generations. Alexander's economic policies were discarded after his death, and the currency was devalued. He was deified following the death of Maximinus in 238.

  A separate thread runs from Alexander's mausoleum to the British Museum. The Portland Vase, a cameo glass work dated to around the reign of Augustus, was allegedly found at Monte del Grano in the 16th century. Pietro Santi Bartoli described the discovery, and an early account claimed the vase contained the ashes of Severus Alexander himself. The vase passed through several owners, including Sir William Hamilton, ambassador to the royal court in Naples. In 1784 it was sold to the Duchess of Portland, giving the vase the name it still carries. In 1786, Josiah Wedgwood borrowed it from the 3rd Duke of Portland and copied it in black Jasperware for his firm, adding some drapery over nudity. Those copies later proved useful when a disturbed man smashed the original into fragments at the British Museum in 1845. The vase has since been reconstructed three times.