Septimius Severus

Septimius Severus, a senator from the North African city of Leptis Magna, won the Roman throne in the civil wars of 193 and held it until his death in 211. He fought on the Euphrates, the edge of the Sahara and in Scotland, made the army the foundation of imperial power, and founded the Severan dynasty, the last to rule before the turmoil of the third century.

Severus was born on 11 April 145 at Leptis Magna, in present-day Libya, into a wealthy family of equestrian rank, with Punic and Libyan ancestry on his father's side and Italian on his mother's. He grew up speaking Punic and learned Latin and Greek, which he spoke with a slight accent. Because both his birthplace and his family were provincial, he is often called the first truly provincial emperor. Helped by a cousin who had been consul, he entered the Senate under Marcus Aurelius, though his early career was slowed by delays and by the Antonine Plague. In the 170s he held a series of posts, including service in Africa and as tribune of the plebs.

His first wife, Paccia Marciana, also from Leptis, died around 186. According to the Historia Augusta, a notoriously unreliable source, Severus then consulted horoscopes and chose a Syrian woman who had been told she would marry a king. She was Julia Domna, daughter of a high priest of the sun god at Emesa, and they married in 187 at Lugdunum, modern Lyon, where he was governor. Their sons, the future emperors Caracalla and Geta, were born in 188 and 189. Julia Domna became one of his most trusted advisers.

In 191 Severus became governor of Pannonia Superior on the Danube. When the emperor Pertinax was murdered by the Praetorian Guard early in 193 and Didius Julianus bought the throne at auction, Severus's troops proclaimed him emperor at Carnuntum on 9 April. He marched on Rome, where the Senate condemned Julianus to death, and replaced the guard with soldiers from his own legions. He bought time with Clodius Albinus, governor of Britain, by naming him Caesar, then defeated the eastern claimant Pescennius Niger at Issus in 194. When he made Caracalla his heir, Albinus rebelled, and on 19 February 197 Severus defeated and killed him near Lugdunum in a battle involving perhaps 75,000 men on his side. He then had 29 senators executed for backing Albinus.

Severus next turned on the Parthian Empire, sacking its capital Ctesiphon and annexing northern Mesopotamia, though two sieges of Hatra failed. In Africa his commanders pushed the frontier deep into the desert, taking Garama, the capital of the Garamantes. He raised three new legions, stationed one of them near Rome, and increased soldiers' pay, financing the costs partly by debasing the silver coinage. At court his prefect Plautianus wielded enormous power until his execution in 205.

In 208 he travelled to Britain, strengthened Hadrian's Wall and invaded Caledonia, in modern Scotland. Cassius Dio claims the Romans lost as many as 50,000 men there to ambushes and hardship. The Caledonians made peace and then revolted again, but Severus fell ill and died at Eboracum, modern York, on 4 February 211. He is said to have told his sons to live in harmony, enrich the soldiers and scorn everyone else. His ashes were taken to Rome.

Severus left the Roman Empire at what some scholars consider its greatest territorial extent, and he adorned Rome and Leptis Magna with triumphal arches. His heavier reliance on a better-paid army and the burden it placed on taxpayers troubled later emperors, and the historian Edward Gibbon blamed him as a principal author of Rome's decline. The dynasty he founded was the last to rule before the Crisis of the Third Century.

Our 200 map shows the empire in the middle of his reign, after his Parthian war, with Rome's African, eastern and British frontiers all visible.