The Book of Ancient Bastards (20 page)

The Emperor Who Gave Us the Word “Severe”

( A.D. 145–211)

There were many things Severus did that were not to our liking, and he was blamed for making the city turbulent through the presence of so many troops and for burdening the State by his excessive expenditures of money, and most of all, for placing his hope of safety in the strength of his army rather than in the good will of his associates in the government.
—Cassius Dio, The Roman History

We get any number of words from the Latin, such as the names of most of the months (“July” for Julius Caesar and “August” for Augustus). Imagine what the guy whose name gave us the modern word “severe” must have been like.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Lucius Septimius Severus, the man who finished the work of earlier ambitious demagogues by turning Rome into the de facto military dictatorship it remained for the last two centuries of its existence.

Severus was that luckiest of men: born in the provinces to an undistinguished family, he rose through the ranks of the empire’s civil service because of his family connections. His good luck followed him throughout the next two decades, where he served without merit or particular distinction in a variety of provincial government posts.

In A.D. 191, Severus got particularly lucky: he was appointed governor of Upper Pannonia, which post also carried with it command of the legions defending the Danube frontier against the barbarian tribes to the north.

Two years later, during the tumultuous aftermath of the murder of the emperor Commodus, Severus’s troops rose up and proclaimed him emperor. He accepted their proclamation and marched on Rome at the head of his troops, sweeping aside all opposition and entering the city several weeks later.

In order to strengthen his grip on power, the emperor swept aside the largely ornamental senate and expanded the size of the army by hundreds of thousands of men. He used his new legions not just for external but for internal security. He expanded the frontiers in the east and in Britain and crushed the insurrections of two rival generals during the first years of his reign.

It was under Severus that Roman persecution of Christians began in earnest. Where other emperors had executed early church leaders, Severus forbade any resident of the empire from converting to either Judaism or Christianity on pain of death. Thousands were killed and their property confiscated by the state.

Severus died in A.D. 211 after a long illness, leaving a smoothly running military dictatorship to his sons Caracalla and Geta. This bastard’s political philosophy can best be summed up by the final advice he gave them: “Agree with each other, give money to the soldiers, and scorn all other men.” As we shall see in the next chapter, his sons had a bit of trouble following their ruthless father’s advice.

African Bastard

A Roman citizen from a family that had emigrated a couple of generations earlier, Septimius Severus was born in North Africa, the first Roman emperor not born in Europe. He went to Rome as a young man because two of his cousins were highly placed among the empire’s civil servants (both of them serving as consul while Severus was still a child), and these family connections promised him advancement in lucrative government jobs.

Don’t Drop Your Guard Along
with Your Trousers

( A.D. 188–217)

His mode of life was evil and he was more brutal even than his cruel father. He was gluttonous in his use of food and addicted to wine, hated by his household and detested in every camp save the praetorian guard; and between him and his brother there was no resemblance whatever.
—The Historia Augusta

Calling someone “more brutal even than his cruel father” is saying something when that cruel father was the ruthless Roman emperor Septimius Severus. But in this case it’s hardly an exaggeration: the brutal bastard being referred to set up his father-in-law on a charge of treason, eventually executed his wife, and stabbed his own brother to death in the presence of his mother!

While it’s true that contemporary and subsequent historians have demonized Caracalla throughout the centuries (his brother Geta was better at spin-
doctoring than he was), and he likely wasn’t as bad as he’s been made out to be, several of the more atrocious misdeeds laid at his feet are probably true.

For starters, Caracalla did set up his father-in-law, who was his father’s trusted subordinate, the Praetorian Guard commander Gaius Fulvius Plautianus. He got several centurions to approach old Severus and inform him that Plautianus had attempted to recruit them into a plot to assassinate Severus. Within hours, Plautianus was dead, and his daughter (Caracalla’s wife), as the child of a traitor, was sent into exile. Once he was emperor in his own right, Caracalla had her killed.

On his deathbed, Severus had said that Geta and Caracalla ought to share power, and he advised them to trust each other, pay off the army, and not care what anyone else thought. Turns out they were able to accomplish two of those three things.

When it came to trusting each other, though, that was just never going to happen. They loathed each other. Each tried to have the other poisoned within months of their taking the throne in A.D. 211. In their final confrontation, in their mother’s chambers, Caracalla stabbed Geta, who died clinging to her.

This was hardly the end of Caracalla’s bloody deeds. While he was in Alexandria, he ordered thousands of civilians slaughtered for reasons that remain unclear.

When he invaded the Parthian empire a couple of years later, Caracalla ran out of luck. Some of his personal guardsmen hatched a plot to kill him, which culminated in his being stabbed to death when he stopped by the side of the road to answer the call of nature. When the other members of his retinue turned their backs out of respect for the office, one of their number stepped forward and stabbed Caracalla to death in mid-bowel movement.

Bastard Fashion Statement

Like Caligula before him, Caracalla derived his nickname from an item of clothing he customarily wore: a caracallus, which was originally a short, tight-fighting cloak with a hood. Caracalla adapted this, making it much longer, and wearing it everywhere he went on campaign with his armies. The soldiers coined his nickname, and as a result he is better known today as Caracalla rather than by his ruling name of Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Pius.

The Emperor and His Big Stone God

( A.D. 203–222)

I will not describe the barbaric chants which [Elagabalus], together with his mother and grandmother, chanted to [Elagabal], or the secret sacrifices that he offered to him, slaying boys and using charms, in fact actually shutting up alive in the god’s temple a lion, a monkey and a snake, and throwing in among them human genitals, and practicing other unholy rites.
—Dio Cassius, The Roman History

Who was the strangest bastard ever to don the imperial purple of ancient Rome? How about a gay, cross-dressing religious fanatic who wore more makeup than most strippers, and allegedly worked as a hooker out of his rooms in the imperial palace?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Varius Avitus Bassianus, better known by the nickname Elagabalus. He ruled the empire under the very Roman-sounding name of “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus” from A.D. 218 to 222.

Born and raised in Syria, the kid was all of fourteen when his mother and grandmother used his blood connection to several previous emperors to engineer a claim to the throne. Within months, he was on his way to Rome. And he literally brought his god with him.

Elagabalus and his followers worshipped a craggy, two-ton phallic-shaped meteorite as the actual physical incarnation of his god (“Elagabal,” or “El-Gabal,” from which he derived his nickname).

The new emperor’s religious views were only part of the problem, though. Much more important was his penchant for continually thumbing his nose at Rome’s traditions—for example, by taking as his husband a slave-charioteer named Hierocles. He would even go so far as to have his lover catch him “cheating” and beat him: a foreign slave beating a sitting emperor! It couldn’t last.

It all finally came to a head in March of A.D. 222, when Elagabalus flew into a rage during a meeting with the commanders of the Praetorian Guard (his personal bodyguard), denouncing them as disloyal: not a very bright thing to do while still standing in the middle of their camp.

They chased him down and killed him in one of the camp latrines. His last words were, “Leave my mother alone!” If those actually were his final wishes, they were ignored. His mother was killed right alongside him. Their bodies were beheaded, dragged through the streets of Rome, and wound up in the Tiber River, the sort of burial that contemporary Roman law reserved for criminals.

Later historians whipped up many improbable tales about this teenaged demagogue, but the truth as we can divine it about Elagabalus is far more interesting.

Bastard on Parade

[Elagabalus] placed the sun god in a chariot adorned with gold and jewels and brought him out from the city to the suburbs. A six-horse chariot carried the divinity, the horses huge and flawlessly white, with expensive gold fittings and rich ornaments. No one held the reins, and no one rode with the chariot; the vehicle was escorted as if the god himself were the charioteer. Elagabalus ran backward in front of the chariot, facing the god and holding the horses’ reins. He made the whole journey in this reverse fashion, looking up into the face of his god.

—Herodian, History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus Aurelius