Interrupted dynasty – between Caracalla and Elagabalus, there are non-Severans.
DYNASTIC PLANNING
- Plans
- Geta 209-11
- Caracalla 198-217
- Both share power with their father Septimius before his death
- In 198 Septimius makes Caracalla co-Augustus
- Geta is made Caesar at the same time
- Intended as the spare – younger of the two, exceeded to honours later than his brother
- Intention for them to share power
- Both consuls in 205 and 208
- Geta gets honours equivalent to his brother (co-Augustus)
- Septimius leaves Empire for joint rule between sons – why?
- Stability?
- Literary sources suggest Septimius was concerned about the behaviour of Caracalla
- Herodian 3.10.3-4
- Memory of early contention between two children
- Later disagreements being read back into their childhood?
- Practise
- Brothers did not get on initially - public unity, private enmity
- Each established independent admin apparatus
- Dec 25 211 – Caracalla murders Geta
- Justified by Caracalla as self defence
- Herodian 4.4.3-6
- Herodian 4.5.5-6
- Common practice to include speeches that gave a sense of the sort of thing that would have been appropriate for that character to say in the situation
- No idea what was actually said
- Herodian imagining what Caracalla might have said to justify the act
- Caracalla gets the Praetorian guard on board first – giving a large military bonus
- Dio 78.3.2 – remembers the actions by which Caracalla went about solidifying his rule
- Caracalla’s ability to rule is based on getting the military and Praetorians onside
- N.B. Septimius Severus’ dying words to his sons – Dio 77.15.2
- Goes to senate next day
- Chronology interesting – military first, then ratify with senate
- Massacre of Geta’s supporters – 20,000? Other claimants
- Damnatio memoriae
- Draws focus to the erased section
- Deliberate attempt at publicly erasing someone’s identity as a warning
CARACALLA’S REIGN
- Constitutio Antoniniana
- Most famous act (of 3rd century) – edict of universal citizenship
- 212 AD
- Ulpian – all those who are in the Roman world have been made Roman citizens as a result of the constitution of the emperor Antoninus
- Edict exists in fragmentary form
- Extraordinary thing for an empire to do
- Already unusual for sharing citizenship – not normally what empires do
- Rome shared citizenship with local elites
- Giving citizenship to everybody in the empire was utterly unprecedented
- Negates the point of having an empire?
- Empire – rulers and rule, hierarchical relationship
- If everybody in territory is made a citizen, then nobody is being rule
- For such a surprising act, it seems to have elicited little surprise in antiquity – sources fairly quiet about it
- So why did he do it?
- Personal recognition – when a roman slave was freed, he took the nomen of his master as his own name – extreme way of establishing a tie between self and large number of people in the empire
- Financial reasons – increase number of people who need to pay taxes
- This is the view of Dio 77.9
- Seems unlikely though – many different ways of raising income, and could create new taxes when needed, or extract money from provinces
- Conspiracy? Establishes a link between sacrificial thanksgiving and the gift of universal citizenship
- National identity – victory of the Roman people?
- Everybody bought into an act of thanksgiving as a way to join people together
- Uniting people as a response to the increasing fragmentation of the empire in the late 2nd century
- Related question – how significant was this?
- How many people did it actually affect?
- Need to know how many people in the empire, and how many are already citizens
- Incredibly difficult task to do
- Is the reason that Dio and Ulpian don’t comment on this that it wasn’t that much of a deal because most people were already citizens?
- Tyrant?
- Viewed as a bad emperor in the list of ‘good/bad emperors’
- Executions?
- Geta’s supporters – 20,000
- 215 AD mass slaughter of citizens in Alexandria
- Financial mismanagement
- Dio 78.9.2-7
- Dio slips into the first person – ‘we’
- Reference to Dio’s own senatorial class
- Financial mismanagement was a concern of those particularly hit by it – i.e. the senators and provincial elites
- Probably doesn’t reflect the concerns of the masses in the empire
- Poor foreign policy especially with Parthia
- Septimius had exploited weak Parthia with unnecessary wars – 194/5 and 197/9
- Caracalla made things worse – from 213, prepped eastern campaign
- Parthian frontier had been relatively stable by mutual agreement on the Euphrates from the time of Augustus
- Trajan had pushed boundary but given back by Hadrian
- By gaining territory, they raise the question of where the border should be
- All fine when Parthia is weak, but stirs trouble when Parthia becomes more powerful
- Eastern power suddenly becomes a force to be reckoned with and pushes back
- Would they have pushed back if Rome did not interfere with border with cheap and easy victories?
DYNASTY INTERRUPTED
- Death of Caracalla
- Only emperor to die with his trousers down
- While on a trip (pilgrimage) in the east, assassinated
- Done by Martialis – minor soldier
- Sort of death the exact thing authors would have wanted to portray for Caracalla
- KIV parallels with Caligula’s assassination
- Interlopers
- First period of usurpation
- Brief reign of Macrinus 217-218 and his son Diadumenianus 218
- Macrinus
- North African equestrian – not an important individual
- First non-senator to be emperor
- Career as advocate and legal consultant
- After death of Caracalla, Macrinus respons cautiously
- 3 day period without an emperor Dio 79.11
- 4 days after death (Severus’ birthday) assembles troops
- Writes to senators - slow to respond? Eventually declared emperor
- Troops unhappy by assassination
- He takes Severus’ name
- Distances himself from assassination
- Policy
- Reinforce centralising tendencies
- Trouble with Parthia – new kids in town
- Artabnus uses instability as excuse to advance
- 217 battle at Nisibis – Romans defeated
- Crippling peace settlement to Roman empire – agrees to pay 200 million sesterces
- 1/8 of annual budget of empire
|
|