The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (41 page)

Septimius Severus, born on 11 April 145, was a native of the northern African colony of Lepcis Magna in Tripolitania (Libya), the scion of a provincial family whose heads had risen to senatorial rank under the aegis of Trajan. With his family’s sponsorship, Severus himself embarked on a senatorial career and rose steadily through the ranks under Marcus Aurelius. Along the way, he acquired a wife, a fellow countrywoman named Paccia Marciana, and at the age of thirty-five, shortly after the death of Marcus Aurelius in March 180, he received a posting to the Roman province of Syria, as commander of the prestigious legion IV Scythica. It was during this tour of duty that Severus first crossed the path of the young Julia Domna.

She hailed from the city of Emesa (modern Homs), located in the fertile valley of the River Orontes in central Syria. Once the principal seat of an Arab kingdom, it was later annexed by the Roman Empire and ruled by a series of client kings, who, like their close allies the Herods down in Judaea, provided diplomatic and military support to their Roman superiors in times of crisis such as the Jewish Revolt of
66–70. Not long afterwards, as the Flavian dynasty consolidated their grip on power and the last of the Emesene kings died out, the territory was smoothly incorporated into the Roman province of Syria.
⁷

Thanks to its rich, volcanic soil which nourished well-watered crops of wheat, fruit and olives, and its location on the Orontes trade route ferrying goods from east to west, Emesa was a wealthy city, though an obscure one in political terms. Best known as the home of the cult of the Emesene sun-god Elagabal, Emesa drew pilgrims journeying to worship a cult object in the form of a large conical black stone. The guardian priests of the sun-god’s cult, who clad themselves in the working costume of a long gold and purple tunic topped by a crown of precious stones, were the descendants of the client-kings who had ruled Emesa in the first half of the first century. When Septimius Severus visited in 180, perhaps drawn by visitor accounts of the vast and famous temple of Elagabal, the hereditary incumbent of the guardian post was Julia Domna’s father Julius Bassianus. He had another young daughter, Julia Maesa, and the family’s Roman-sounding nomenclature reflected their former privileged status as satellite rulers of the Roman Empire, although the girls’
cognomina
, Domna and Maesa, were Semitic in origin. Domna came from the Arabic
Dumayna
, an offshoot of the word for ‘black’, and Maesa’s name is thought to be taken from the Arabic
masa
, meaning to ‘walk with a swinging gait’.
⁸
Domna’s and her sister’s birth years are unknown, though at the time of Severus’s visit in 180, they had probably not yet reached their teens.
⁹

As with the first meetings of other emperors and their consorts, such as Titus and Berenice or Livia and Augustus, we do not know when or where Domna met her future husband, who was still married to Paccia Marciana at the time of his visit to Emesa. A good guess is that Severus and Bassianus had some kind of acquaintance, and that the latter introduced this promising Roman general to his daughters. Following his departure from Syria, Severus’s career stalled for a few years. In the absence of further assignments, he spent some time engaged in private study in Athens before his services were called on again in 185 by Commodus, when he was dispatched to the province of Gallia Lugdunensis to take up his first governorship. Not long after his arrival there, Paccia Marciana died (of natural causes, to the best of our knowledge), and the still-childless Severus’s sights swivelled back in the direction of Emesa, to Bassianus’s daughter Domna. A marriage proposal soon made its way from Severus’s headquarters in Gaul to Bassianus’s residence in Syria, and was duly accepted.
¹⁰

Years later, it was said that Severus had chosen Domna as a bride after meeting her on his Syria trip, because her horoscope had made the prediction that she would marry a king, and this seemed a good omen for an ambitious man such as himself. Severus would also of course not have been blind to the more prosaic advantages of an alliance with a girl who, if she was the same Julia Domna mentioned in a legal text of this period, was the great-niece of a senator and ex-consul named Julius Agrippa (no relation to Berenice’s father), to whose sizeable fortune she was in part heir.
¹¹
The horoscope story was probably invented and disseminated many years later after Severus’s accession, to make the new emperor’s curriculum vitae look more impressive. In the summer of 187, the wedding between forty-two-year-old Severus and his young Syrian bride took place. Severus’s talent for being visited by portentous omens led him to declare later that he had a dream in which a marriage bed for himself and his betrothed was prepared for them by Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina, in the temple of Venus and Rome near the imperial palace.
¹²

Domna’s and Severus’s union was quickly blessed by the birth of two sons. Their first, born in Gaul on 4 April 188, was named Bassianus after his maternal grandfather from Emesa, while the second, born at Rome on 7 March 189, was named Geta, a name shared by Severus’s father and brother. Fatherhood coincided with an improvement in Severus’s career prospects. In 190, after he and his young family had spent a year in Sicily, he attained the coveted rank of consul at the age of forty-five. The promotion ensured them a place at the apex of Roman society, and gave the young Domna a taste of life as a political consort and hostess at their town house in the city. Conversations at the dinner parties and entertainments attended by the consul and his wife were pregnant with speculation and tension.
¹³
Severus’s year of office was served out against the bloody background of Commodus’s twilight years, during which the emperor’s behavior became so erratic that he was said to have taken to entering the gladiatorial arena and slashing the heads off the competition, which might have been more impressive if his opponents hadn’t been ostriches. The historian Cassius Dio, a beneficiary of the Severans’ eventual rise to power, described how he and his fellow senators were forced to stifle their giggles at the sight of this bird-fighting spectacle in order to avoid their emperor’s ire.
¹⁴

There was of course a serious side to the unravelling of Commodus’s reign. The months before the start of Severus’s consulship saw the
fall of the unpopular and unscrupulous Cleander, a freedman chamberlain who had pulled the emperor’s strings since the death of the previous court favourite Perennis in 185. Accusations of conspiracy against the emperor flew around the city, and a wave of senatorial executions followed, including that of an Emesene kinsman of Domna’s named Julius Alexander. Severus was surely glad to put some distance between himself and the hothouse atmosphere of the city in 191, when he was dispatched to a governorship in Upper Pannonia, on the recommendation of Laetus, the head of the praetorian guard. Finally, Commodus’s increasingly unpredictable and violent behaviour convinced Laetus and his new imperial chamberlain Eclectus to act. On 31 December 192, with the connivance of the emperor’s mistress Marcia, Commodus was first poisoned and then strangled in his bath after twelve erratic, childless years of rule. Marcia’s reported role in the affair was a convoluted rehash of the part played by Agrippina Minor and Domitia in the deaths of their husbands – it was claimed she warned Laetus and Eclectus of the existence of a proscription list, on which their names were included, and then mixed poison into Commodus’s evening glass of wine, which only caused him to vomit copiously, forcing the conspirators to hire a professional wrestler to finish their victim off.
¹⁵

Publius Helvidius Pertinax, the son of an ex-slave, was a distinguished military and civil servant under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and had already been installed by the conspirators as emperor by the time word of Commodus’s murder reached Severus, 683 miles (1,009 km) away in the Pannonian capital of Carnuntum.
¹⁶
According to the contemporary civil servant Herodian, who wrote a history of the empire from 180 to 238, Severus dreamed that night of a horse unseating Pertinax and taking himself up in his stead as he passed through a gauntlet of cheering supporters, convincing Severus that the fulfilment of a cherished ambition was just around the corner. Though Pertinax himself was so determined not to be accused of despotism that he sought to emulate Augustus by styling himself
princeps senatus
and declining to accept for his wife, Flavia Titiana, the title of
Augusta
, his administration lacked the funds to keep the praetorian guard in the style to which they had become accustomed under Commodus.
¹⁷
When the domino effect started, and Pertinax was brutally usurped by a former consul named Didius Julianus in March 193, Severus was ready, despite a rival claim to the purple from Pescennius Niger, the governor of Syria. Carried along by the acclamation of his own and
neighbouring legions, Severus marched on Rome to make his bid for power, though not before ensuring that his sons and Julia Domna were spirited to his side to ensure their safety.

Less chivalry was shown towards the wife and children of his rivals. Having arrived on the outskirts of Rome, and convinced the Senate to condemn Julianus on 1 June, Severus was accepted as emperor and his entourage admitted to Rome on 9 June to a dutifully rapturous reception from its citizens, dressed in white and lining flower-decked streets. One of the new emperor’s first actions was to order his right-hand man Plautianus to find and hold hostage the children of Niger, who was declared an enemy of the state. Niger was eventually defeated in battle at Antioch in April 194, his severed head exhibited at Rome, and his wife and children executed. The threat from another rival for the throne, Clodius Albinus, the governor of Britain, was at first negated by Severus in a less ruthless manner, with the offer to his rival of the deputy rank of Caesar. However, when Clodius decided a couple of years later that this was not good enough for him after all, he too was defeated – this time in Gaul – and his abused body thrown into the Rhône along with those of his wife and sons. Their fate was a stark reminder of what had been at stake in defeat for Domna and her own children.
¹⁸

During the 1930s, the National Museums in Berlin acquired a fragile portrait from a Parisian art dealer. It depicted the newly enthroned Septimius Severus and Julia Domna standing like proud parents behind their two young sons.
¹⁹
A homespun artwork, daubed in egg-yolk tempera paint on a circular panel of wood, it was the work of an Egyptian artist, and it perhaps commemorates a trip by the emperor and empress to Africa in around 200. The ‘Berlin tondo’, as it is known, is not only the most famous portrait of Julia Domna and her husband, it is the only painted portrait of members of the Roman imperial family that survives from antiquity, affording us for the first time a unique and precious chance to look on the faces of the new incumbents of the Palatine in ‘colour’. With his silvery curls and beard, Severus’s appearance fits with descriptions of him in Roman literary sources, while his skin tone against the gold stripes of his toga is several shades darker than his wife’s, a counterpoint to his official marble portraits whose material hue depicted him as white as any other emperor before him and an important piece of evidence in support of the theory that Severus was Rome’s first black emperor.
²⁰

Domna’s creamy-skinned oval face on the other hand is characterised by wide-set eyes, thick straight eyebrows and full lips. Fat white pearls the size of gobstoppers circle her neck and drip from her ears, a departure from the minimalist approach to women’s jewellery adopted by imperial Roman sculptors and further proof of the gulf between ideal and reality in women’s adornment.
²¹
Her dark, thickly crimped locks, however, are entirely in keeping with sculptural images of her. Of all the Roman empresses, Julia Domna’s hairstyle was the most distinctive, a rippling, centre-parted, helmet-like coiffure which is thought to have been created with the aid of a wig. It has been suggested that she even introduced the Syrian practice of wearing wigs to the women of Rome, although several detachable marble hairpieces belonging to female sculptures from the early and mid-second century have been found of late, some with traces of a plaster adhesive called gesso which was presumably used to stick the marble ‘wig’ to the head. This suggests that some of Domna’s imperial predecessors may have already been familiar with the practice of wearing them in real life.
²²

Domna’s baptism into the role of Roman first lady was anything but the staid affair this Quakerish hairstyle might suggest. Less than a month after her husband’s proclamation as
Augustus
and her own as
Augusta
, she and Severus were on their way east to deal with the threat from Niger and to square up to the Parthian territories which had sided with his enemy. After settling both scores, Severus doubled back to Gaul and crushed the last of his rivals, Clodius, in February 197. Throughout these hard-fought campaigns, Domna was at her husband’s side, enduring the same dry, thirsty desert conditions as he and his troops, and unlike certain of her female forebears, receiving nothing but praise for her role as army mascot. Following in the footsteps of Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina, another lauded camp-follower, she was rewarded with the title
mater castrorum
(‘Mother of the Camp’) on 14 April 195. A statue of her in this guise was set up along Rome’s Sacred Way, near the temple of Antoninus and Faustina.
²³