The Real Severans IV: No Severan Blood - The Scramble for Legitimacy and a New Dynasty

With the defeat of Macrinus at the Battle of Antioch on 8 June 218 and his subsequent capture and execution before the month was out, it is usually accepted that the Severan dynasty was restored to power; Macrinus and his son Diadumenianus relegated to a 14-month usurpation/interregnum. However, this ‘Severan restoration’ is much less clear cut and may actually be technically non-existent. This is because there is very little actually ‘Severan’ about the men and women who comprised the imperial family of 218-235.

Elagabalus (218-222) and Severus Alexander (222-235) relied on the ‘Severan’ connections of their mothers and shared grandmother. Maternal descent was weak enough as it was, but of the four so-called ‘Severan women’ of the age - Julia Maesa, Julia Domna, Julia Soaemias, and Julia Mamaea - only Julia Domna could claim to truly be a Severan. And even then, that was through her marriage to Septimius Severus, rather than a blood link. This means that while they were first cousins once removed of Caracalla and Geta, Elagabalus and Severus Alexander were not part of the imperial Severan bloodline.

These ‘Neo-Severans’ will likely have been happy to ignore this gap in their dynastic legitimacy, but as others would almost certainly look to take advantage of it, they had to try to plug that gap. One possible option was to repeat the action of the founder of the Severan dynasty. In 197, Septimius Severus had the Senate oversee his ‘posthumous adoption’ as the son of Marcus Aurelius. Of course, such an action was not based on a spur of the moment idea. Severus had been laying the groundwork for such an adoption for several years by that point.

Demonstrating just how vociferously and indeed effectively Severus had been in setting up this ‘posthumous adoption’ can be seen in a now lost inscription found in Zurich in the 19th century but originally from Castellum in Mauretania Caesarensis. Its authors really laid it on thick when referring to Severus in various Antonine guises...

Imp Caesari divi M Antonini

Pii Sarmatici Germanici filio divi

Commodi fratri divi Antonini Pii

nepoti divi [Hadria]ni pronepoti

divi [Traiani Parthici ab]nepoti divi

[Nervae adnepoti]

L[ucius] Septimio Severo Pio Pertinaci Aug

[Arabico [A]diabenico Pontifici

[maximo]...

CIL VIII.9317

This honorific inscription, over-egging the imperial dynastic pudding by naming all emperors of the Nerva-Antonine line, dates to 195, two years after Severus’ initial acclamation as emperor by his men, but still two years before he was completely secure on the throne and “officially” adopted into the Antonine dynasty by the Senate in 197 (Cooley in Swain et al. (2007) 386). Severus had also minted bronze and gold coins with the reverse legend DIVI M PII F - divi Marci Pii fillus - ‘son of the divine Marcus’ in the aftermath of his defeat of Pescennius Niger in mid-194. His claim to Antonine descent was front and centre in Severan dynastic propaganda.

Severus may have had a much more immediate need to claim such an illustrious dynastic connection - his remaining rival in 195-197, Clodius Albinus, had a much more prestigious line than him (Herodian II.5.2) - than Elagabalus in 218, but this previous example showed what could be done in terms of ‘posthumous adoption’, with the army, some civilian authorities and even the Senate.

Circumstances would show that important parts of the empire would be willing to go along with another dynastic fiction again, but there is no record of Elagabalus being similarly ‘posthumously adopted’ into the imperial Severan dynasty. Perhaps the new emperor, his mother Julia Soaemias, and his grandmother Julia Maesa felt they had found something ‘better’.

A rumour was put about seemingly by Julia Maesa that Elagabalus was the son of Caracalla, a rumour that was then publicly supported by Julia Soaemias. This meant that they were claiming that Caracalla had fathered a son with his maternal first cousin, Soaemias herself, when he was about 15 and she was about 24... However unsavoury and indeed dubious we and possibly even some contemporaries considered such an illicit match (Dio 79.2.3 is not at all convinced, referring to Caracalla as Elagabalus’ “pretended father”, while Herodian V.3.10 makes no judgement), it does seem to have helped garner support amongst the soldiery, which still loved Caracalla. Indeed, the legion that defeated Macrinus at Antioch, III Gallica, had enjoyed considerable privileges under Caracalla and gave their support not just to Elagabalus but also his claim to be the son of Caracalla (the legion was probably also bribed by the wealthy Julia Maesa – Herodian V.3.11). While born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, Elagabalus played into his claimed heritage by taking the regnal name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, exactly the same as that of his first cousin once removed/‘father’, Caracalla.

The army might have been particularly happy/willing to accept this Caracallan descent, but was being the fruit of an illicit first-cousin liaison the only avenue of dynastic legitimacy that Elagabalus followed? Might we view his marriages through a filter of dynastic expedience? His first wife, Julia Cornelia Paula, chosen for him by his grandmother Julia Maesa, was of highly noble descent and her father, Julius Paulus, had been an active jurist under Septimius Severus and Caracalla.

However, as emperor and priest, Elagabalus thought he could do better and after setting aside Cornelia Paula, he made the scandalous choice of marrying Julia Aquilia Severa, who just happened to be a priestess of Vesta... a Vestal Virgin. While Elagabalus might have seen Aquila’s holding of a priestesshood as making her his religious equal  and the marrying of a Vestal Virgin was in itself scandalous, with our dynastic legitimacy hat on, we might focus more on Aquila’s name rather than her religious status.

Her father was the otherwise unknown Gaius Julius Severus, but his name alone might have been enough for Elagabalus scrambling for any shred of legitimacy. Looking beyond Aquilia’s status as a Vestal Virgin (which, of course, completely overwhelms any other arguments about this match), there would be no (further) eyes raised if a child of this union was named Severus or Severa. The child would therefore be of Severan name and imperial blood. The child not being of the imperial Severan line or that its imperial blood stemmed solely from Elagabalus and no further were distinctions that would have faded with time through a prolonged reign of this ‘Neo-Severan’, only to bother historians with ‘copy to file’.

ahem

We can shine a similar dynastic light on Elagabalus’ third wife too. Aquila Severa was set aside (briefly, Elagabalus would return to her within a year), seemingly on the urging of his grandmother Julia Maesa, but the emperor quickly remarried again, this time to Annia Aurelia Faustina.

Her name gives away why she would have been useful dynastically - it demonstrates how she was the paternal great-granddaughter of Marcus Aurelius and his wife Faustina the Younger, who was also the daughter of the emperor Antoninus Pius. Annia Faustina was also a great-niece of Marcus Aurelius through his sister Annia Cornificia Faustina, who was our Annia Faustina’s grandmother. So doubly connected the Aurelians.

But that is not the only potentially useful dynastic name connected to Annia Faustina - if we are going to even just suggest that a Several name, without the imperial bloodline, could be of some use with regard to Aquilia Severa, we must extend the same possibility, however slight, to Annia Faustina. And we see it in her father - not only was he a grandson of Marcus Aurelius, his name was Tiberius Claudius Severus Proculus.

And his father was Gnaeus Claudius Severus...

And his father was Gnaeus Claudius Severus Arabianus, who was a teacher and friend of Marcus Aurelius...

Okay... one more...

And his was Gaius Claudius Severus, who was the first Roman goveror of Arabia upon its Trajanic annexation in 106.

So by the time that Elagabalus chose Annia Faustina to be his third wife in 221, her family contained a long line of non-imperial Severans with records of good service to several emperors; good service that had culminated in Annia’s grandfather, Gnaeus Claudius Severus, being married to Annia Galeria Aurelia Faustina, the second daughter of Marcus Aurelius.

So in a very real sense, Annia Faustina was a Severan with imperial blood - it’s just that it was not Severan imperial blood... (it also helped that Annia was the heiress to the vast fortune of her mother).

The identity of Elagabalus’ fourth wife also gives us some potential dynastic insights, but those are all questions and answers we have seen already... for Elagabalus’ fourth wife was the same as his second - it was Aquilia Severa again, the Vestal (likely to no longer a) Virgin...

There was supposedly a fifth marriage near the end of Elagabalus’ reign - that to Hierocles... Any such ‘marriage’ had no dynastic benefit; indeed, it may have been the exact opposite. Elagabalus’ submissive favouritism towards Hierocles may have sparked the sequence of events that saw to Elagabalus’ murder by the Praetorian Guard (Dio 80.15-21).

Despite perhaps five marriages in four years, Elagabalus had not had any children, so his murder in 222 would seem to have signified a second demise of the ‘Severan’ dynasty; however, part of Julia Maesa’s plotting to either secure the reign of Elagabalus or end it had seen Elagabalus adopt his first cousin, Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander, as his son and heir.

While it appear in his regnal name, Severus Alexander lacked Severan blood in the same way that Elagabalus did. He too was a first cousin once removed of Caracalla through his mother Julia Avita Mamaea, another daughter of Julia Maesa. Through this adoption, Severus Alexander inherited all the lines of legitimacy that had been concocted for Elagabalus, making him the adopted grandson of Caracalla.

And if Severus Alexander’s accession had been under more peaceful circumstances, that line of legitimacy would have been enough. But his accession had not been peaceful. His adopted father had just been executed, his body thrown in the Tiber like a common criminal, his memory in the process of being damned... this was no line of legitimacy that Severus Alexander wanted to follow.

He did, however, follow Elagabalus’ approach to dynastic legitimacy building... being the fruit of an illicit first-cousin liaison, this time between Caracalla and Julia Mamaea! Julia Maesa “claimed that when she was living in the palace with her sister [Julia Domna], Caracalla slept with both of her daughters, who were young and beautiful” (Herodian V.3.10; there was even an historical tradition, HA Cara. 10.1-4; Geta 10.1, that claimed Caracalla had even slept with Julia Domna, his own mother, although there was some claim she was his stepmother). And this was a liaison trumpeted across the empire - a papyrus originally from Bakchias in Egypt and dating to 222 contains an edict of Severus Alexander that refers to him as the ‘son of the deified Marcus Antoninus Pius’ (P.Fay. 20), while a building dedication of the same year from Arbeia in Britannia (South Shields in England) refers to Severus Alexander as divi Severi nepos divi Magni Antonini fil - ‘grandson of the divine Severus, son of Antoninus the Great’ (RIB 1060), with ‘Marcus Antoninus Pius’ and the ‘great Antoninus’ referring to Caracalla.

Clearly, the ‘Severan’ women had little problem with publicly stating that they had had an affair and that their imperial sons were in fact illegitimate if it was to give them some dynastic legitimacy!

And as we looked at Elagabalus’ spouses for possible dynastic usefulness, we should do the same for Severus Alexander. His first wife, Gnaea Seia Herennia Sallustia Barbia Orbiana, may have been of many names and well-connected - her great-grandfather had been a childhood friend of Marcus Aurelius - but she lacked the possible/actual dynastic connections of Aquilia Severa and Annia Faustina. Her hoarding of names does however suggest significant intermarriage amongst various leading families.

Severus Alexander’s second wife, Sulpicia Memmia, may not even have existed! We are relying on the Historia Augusta for all information about her, which is rarely a good thing. HA Sev. Alex. 20.3 has Sulpicia as part of one of the oldest patrician families, the daughter of a man of consular rank and granddaughter of a Catulus.

Despite the success of all these claims in portraying Elagabalus and Severus Alexander as representing the restoration and continuation of the Severan dynasty, if we consider that Julia Soaemias’ claim to have birthed the child of a 15-year-old Caracalla was false, then the imperial Severan bloodline and dynasty died with its trousers down when Martialis stabbed Caracalla on 8 April 217.

And if that was the case, then Elagabalus was actually the founder of a new imperial dynasty, which should probably be called the ‘Varian’ dynasty after his actual father, Sextus Varius Marcellus. Strangely, even if it was true that Caracalla was the father of Severus Alexander, but not of Elagabalus, then Severus Alexander would still not be a member of the Severan dynasty because his adoption by Elagabalus would have made him part of the nascent ‘Varian’ dynasty.

This is however one other option... the practice of matrilineality amongst some Northern Arabian tribes (Korotayev (1995)) may see Elagabalus and Severus Alexander placed in other dynasty of possibly royal blood. Through their mothers, these young emperors were connected to a hereditary priesthood of the sun god Elagabal in Emesa (modern Homs in Syria). Indeed, Elagabalus was the high priest of this Emesene manifestation of the Semitic god Ba’al (‘Elagabal’ is the Latinised version of the Arabic ‘Ilah al-Jabal’, which means ‘God of the Mountain’).

While this connection is obvious in the name that Elagabalus has become known as, it is less clear in that of Severus Alexander, but there are hints. The identity of Severus Alexander’s father is unknown. Dio 79.30.3 claims that it is Marcus Julius Gessius Marcianus, but this is disputed by Icks (2011) 57-58, who demonstrates that Marcianus could not have been married to Mamaea until 212, four years after Severus Alexander’s birth on 1 October 208. So while Marcianus did marry Mamaea, it was after Alexander’s birth, making Marcianus the future emperor’s stepfather.

However, we do get some hints from the meagre record of Alexander’s original name. Dio 79.30.3 refers to him as Bassianus, while Herodian V.3.3 calls him Alexianus. These could reflect aspects of the name of Mamaea’s first husband/Alexander’s father, but both Bassianus and Alexianus were names used in the Emesene dynasty - Julia Maesa’s husband (and therefore the maternal grandfather of both Elagabalus and Severus Alexander) was Gaius Julius Avitus Alexianus, while Julia Maesa’s father (and therefore a maternal great-grandfather of both Elagabalus and Severus Alexander) was Julius Bassianus. The respect shown to Julius Bassianus and his dynasty by Septimius Severus might be demonstrated in his giving of the name ‘Bassianus’ to his first-born son, Lucius Septimius Bassianus, who would be renamed Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, but be known to history as Caracalla.

While the generations before Julius Bassianus are not completely clear, the presence of names like Soaemias, Mammaea and versions of Alexander amongst the ‘Severan’ women and their children, as well as the hereditary Emesene priesthood, would seem to connect Bassianus’ line to the royal family of Priest Kings of Emesa, the house of Sampsigeramids, which had ruled as Roman clients from around 46BC to c. AD78.

Just to show how convoluted such dynastic politics were , if Julius Bassianus was a direct descendant of the last ruling Priest King of Emesa, Gaius Julius Alexion, then Caracalla, Geta, Elagabalus and Severus Alexander were all direct descendants of Alexion’s maternal great-great-grandparents - Mark Antony and Cleopatra...

It is rather peculiar to think that two Severan emperors might have shared less blood with the dynasty they were claiming to be part of than with the most famous Queen of Egypt and her Roman triumviral paramour who had both died nearly 250 years before Elagabalus ascended the throne in 218...

Bibliography

Barron, C. ‘Septimius Severus claims Antonine heritage (CIL VIII, 9317)’ https://www.judaism-and-rome.org/septimius-severus-claims-antonine-heritage-cil-viii-9317

Cooley, A. ‘Septimius Severus: the Augustan emperor’, in Swain, S., Harrison, S. and Elsner, J. (eds.) Severan Culture. Cambridge (2007) 385-399

Icks, M. The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor. London (2011)

Johns, K.A. ‘A Crisis of Consensus: The Epigraphic Representation of Imperial Status in the Latin-speaking West, AD180-235’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick (2022)

Korotayev, A.V. ‘Were There Any Truly Matrilineal Lineages in the Arabian Peninsula?’, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 25 (1995) 83–98

Kropp, A. ‘Earrings, Nefesh and Opus Reticulatum: Self-Representation of the Royal House of Emesa in the First Century AD’, in Kaizer, T. and Facella, M. (eds.). Kingdoms and Principalities in the Roman Near East. Stuttgart (2010) 199-214

Sullivan, R.D. ‘The Dynasty of Emesa’, in Temporini H. and Haase W. (eds.). Politische Geschichte (Provinzen und Randvölker: Syrien, Palästina, Arabien). Berlin (1978) 198-219.