(14) SEVERUS ALEXANDER –
SEVERAN DYNASTY
(222 – 235 AD: 13 YEARS 8 DAYS)

Gordian III as child puppet emperor for his mother Gordiana echoed Severus Alexander only a few years before him. Severus Alexander was not particularly bad, just weak, but his weakness was ground zero for the Crisis of the Third Century.

The historian Herodian portrayed him as a mother’s boy, which is unfair – he was more her puppet, as well as that of his grandmother Julia Maesa, who used him as the instrument of her coup against his predecessor and cousin. He then ascended the imperial throne as a teenager and never outgrew his awkward teenage phase – or his reliance on his mother, Julia Mamaea.

Similarly to Gordian III relying on Timesitheius as the de facto ruler of the emperor, Severus Alexander didn’t do too badly in the domestic management of the empire, helped by capable advisors such as Ulpian or Cassius Dio. As usual for weak emperors, he came undone in the management of the empire’s military and foreign policy, starting with the rise of the new Sassanid empire in Persian (from the collapse of the preceding Parthian empire). Again in fairness, the Sassanids caused problems for many Roman emperors over the next four centuries or so.

Alexander was no Alexander the Great. He did respond with a threefold invasion of Persia, leading the main army in the centre while two other armies advanced to the north and south. He was widely perceived to have bugged out and retreated from the campaign – certainly, he did the latter after indecisive results (although his army had retaken some of Mesopotamia), with his army “wracked by indiscipline and disease”. The southern army was surrounded and destroyed by Sassanid horse-archers. The northern army did have some success, but suffered losses in that bane of armies – retreating in winter “due to a failure through incompetence to establish adequate supply lines”.

Despite the relative failure of his Persian campaign (and the mutiny of a legion which proclaimed a short-lived usurper as emperor), Alexander celebrated a triumph in Rome, which did not improve his army’s mood.

After Persia, trouble came from that usual other source – Germanic tribes crossing the Rhine and Danube. So Alexander, accompanied of course by his mother, went to the front line at the Rhine – but once there, took the advice of his mother to not get involved in battle, and worse, just buy the Germanic tribes off.

Spending money in tribute or other forms protection money to pay off adversaries from attacking imperial territory or avoid war was not unprecedented for the Roman empire, albeit more so in the later empire, and was probably not a bad option to literally buy time. Here it had the unfortunate appearance of paying the Germans rather than the legions, since Alexander was perceived to have skimped on the latter – “the emperor’s miserliness (partly the result of his mother’s greed)”.

And so Alexander and his mother found themselves overthrown and assassinated by what we would call a military coup – the last of the Severan dynasty and “the first emperor to be overthrown by military discontent on a wide scale”, something that would become depressingly familiar in the Crisis of the Third Century it kicked off.

As per Spectrum, “he could have turned out into a good emperor but unfortunately his mother took too long to die”.

RATING: 2 STAR**
D-TIER (LOW TIER)
EMPIRE BREAKER