W063 The Severan civil wars

Pertinax's murder and the succession crisis of AD 193 produced several military claimants. Septimius Severus secured Rome, defeated Pescennius Niger in the East, and eventually confronted Clodius Albinus in the West. The capture of Byzantium and the defeat of Albinus near Lugdunum show how control of strategic cities and provincial armies shaped the contest.

Campaigning was followed by punishment, confiscation and the restructuring of commands. The provincial origin of armies mattered, but no simple ethnic division explains their loyalties. A claimant's ability to move forces and sustain their commitment was fundamental.

Command, forces and military problem

Extended campaign study

The account below develops the operations and their interpretation. Reported numbers and reconstructed tactical details retain the uncertainties described in the dossier.

The Second Auction of the Empire (192–197)

The dynasty of Marcus ended as the dynasty of Augustus had, in a bedchamber, and produced the same discovery on a larger scale. Commodus — thirty-one, ruling through favorites, fighting in the arena as Hercules Romanus, renaming the months and the legions after himself — was strangled by his wrestling-partner on the last night of 192 after the poison in his bath failed, and the year that followed reran 69 with the Praetorians' price now openly posted. Pertinax, the elderly city prefect who had risen from a freedman's household through the Marcomannic wars to the throne, attempted discipline and was killed in the palace after eighty-seven days; and there followed the scene the tradition preserved as the Republic's final obituary: the Guard on its camp wall taking bids for the empire from two candidates below, Sulpicianus the murdered emperor's father-in-law against Didius Julianus the millionaire senator, the purple knocked down at twenty-five thousand sesterces a man to the higher offer. Julianus reigned sixty-six days, cursed in the streets. The armies answered as in 69 and with the same geography: Syria proclaimed Pescennius Niger, Britain Clodius Albinus, and Pannonia — the heaviest concentration of force on earth since Domitian's day — proclaimed its governor, Lucius Septimius Severus of Lepcis Magna in Africa, who reached Rome first, executed Julianus, disbanded the Praetorian Guard entire and reconstituted it from Danubian legionaries, and then fought the two civil wars his accession required: Niger destroyed at Issus in 194 on the ground where Alexander had beaten Darius; Albinus at Lugdunum in February 197 in the largest battle Romans ever fought against Romans — Dio's figure of a hundred and fifty thousand a side is the tradition's arithmetic, the day's near-loss and Severus's own unhorsing are not, and the sack of Lyon that followed removed Gaul's greatest city from the first rank permanently. Between the wars the reign's eastern campaigns opened: Osrhoene and northern Mesopotamia annexed as a province in 195, the Parthian capital taken again in 197–198 — Ctesiphon sacked, a hundred thousand captives claimed, the emperor's Parthicus Maximus — and Hatra, twice besieged in 198–200, twice holding, the desert city's second defeat of a Roman emperor.

Outcome and critical assessment

Result and caution: Severus founded a new dynasty. The war's end did not remove the army's role in imperial succession. Narrative sources allocate virtue, cruelty and responsibility according to political perspective; precise strengths and losses at Lugdunum should not be treated as audited figures.

Historical record: IR-VII, chapter 6; Dio, Severan books; Herodian, books 2–3; Historia Augusta, subsidiary and problematic.