The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars (44 page)

On 4 February 211, Severus died aged sixty-six at Eboracum, officially carried off by his ailments, though Caracalla’s hand was suspected in some quarters.
⁶⁴
The emperor’s death immediately intensified the already volatile feud between his two sons, to whom Severus had bequeathed co-command, causing great alarm to Domna, and to the council of advisers who had been appointed to guide the footsteps of the young
Augusti
. The situation was made even more perilous by the temporary location of the imperial family in Britain, far removed from the central authority of the Senate in Rome, who alone could ratify the succession. Caracalla, a popular figure with the army, initially tried to persuade them to pledge him their sole support, but his failure, combined with the pleas of Domna and the council of advisers, persuaded him to accept an uneasy truce with Geta for the time being.
Severus’s cremated remains were accompanied back to Rome in a purple urn, which a grieving Domna perhaps carried herself in an echo of the similar journeys made by previous imperial wives.
⁶⁵

The public funeral in the capital, at which a wax model of the deified emperor was flanked by a black-clad Senate on one side and a delegation of noble matrons dressed in plain white on the other, was barely over before the feud between the two new young co-emperors was reopened. The metaphorical dividing lines between them were drawn literally. Not only was the vast imperial palace split up between them, with separate entrances and separate quarters established, but according to one account, the brothers even began to negotiate a two-way division of the empire itself.
⁶⁶
This was apparently more than Domna, who had been summoned to a meeting of the brothers along with their council of advisers, could stand, and according to the account of Herodian, she appealed to her boys to come to terms, emulating the example of female peacemakers like Octavia and the Sabine women as she did so:

… Julia [Domna] cried out: ‘My sons, you have found a method of partitioning land and the sea … but what about your mother? How do you propose to partition her? How am I supposed to divide and carve up this unhappy body of mine? Very well, kill me first and each of you take a part of my torn body to your territory and bury it there. In this way I can be shared out between you along with the land and the sea.’ With these words she began weeping and crying out. Then she threw her arms around them both and drew them into an embrace, trying to reconcile them.
⁶⁷

For a time, Domna’s intervention worked. Her two sons ruled together and Domna’s honours and privileges only increased under the joint reign. In 211, the captions
Pia
(‘Pious’) and
Felix
(‘Fortunate’) were appended to her nomenclature on coins, titles which had for the most part been the exclusive privilege of emperors. Coin types issued in conjunction with the official announcement of Severus’s deification also gave her the extra title
mater patriae
: ‘Mother of the Fatherland’.
⁶⁸
The latter was of course the title that Tiberius had vetoed when it was offered by the Senate to Livia, and made clear that Domna was now outstripping that former great matriarch of empire – after all, even Livia could not claim uxorial and maternal ties to no less than three
Augusti
.

Yet before the outwardly harmonious power-sharing agreement
between Domna’s sons was two years old, it was ruthlessly torn up. On 26 December 212, Caracalla invited Geta to their mother’s quarters on the pretext of effecting a fuller reconciliation, whereupon he gave an order to his centurions to have his twenty-three-year-old younger brother brutally stabbed. Cassius Dio’s account of the affair describes how Geta clung to his mother, who had been as deceived about Caracalla’s intentions as he, and cried out to her as his assassins moved in, before breathing his last in a helpless, blood-soaked Domna’s arms. So gory was the scene that a shell-shocked Domna did not notice that she had also received a cut to her hand.
⁶⁹

A ruthless cull of Geta’s portraits was immediately ordered, resulting in the barely disguised defacement of monuments such as the arch at Lepcis Magna and the Arch of the Argentarii, where the inscription honouring Domna as ‘Mother of the
Augusti
’ was cynically edited to read ‘Mother of
Augustus
’ – just the one now.
⁷⁰
Coins featuring Geta’s image were melted down in every corner of the empire and it became a capital offence to speak or write the name of Caracalla’s younger brother. Geta’s memory was not only the victim of effacement – there were also gestures of degradation. The crude faceless void left by the erasure of his portrait on the Berlin tondo, for example, shows signs of having been smeared with excrement for good measure.
⁷¹

A few of Geta’s images, preserved mostly on privately owned curios such as gems and seals, did slip through the net. A story that Caracalla used to burst into tears at the sight of his dead brother’s portrait has been interpreted as constituting evidence that the images in question were private keepsakes preserved by Geta’s grieving mother, Domna.
⁷²
But if the empress indeed sought a mourning period for her youngest son, no opportunity was given her:

… she was not permitted to mourn or weep for her son, though he had met so miserable an end before his time (he was only twenty-two years and nine months old), but, on the contrary, she was compelled to rejoice and laugh as though at some great good fortune; so closely were all her words, gestures, and changes of colour observed. Thus she alone, the Augusta, wife of the emperor and mother of the emperors, was not permitted to shed tears even in private over so great a sorrow.
⁷³

So strict was Caracalla’s dictat on this score that a female relic of the last dynasty, Cornificia – daughter of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina,
and the sister of Commodus – was put to death on the charge that she had wept with Domna over the death of Geta.
⁷⁴

For all Domna’s acknowledged impotence in the face of the personal tragedy of her eldest son’s violent seizure of power, Caracalla’s five-year turn at the head of the Severan dynasty ironically ushered in the era in which she was credited with her most direct influence in the imperial set-up. In the absence of a consort for the new emperor, following Plautilla’s execution in exile on Lipari, Domna was left to play the part of Rome’s de facto ‘queen mother’ which first Livia and then Agrippina Minor had fulfilled for their own sons. In stark contrast to those two matriarchs, mind, Domna’s promotion was acknowledged to have been forced on her unwillingly through the murder of her son, rather than the suspicious death of her husband.

Since Caracalla, like several of his predecessors, nurtured fantasies of apeing that great folk hero Alexander the Great, in 214, after a period of campaigning on the Danube, the imperial court was uprooted eastwards to Antioch, in Domna’s homeland of Syria. Here, in a tribute to her superior education, she was assigned responsibility for handling Caracalla’s Greek and Latin correspondence and dealing with the daily round of petitions that arrived for the young emperor from various parts of the empire. Such duties would normally have been the remit of an
ab epistulis
(a freedman secretary) and although previous empresses, such as Livia and Plotina, had previously written and received letters from petitioners to the emperor, there is no sign that any woman had previously been given such a formalised role in the imperial administration. Not only that, but Domna, despite her much-reported dislike of him, was said to have given Caracalla well-regarded advice on numerous matters, rebuking him on one occasion, for example, for his lavish spending on his soldiers, to which Caracalla replied with insouciance, ‘Be of good cheer, Mother: for as long as we have this’ (showing her his sword), ‘we shall not run short of money.’
⁷⁵

Such accounts, plus the testimony that Domna hosted public receptions for the most prominent men just as the emperor himself did and was given her own security detail of the praetorian guard, have led some modern historians to conclude, over-optimistically, that Domna was effectively her son’s co-regent – in other words that she had a level of executive authority far beyond the incidental influence gained through proximity that had been wielded by Livia and Agrippina. The
Historia Augusta
even reports a titillating tradition that Caracalla
had married the ‘very beautiful’ Domna (erroneously referring to her as his stepmother), who had tempted him by revealing her beautiful form to him, and thus added incest to his list of depravities which already included fratricide. Herodian meanwhile claims that a number of mocking caricatures of Caracalla did the rounds while he and his mother were staying in Alexandria, referring to his murder of Geta and nicknaming Domna as ‘Jocasta’, after Oedipus’s mother who unwittingly married her patricidal son, unaware of his identity.
⁷⁶

While the similarities between Agrippina’s allegedly incestuous relationship with her son and reports of Domna’s attempts to seduce her own should be ascribed to the source’s intent to paint Caracalla as a second Nero, one must wonder at the atmosphere in the royal house and the relationship between Domna and Caracalla, after the latter’s brutal murder of his brother.
⁷⁷
Did Domna pragmatically make the best of her situation in acting as an ambassador for her surviving son or was she forced to conduct her role under a mask hiding her profound grief for her younger son and her husband, in the face of the tyrannical Caracalla’s oppression? Did her decision not to rock the boat include thoughts of Agrippina Minor’s fate at the hands of Nero? – we cannot know. But both she and Caracalla would at least have recognised her worth to him as the only available source of maternal and domestic symbolic authority for his regime to exploit. Plautilla was dead, and Julia Maesa, being Domna’s sister rather than Severus’s or Caracalla’s, did not fit the traditional description of a dynastic female figurehead.

Caracalla’s reign lasted five years in total, and did contain one important historical milestone, namely the edict issued in 212 which granted Roman citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the empire. This seemingly libertarian gesture was in fact aimed at raking in more tax revenue to boost the imperial war chest, which was being steadily emptied by Caracalla’s ambitious military campaigns first against the ever persistent Germanic tribes, and then against the Parthians. He made frequent and concerted bids during his reign to curry favour both with the Roman populace and with the army, and his portraits styled him as a tough military general, reminding one of the sartorial attempts of some modern political leaders to convince their electorate of their own battlefield credentials. But he was eventually murdered by his own soldiers on campaign while relieving himself on the road near Carrhae (in modern Turkey) on 8 April 217. Into his shoes stepped his praetorian prefect, Opellius Macrinus, whose coup would have been
foiled, according to Cassius Dio, if a letter warning Caracalla of it had not been sent on a lengthy detour to Antioch for sorting by Domna, who of course was in charge of dealing with all the correspondence he did not want to be bothered with.
⁷⁸

When Domna heard of Caracalla’s death, which was shortly followed by the delivery of his ashes in an urn, the news apparently caused her deep consternation:

… at the first information of her son’s death she was so affected that she dealt herself a violent blow and tried to starve herself to death. Thus she mourned, now that he was dead, the very man whom she had hated while he lived; yet it was not because she wished he were alive, but because she was vexed at having to return to private life.
⁷⁹

Slightly varied accounts survive of her next actions. Cassius Dio reports that her inner turmoil gave way to wild thoughts of attempting to seize power herself before she resorted to her original plan of starving herself. Her death was after all already assured thanks to a cancerous lump in her breast which she had aggravated by the blow she dealt to her chest on hearing of Caracalla’s death. Herodian agrees that she committed suicide, but hints she may possibly have been given little choice but to do so by the new emperor Macrinus, though in public at least the usurper seems to have shown due deference to Septimius Severus’s widow, permitting her to keep her bodyguard and sending her a placatory message as an olive branch. However, it seems that now her husband and sons were dead, the men under whose aegis she had, for better or worse, acquired her public role and sense of purpose in life, Domna saw nothing left for herself in a future administration. Rather like another imperial matriarch, Antonia Minor, she chose – or at least accepted – to take the way out offered by suicide, a mode of death on which respectability had been conferred by the example set in the face of adversity by Roman heroines such as Lucretia.
⁸⁰

Following her death, Domna’s remains were brought back to Rome by her sister and companion, Julia Maesa, and deposited, for reasons obscure, in the mausoleum of Augustus, although later they were removed to join those of her husband in the mausoleum of Hadrian.
⁸¹
Not long afterwards, Domna’s deification was ordered, perhaps even at the direct intervention of Macrinus. He may well have seen political mileage in leading the tributes to Caracalla’s mother, if her personal
dislike of her unpopular son was indeed common knowledge. Domna thus became Diva Julia, joining the pantheon of imperial-women-turned-goddesses before her.
⁸²