Century 10 of 13 · AD 193 – 284
Palmyra, the Sasanians, and emperors by the dozen.
64 entries · 35 hours · 57 with a written verdict
In 193 the Praetorian Guard killed the emperor and auctioned the throne to the highest bidder. Septimius Severus marched on Rome and took it by force instead, and the advice he left his sons was to enrich the soldiers and ignore everyone else. That sentence is the next hundred years.
Caracalla murdered his brother, made every free inhabitant of the empire a citizen in 212 largely for the inheritance tax, built enormous baths and was killed by the roadside. After 235 the system breaks. Somewhere between twenty and sixty men claim the purple in fifty years, depending on how you count. Decius dies fighting Goths at Abritus in 251, the first emperor killed by a foreign enemy. Valerian is captured alive by Shapur I in 260, and the Persians carved the moment into a cliff at Naqsh-e Rustam where you can still go and look at it. The empire splits three ways, with a Gallic Empire in the west and Palmyra under Zenobia in the east. The silver in a denarius falls from ninety percent to under five. A plague runs through all of it.
And then it recovers. Aurelian reconquers both breakaway states in five years, walls Rome for the first time in six centuries, and is murdered by his own staff over a misunderstanding. The narrative sources thin out almost exactly when the century gets interesting, so historians work from coins, inscriptions and archaeology, and the episodes below do the same.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
Sentire, what was lived and endured
Facere, what hands made and did
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Part of The Ancients
With David Gwynn
David Gwynn on the fifty years from 235 to 284, when Rome ran through more than twenty emperors and almost none of them died in bed. Sixty-two minutes on the century that reorganised the empire by breaking it.
With Matilda Brown
Elagabalus took the throne at fourteen and was dead at eighteen, and the people actually running the empire in between were his grandmother and his mother. Sixty minutes with Matilda Brown on the women.
With Eve MacDonald
Eve MacDonald on the Sasanian king who took a Roman emperor alive: Valerian in 260, and the rock relief at Naqsh-e Rostam cut so that nobody could forget it. Fifty-eight minutes.
With Alex Imrie
Alex Imrie and Matilda Brown on the real Macrinus, a praetorian prefect who took the purple for fourteen months in 217, long before Denzel Washington played him. Fifty- six minutes.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
Severus won the throne by marching on Rome and told his sons to enrich the soldiers and ignore everyone else. That advice is the century in a sentence.
With Adrian Goldsworthy
Adrian Goldsworthy on the empire that destroyed the Seleucids, killed Crassus at Carrhae and outlasted the Republic itself. Fifty-four minutes.
Two brothers, one murder in their mother's arms, and the citizenship grant of 212 that made every free inhabitant of the empire a Roman, largely for the inheritance tax.
Part of The Rest Is History
Aurelian reconquered a broken empire in five years, walled Rome for the first time in six centuries, and almost nobody has heard of him. This is the fix.
Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna and rebuilt it as a showpiece of the empire he came to rule. Fifty-two minutes on what that says about Roman citizenship: the provinces produced emperors, and the emperors paid the provinces back in marble.
Fifty-one minutes on the emperor who killed his brother in their mother's arms and then gave citizenship to every free person in the empire.
Eve MacDonald on Ardashir overthrowing the Parthians in the 220s and building a state that pressed Rome harder than anything before it. Fifty minutes.
Dura-Europos was buried under a Sasanian siege ramp and rediscovered in 1920 with its synagogue and its church still painted. Forty-nine minutes.
Emran El-Badawi on Mavia, queen of the Tanukhids, who fought Rome in the 370s and then supplied it with cavalry on her own terms. Forty-eight minutes.
Forty-seven minutes on Severus Alexander, on the throne at thirteen and killed by his own soldiers at twenty-six, which opens fifty years of the same.
With Ted Kaizer
Ted Kaizer on the caravan city that sat on the only reliable water for a long way, first named in the second millennium BC and rich on the traffic that had to stop there. Forty-six minutes.
Eve MacDonald on the eastern frontier, where Rome faced the only neighbour with a comparable state behind it. Forty-four minutes.
Forty-one minutes on the first emperor born in Africa, who took the throne in a civil war, held it for eighteen years and told his sons to pay the soldiers and ignore everyone else.
Forty-one minutes on the Tenth, raised against Sextus Pompeius and then stationed in the east for centuries, where it besieged Jerusalem and later garrisoned it.
With Jonathan Eaton
Jonathan Eaton on Lugdunum in 197, where Cassius Dio puts around three hundred thousand men on the field, Roman against Roman. Forty minutes on whether to believe him.
Part of The Ancient World
Forty minutes on the Efqa spring that made Palmyra possible, and on the close of the Bloodline series. Scott Chesworth reads the inscriptions slowly and lets them do the arguing.
Thirty-eight minutes on the admiral who took Britain and northern Gaul in 286, minted his own coins with Roman legends on them, and held it for seven years.
With Emma Southon
Emma Southon on Zenobia, who beat the Sasanians, stabilised the Roman east and then claimed it. Thirty-four minutes on the three years she ran a third of the empire.
Thirty-two minutes on Uranius Antoninus, high priest at Emesa, watching Ardashir found Sasanian Persia from the frontier it was about to cross.
Thirty-two minutes on Aurelian sparing Tyana on the strength of a vision and then meeting Zenobia's forces in Syria.
Thirty-one minutes on Valerian, the only Roman emperor taken alive in battle, deported into Persia in 260 with tens of thousands of his men.
Thirty-one minutes on Zabdas taking Anatolia for Zenobia while Aurelian cleared the Danube and turned east.
Thirty-one minutes on the siege, with Zenobia inside the walls sending to Persia for help that never came.
Part of When in Rome
With Niccolò Mugnai
Thirty-one minutes on the birthplace of Septimius Severus on the Libyan coast, which he rebuilt as emperor into something meant to rival Rome. A harbour city preserved by sand.
Thirty minutes on Severus destroying Albinus at Lugdunum in 197 and then turning east against Parthia, at the height of everything he would get.
Thirty minutes on Caracalla's murders in Rome and at Alexandria, the Parthian war he provoked, and Julia Domna left to face a usurper after he died.
Thirty minutes on Artabanus gathering Parthia for revenge while, further south, the Sasanids take Fars and begin replacing him.
Thirty minutes on Aurelian crushing the second Palmyrene revolt, and on the sources that cannot agree whether Zenobia died on the road, in the triumph or in a villa at Tivoli.
Twenty-nine minutes on Shapur inheriting Persia after the destruction of Hatra, and on Gordian III's invasion ending in defeat and a dead emperor.
Twenty-eight minutes on Ardashir beating Artabanus, taking the Parthian empire, and turning a tired neighbour into Rome's most dangerous one.
Twenty-eight minutes on Mavia of the Tanukh, who beat Roman armies in the 370s and then supplied cavalry to the empire on her own terms.
With Simon Elliott
Simon Elliott on the campaign of 208 to 211, the largest force Rome ever sent north, aimed at conquest and abandoned the moment Severus died at York. Twenty-seven minutes.
Twenty-seven minutes on the Severans retaking the throne through Macrinus's mistakes, and on the black stone of Elah Gabal being shipped to Rome.
Twenty-seven minutes on Elagabalus trying to put a Syrian sun god above Jupiter, and on the grandmother who arranged his replacement when it failed.
Twenty-seven minutes on the Battle of Emesa, where the Palmyrene cavalry broke a Roman line and then chased it too far.
Alex Imrie on whether Caracalla really raised a sixteen-thousand-man phalanx in imitation of Alexander, and what the coins and the sources will support. Twenty-six minutes.
Twenty-six minutes on Severus Alexander, governed by his mother and grandmother through a decade of calm and then destroyed by a Sasanian invasion.
Twenty-six minutes on Severus Alexander marching east to a stalemate and then being killed on the Rhine, which ends the Severans and opens the crisis.
Twenty-six minutes on Zenobia taking over after Odaenathus was murdered, and holding Palmyra against Rome and Persia at once.
Twenty-five minutes on Julia Domna, daughter of the high priest at Emesa, who married Septimius Severus and outlasted him. Scott Chesworth reads Cassius Dio on gold turning to rust.
Twenty-five minutes on the year of five emperors: Pertinax killed, the throne auctioned by the guard, and Severus arriving with the Danube legions.
Twenty-five minutes on Odaenathus driving the Persians out of Syria and holding Gallienus's east together, in the years before Zenobia.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-four minutes on 628 to 630 and the complete defeat of Persia. Within a decade both empires lose their southern provinces to the Arabs, which makes this victory the strangest in Roman history.
Twenty minutes on the Sasanian revival that turned Persia back into a rival, ending with a Roman emperor captured alive in 260. That capture is the low point the rest of the century climbs back from.
Nineteen minutes on the instability after Constantine, with three sons dividing the empire while Persia pressed the eastern frontier.
Eighteen minutes on Aurelian against Palmyra in the 270s, when the empire was split three ways and one general put it back together.
Sixteen minutes on the second half of that job: after Palmyra, the breakaway Gallic empire. Aurelian's title, restorer of the world, was earned in these two campaigns.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
How the baths were built, how they were heated, and what stood in the niches. The engineering and the decoration in one film.
The edict of 212 that made almost every free inhabitant a citizen, and the argument about whether it was principle or tax revenue.
Eleven minutes on the long problem of the eastern frontier: an infantry army against horse archers and armoured lancers, and the answers Rome tried.
Eleven minutes on an accident of the record: Aurelian reunified the empire in five years and is thinly documented, while Diocletian got a biography.
Eight minutes on the Septizodium, the three-storey show front Septimius Severus put at the foot of the Palatine in AD 203 so that travellers from Africa met it first. Sixtus V quarried it away in 1588.
Part of toldinstone
Five minutes at Lugo in Galicia, ringed by a third-century wall that still runs its entire circuit. No other Roman city in Europe can say that.
Everything else, in order
Part of Ancient History Hound · Ancient Blogger on Greece, Rome and antiquity for every level; only the Roman episodes are indexed
With Maria Lloyd
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
