Had not Marcus been so weak, he would hardly have allowed Commodus to become his successor: he must have seen how coarse and void of all virtue the youth was, and he should have come to the resolution of adopting one of his leading generals. The idea of the empire’s being an heir-loom, was scarcely yet a settled one; but Marcus established it.

Commodus was a handsome and active young man, of great strength and nimbleness of body; and thus he was led to choose the roughest amusements, as archery, fencing, and such like. At first, he checked himself, and matters went on smoothly enough in the track of his father; but he soon followed his own nature. It was not long before he gave up the government to the prefect M. Perennis, who ruled in the most oppressive manner, quite in the Asiatic style. This ended in a sedition, and Commodus sacrificed his minister and favourite to the mutineers. Soon afterwards, he was attacked by an assassin, whom his sister Lucilla is said to have employed against him, but who told him that he had been set on by the senate; whereupon Commodus began to wreak his vengeance on that body. His means of ingratiating himself had been his profuse liberality, especially to the plebs urbana and the soldiers: this, as we see from the coins, was very often repeated, and thus the treasures of the empire were completely drained. At the death of Pius, there were 2,700 million of sesterces (135,000,000 dollars of our [Prussian] money) in the treasury; but this had been spent in the wars of Marcus, who had even sold the valuable things in his palace, so that he should not be obliged to lay on new taxes. Commodus now also began to shed blood, that he might have more money to throw away. His reign is detestable, and it is impossible to dwell on it. After Perennis was sacrificed, our interest is excited by the similar fate of Cleander, a freedman: it does not, however, seem quite credible, that he was præfectus prætorio. The cavalry of the prætorians and the cohortes urbanæ had now already begun to have brawls with each other; which proves in what a distracted state things then were. The city cohorts, which took the part of the town against the prætorians, had the best of it; and Commodus would have been murdered at Lanuvium,^[53] whither he had retired on account of the plague, had not his sister Fadilla and his concubine Marcia, pointed out to him the danger in which he was. He only escaped by sacrificing Cleander.

His tastes were now no longer confined to the sports of the chase; but it was the pride of his later years to come forth as a gladiator, and he called himself Hercules. His head which he put on the colossal statue of the god of the Sun, is undoubtedly still preserved, and it is very beautiful. His mad decrees are the dreams of a tyrant. When he wanted, on the Calends of January, to march at the head of the gladiators from the ludus gladiatorius to the Capitol, and thus take possession of the consulship without auspices; he was led in his wrath to proscribe Lætus and Marcia, who had most strongly urged him not to do so. This, however, was betrayed to them by a dwarf; on which Marcia gave Commodus a cup of poison, and she also sent a strong wrestler to strangle him. The senate and people now vented their hatred by cursing and reviling his memory; but the prætorians grumbled, as they were fond of him for his weakness. It was spread abroad that he had died of apoplexy.

The præfectus prætorio Lætus now proclaimed old Pertinax, who was already upwards of sixty, emperor. A worthier man than he, could not have been chosen: he had distinguished himself as a brave, although not precisely as a great general; but it was especially for his administrative talent and his sterling character, that he was known and respected. He had Marcus’ virtues without his faults, and he would therefore in time have even excelled him as a ruler; for with all his heart and soul he threw himself into the business of the state. The people rejoiced at his election: but only part of the senators did, as he was not of noble race; and the soldiers tolerated him indeed, but they did not like him. On the first of January 193, he entered upon the government; before the end of March in the same year, he was already murdered.

After his death, as the story goes, the prætorians put up the empire to the highest bidder. This is most likely a gross exaggeration. It was a generally received custom for every new ruler to give the prætorians a donativum; and as Sulpician and Didius Julianus were trying at the same time to get the sovereignty, it is quite natural that the largeness of the donation turned the scales. Sulpician who was in the camp, promised twenty thousand sesterces for every prætorian; but Julianus, who was at the gates of the city, offered twenty-five thousand. The prætorians opened the gates to the latter, and acknowledged him as emperor. Julianus here appears still more contemptible than he really was, as he had quite as good prospects of ascending the throne as any one else, and he was really innocent of the death of Commodus. He had not been a bad governor of a province, and there is on the whole, not much against his personal character: he was a very rich, but at the same time, a very vain man, and he had, as a governor, distinguished himself in his campaign against Dalmatia. It was not with his own treasures, that he bought the empire; but with those of the state: yet the fierce ill-will which he thus aroused against himself, was owing to his having so openly applied to the prætorians, thereby letting them know the secret of their power, and the fact that they were masters of the government. As Dio here is mutilated, and Herodian was a foreigner, and a frivolous writer; most of the circumstances are to be gleaned from the Scriptores Historiæ Augustæ, who, however, are wretched beyond all conception. They contain, notwithstanding, many a detail which even Gibbon has overlooked.

Even before this, Clodius Albinus, who commanded in Britain, had been on bad terms with Commodus. The offer which the latter had once made him of taking the title of Cæsar, in case any accident should happen to himself, he had declined; and, on the other hand, he seems, even before the death of the tyrant, to have shielded himself by means of his army against any of his attempts. As for Pertinax, he had neither acknowledged nor rejected him. After the death of Pertinax, the British and Gallic legions proclaimed Albinus; the German and Pannonian ones, Septimius Severus; and those of the East, Pescennius Niger. The senate, on the whole, was for Albinus; the people, and some of the senators, for Pescennius Niger; whilst Severus had in Rome a comparatively small number of partisans, and Julianus had every one against him: the senate could not abide him, because he had made himself dependent on the prætorians. Pescennius could not advance, as Severus was blocking up his way. The latter acted with indefatigable energy: three months after the death of Pertinax, he was at Terni. No one raised his hand to uphold Julianus, and the prætorians themselves scarcely made an attempt to defend their own creature: for they were now as cowardly and mutinous as the Janissaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries down to the time of their destruction. The senate swore fealty to Severus, who entered Rome with his army: the populace was panic-struck; Julianus was put to death; and the prætorians were disarmed, and disbanded in disgrace. Upon this, Severus immediately turned himself towards the East.

Septimius Severus was a most remarkable man: he came from Leptis, an old Punic colony in which a Roman conventus had settled. There is no doubt but that the Septimius Severus to whom Statius addressed a poem (the Leptitani), was an ancestor of his. He was thoroughly Punic, and indeed his sister, when she came to Rome, spoke nothing but broken Latin: these places in Africa had so completely retained their foreign character, that Punic was the prevailing language, even in the towns: Severus, however, both in Greek and Latin was a good writer. We have of his only one undoubted letter, which, although he wrote it in a passion, is very well written: he also composed memoirs, which unfortunately have been lost.—He was then in his forty-seventh year, and in every department, whether of administration or of military command, he had greatly distinguished himself. A marked feature in his character was his leaning towards foreign religions, astrology, and soothsaying: these things, on the whole, were now getting more and more into vogue, thus paving the way for the Christian religion. Many took this up as they would any other theurgy, as the Orphic or such like; and therefore it also now begins to emerge from obscurity. Severus’ reign was exceedingly favourable to Christianity, with which his empress, Julia, a Syrian woman, was particularly struck. Unction being at that time often applied as a remedy, Severus also had received it in a violent illness; and as he thought himself to have been cured by it, he gave protection to Christianity in the instructions issued to his lieutenants. He was an uncommonly handsome man; his countenance was so dignified and noble, that it prepossessed all who beheld it. The great charge brought against him, is that of cruelty, which showed itself after the downfall of Albinus: forty-one senators had to atone with their blood for their connexion with the latter, and Spartianus also mentions women and children. This wretched writer cannot, however, be relied on: he is so careless as to make Caracalla the son of Severus by his first wife.

The war of Pescennius Niger is of a peculiar character. If we call to mind how Avidius Cassius in his time met with such favour in the East, and how widely the eastern and western world were kept apart by difference of language; we are led to believe that the East wished even then to sever itself from the West. Niger had in the days of Aurelius gained much renown as a general, being indeed highly thought of as a strict disciplinarian. Notwithstanding this, he was a kindhearted man, quite different from Severus, and generally respected. Severus crossed the Hellespont, and overcame a general of Pescennius near Cyzicus; then he followed up his victory, and defeated Pescennius himself at Issus, where the latter was slain. The whole of the East submitted. Byzantium alone stoutly held out in quite an unaccountable manner, and was completely destroyed after a siege of three years. Perhaps the Byzantines had so grievously offended the emperor, that they were afraid of some severe punishment; or, perhaps, being conscious of the importance of the site of their city, they wanted it at that time already to become the capital of the world.

During this war, Severus had gained over Albinus. The latter, a man without any sort of talent, was also an African, but made pretensions to being sprung from the Postumii: Severus, however, in a letter which has been preserved by Spartianus, taxes him with having merely assumed this name, saying that he was not even of Italian extraction. This commander was indeed a most insignificant person, and Severus very easily overreached him by offering him the dignity of Cæsar: he let himself be won over by this gross deception, and he flattered himself with the hope that Severus, although he had children of his own, would bequeath him the empire after his death. When Pescennius had fallen, Severus changed his tone; and an attempt to murder him, either actually made or only intended, moved him to declare war against Albinus. Britain, Gaul, and Spain, must have been united under Albinus, who went over to Gaul: Severus, after having narrowly escaped defeat, with the utmost difficulty gained a victory near Lyons, where Albinus was mortally wounded, and soon afterwards breathed his last. This victory, Severus followed up with the greatest cruelty. The rashness of the senators with regard to Albinus is quite extraordinary: they must have believed in the chances of his success, and they had now to pay dearly for it. In Spain and Gaul also, the men of rank who had let themselves be gained over by Albinus, were punished with death. After this slaughter, Severus’ reign was not only glorious and brilliant, but also mild and gentle.

The German tribes had somehow or other been kept quiet since the time of Marcus; but with the Parthians there was twice war. Once the emperor led his army against Adiabene, the country east of the Tigris, and Arabia, which, like Osroëne, Media, and others, were distinct vassal kingdoms under Persian supremacy: this campaign, Severus conducted without being at war with the Parthians themselves. The second time, however, he directly attacked the Parthians; and then was the flourishing city of Ctesiphon, which the Parthians had built over against Seleucia to humble it, taken and sacked by Severus: it is strange that he did not make this country a province. He made peace, and gave back Babylon; but kept Adiabene, and more especially Mesopotamia, subject to his supremacy: under Marcus the Euphrates had been the boundary river. The Roman emperors had always to wage war, owing to the very immensity of the empire which otherwise would have sunk into utter effeminacy. He had afterwards another war besides in Britain, and it is surprising that he should have thought it necessary to bring such vast forces of imperial Rome against the weak Caledonian barbarians on the Scottish border. In this war, he took with him his two sons, the elder of whom, Caracalla, was at that time twenty-two years old, while Geta was several years younger: the former was with him as his colleague, the other as Cæsar (he is the first who is mentioned on inscriptions with the title of nobilissimus). Before his death, he also raised both of them to be Augusti, and made them heirs of the empire.

Severus had by his own power caused himself to be adopted as the son of M. Aurelius, without meaning thereby to deceive any one, except perhaps the lowest of the people; it being merely a fiction by which he wanted to designate himself as the lawful possessor of the empire, calling himself M. Antonini filius, T. Pii nepos, and so on as high up as Nerva: he therefore gave his eldest son, M. Bassianus, the name of M. Antoninus. This name, or Divus Antoninus, Imperator noster Antoninus, Antoninus Magnus, is in the Pandects always to be understood of this Caracalla. That last appellation is in fact so generally bestowed on him only by the moderns: in the Scriptores Historiæ Augustæ it is met with only once, and that in the form Caracallus, which is a popular nickname: I am very loth to use it. Both of the young princes were the sons of Julia Domna, a Syrian woman whom Severus is said to have married because she was recommended to him by the astrologers, as her horoscope pointed out that she was destined to be a princess.^[54] Julia was a remarkable person: she was a woman of great cleverness, but of very lax morals. She has, however, atoned for her faults by her misfortunes.

It is a great pity, that we know so little about the measures of Severus. That he made great changes, especially in the administration of Italy, is quite evident. It must have been he who placed correctores over each of the regions; or it may be, one corrector over several united regions. Probably they had the jurisdiction in their own districts. What was the nature of the jurisdiction in Italy after the Lex Julia, is shrouded in the greatest darkness: something, however, must have been done to get rid of the inconveniences which had arisen. The whole of this matter is still to be investigated: inscriptions and laws might indeed throw some light on it. Yet what were the functions of these correctores on the whole, is difficult to make out. Even as early as under the emperors who came immediately before Hadrian, traces are met with of commissions by virtue of which the jurisdiction of Italy was given by districts to people of rank. The Præfectus Urbi had even since Hadrian’s days (though not before) a district of a hundred Italian miles round Rome: this is, however, as yet, but a conjecture of mine. Hadrian appointed consulars to them in due form. Antoninus Pius also kept them up for some time: afterwards, they were again abolished. From the reign of Severus, we regularly meet with the correctores in Italy.