In AD 193, a single purple robe became the deadliest object in the Roman world. It was the imperial purple, the symbol of the emperor’s power, and in the span of one year, four men wore it. Three of them were murdered. The fourth tore the empire apart to keep it.
The year began with the murder of Emperor Commodus, strangled in his bath by a wrestler on the palace payroll. His reign had been a decade of extravagance and cruelty, marked by his obsession with appearing in the arena as a gladiator and his claim to be Hercules reborn. The Senate, relieved by his death, immediately hailed his successor, Publius Helvius Pertinax, as a return to sanity. Pertinax was a 66-year-old general of humble origins, the son of a freedman, who had risen through decades of frontier service.
He had a reputation for discipline and honesty, and the city wept with joy to see an emperor who walked on foot and greeted citizens by name. Pertinax inherited an empty treasury. Commodus had drained the state to the copper. In response, Pertinax staged a massive sale of the dead emperor’s possessions, hauling silks, gold, weapons, and even the palace servants into the forum to be auctioned off.
The crowd picked over the tyrant’s excess, but one group watched with cold calculation: the Praetorian Guard. The Guard was a standing army of 9,000 men, quartered inside the city walls in their own fortress. They had long acted as the true arbiters of imperial power. They demanded a cash bonus, a donative, to confirm Pertinax as emperor.
He agreed to a reduced figure of 12,000 sesterces per man, but with the treasury empty, he could not pay it. He then moved to cut their privileges, banning their corrupt rackets and forcing them back into military drills. To the Praetorians, this was breach of contract. On March 28, AD 193, a mob of two to three hundred angry guardsmen marched on the palace.
The emperor’s advisors urged him to hide, but the old soldier refused. He walked out to confront them, counting on his authority to shame them back into line. For a moment, it worked. The guardsmen hesitated.
Then a single auxiliary named Tausius threw his spear, striking the emperor. The spell broke. Pertinax pulled his toga over his head and was cut down where he stood. His head was severed and paraded through the streets on a spear.
The message was clear: the empire was for sale. The Guard withdrew behind the walls of their fortress and announced an auction. Inside the fortress was Sulpicianus, the dead emperor’s own father-in-law, sent there to calm the mutiny. Outside the gate stood Didius Julianus, one of the wealthiest men in Rome, who had rushed to the scene after hearing the news at dinner.
The two men bid through the bars of the gate, with the soldiers carrying offers back and forth. Julianus won with a promise of 25,000 sesterces per man, plus the restoration of Commodus’s memory. The guard hailed him emperor and draped the bloody purple robe of Pertinax over his shoulders. The city of Rome refused him.
Crowds cursed him, threw stones, and shut their shops in mourning. The citizens packed the Circus Maximus, chanting the name of the dead Pertinax, and then the name of a general they hoped would rescue them: Pescennius Niger in Syria. The auction was a signal that traveled the length of the empire. In Syria, the legions proclaimed Pescennius Niger emperor.
In Britain, they crowned Clodius Albinus. On the Danube, the most feared army in the empire raised their general, Lucius Septimius Severus, on a shield at Carnuntum on April 9. In a matter of weeks, there were four emperors. Severus was the deadliest challenger.
He was closest to Rome, commanding the toughest legions on the frontier. He styled himself the avenger of Pertinax, adding the murdered emperor’s name to his own, and marched on the capital. He also neutralized Albinus with a lie, offering him the title of Caesar and heir, a position Albinus accepted, trusting the promise that bought his silence. Julianus’s reign lasted 66 days.
He could not pay the guard the full sum he promised, and his attempts to buy loyalty failed. As Severus crossed the Alps, Julianus was abandoned by everyone. The Senate condemned him, and a single soldier found him weeping in an empty room. His last recorded question was, “What evil have I done?
Whom have I killed? ” He was killed, and the robe was stripped from his body. Severus entered Rome in June AD 193, dressed as a private citizen to show his restraint. His first act was to dismantle the Praetorian Guard.
He ordered them to assemble unarmed outside the city in parade dress. When they came, certain of their importance, his own loyal Pannonian legions surrounded them with locked shields. He read out their crimes—the murder of Pertinax, the auction of the throne—and dismissed them in disgrace. They were stripped of rank, their ornamental daggers snapped, and they were forbidden from coming within 100 miles of Rome.
The most feared unit in the world was dissolved in an afternoon. He replaced them with his own provincial soldiers, and he raised the ordinary legionary’s pay for the first time in a century. He also stationed a legion in Italy for the first time ever, keeping a permanent army at his elbow. He then turned to the rivals who wore copies of the robe.
The war against Niger in the east lasted over a year, a grinding civil conflict fought across Asia Minor. It ended in spring AD 194 at the Battle of Issus, the same ground where Alexander the Great had defeated Darius. Niger was defeated and killed, his head sent to the walls of Byzantium, which held out for two more years until hunger drove the defenders to cannibalism. In the west, Clodius Albinus eventually learned that Severus had never intended to share power.
He had been named public enemy, and in AD 195, Severus publicly deified the murdered Commodus and declared himself the adopted son of Marcus Aurelius, a spit on the memory of Pertinax. He then named his own son as heir, erasing Albinus from the succession. Albinus took the title Augustus and gathered the legions of Britain, Spain, and Gaul. On February 19, AD 197, the two largest armies ever thrown against each other in a Roman civil war met at Lugdunum, near modern Lyon.
Dio’s figures of 300,000 total troops are almost certainly exaggerated, but the scale was enormous. Roman was killing Roman. At one point, Severus’s own wing broke, and he was thrown from his horse, tearing off his purple cloak to avoid being recognized. He grabbed a standard and rallied his fleeing men.
His cavalry finally crashed into Albinus’s flank, and the rebel army folded. Albinus fled into the city and took his own life. Severus ordered the body carried out and had his horse trample it repeatedly. The head was cut off and sent to Rome to stand on a spike in the forum.
He then sacked Lugdunum and used letters seized from Albinus’s baggage to purge 29 senators who had hedged their bets. The journey of the robe was over. Severus ruled for fourteen more years as a military dictator. On his deathbed in York in AD 211, he gave his sons Caracalla and Geta a single piece of advice, recorded by Dio: “Be at peace with each other, enrich the soldiers, and take no account of anyone else.
” They ignored the first part immediately. Within a year, Caracalla had Geta killed in their mother’s arms. But they kept the second. The precedent set in AD 193, the year the throne went to the highest bidder, would echo through Rome for a century, ushering in the Crisis of the Third Century, when more than two dozen men claimed the purple and died for it.
The gate that swung open in AD 193 never truly closed again.