On March 13, 222 A.D., the Roman emperor Elagabalus was murdered by the praetorian guards and his cousin, Severus Alexander, a youth only thirteen years of age, was proclaimed the new emperor of the Roman Empire. According to the Vita Alexandri, his biography contained in the Historia Augusta, his thirteen year reign was a new golden age. Honest, efficient and enlightened government was its keystone: taxes were reduced, justice prevailed and the senate was restored to its proper place of respect, if not power, in the Roman state. Although the Vita Alexandri has been almost totally discredited as a historical source by modern scholars,[1]  the reign of Severus Alexander is still, more often than not, conceived by modern historians as a period of relative peace, stability and prosperity, particularly when compared with the disruption of the two preceding reigns and the chaos of the five succeeding decades.

However, there is one problem that has puzzled both ancient and modern writers concerning this period: who actually administered the Roman Empire during the reign of Severus Alexander, especially during the early years when he was still a minor? The ancient sources are contradictory and unconvincing on this point. The three surviving ancient literary works which treat this period, the Vita Alexandri, and the histories of Cassius Dio and Herodian, all confirm the influence of Severus Alexander’s grandmother, Julia Maesa, and of his mother, Julia Mamaea, in the imperial administration of the period, but the Vita and Dio emphasize the role of the famous jurisconsult Domitius Ulpianus, although they give few supporting details. In fact, the overall impression gained from the literary sources is that Alexander himself shouldered the responsibilities of direct imperial rule, in the tradition of the great emperors of the past, from Augustus to Septimius Severus. Modern historians, of course, have not been quite so naive as that, but they have traditionally sought a comfortable “male” solution to the problem and the bias, if not the evidence, of the ancient sources has tended to support them. Until rather recently it was almost universally assumed that Ulpian had served as a kind of regent, in fact if not in name, during the first six years or so of Severus Alexander’s reign and thereby furnished the guidance and direction necessary for the smooth functioning of the government.[2]

For several centuries the date of Ulpian’s death was assumed to be in the year 228,[3] that is, some six years after the enthronement of the young Severus Alexander. This date was not only consistent with the content of the Vita Alexandri, which maintained that Ulpian exerted great influence over the administration of the empire during the early years of Alexander’s reign  (Vita Alexandri, 15.6, 26.5–6, 27.2, 31.2–3, 34.6, 53.4, 67.2, 88.3), but also seemed justified by four important statements of Dio:[4]

 Alexander became emperor immediately after him [Elagabalus], and entrusted to one Domitius Ulpian the command of the Praetorians and the other business of the empire (Dio, 80.1.1).

 Ulpian corrected many of the irregularities introduced by Sardanapalus [Elagabalus]; but after putting to death Flavianus and Chrestus, that he might succeed them, he was himself slain ere long by the Praetorians, who attacked him in the night (Dio, 80.2.2).

 Epagathus, who was believed to have been chiefly responsible for the death of Ulpian, was sent to Egypt, ostensibly as governor, but really in order to prevent any disturbance from taking place in Rome, as it would if he were punished there. From Egypt he was taken to Crete and executed (Dio, 80.2.3).

 [The soldiers] indulge in such wantonness, license, and lack of discipline, that those in Mesopotamia even dared to kill their commander, Flavius Heracleo, and the Praetorians complained of me to Ulpian because I ruled the soldiers in Pannonia with a strong hand: and they demanded my surrender, through fear that someone might compel them to submit to a regime similar to that of the Pannonian troops (Dio, 80.4.2).

The date of Ulpian’s death had long been assumed to hinge on this last statement. If the praetorian soldiers did indeed complain to Ulpian concerning Dio’s stern rule in Pannonia, then Ulpian would have still been alive in the year 227 or 228, because, as Fergus Millar has shown,[5] the duration of Dio’s itinerary after Severus Alexander became emperor was at least seven years, placing Dio’s tenure as governor of Pannonia Superior during the years 226 to 228. It was logical enough, based on this evidence, to assume that Ulpian was still serving as Praetorian Prefect in the year 228.

However, in 1966 John Rea[6] published a papyrus from Egypt that compels a different interpretation of these events. P. Oxy. 2565 contains two professiones of birth. The first can be translated with reasonable completeness:[7]

In the consulship of lulianus and Crispinus, the third year of the Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander Pius Felix Augustus, in the month of Payni, the. . . th day, at Alexandria near Egypt, before M. Aurelius Epagathus, prefect of Egypt, M. Aurelius Marsus, also called Serenus. . . declared that there was born to him a son, M. Aurelius Sarapion, by. . ., his wife (?), on the day before the ides of August which fell in the consulship of Grams and Seleucus.

This professio is dated in the Egyptian month of Payni (May 26 to June 24) of the year 224 and provides indisputable evidence that Epagathus, the murderer of Ulpian according to Dio, was already serving as prefect of Egypt on this date. The second professio, which is too badly mutilated to be translated, nevertheless reveals that by a date within the same year another person, Tiberi[us Claudius Herennianus], had already assumed the duties of the prefecture of Egypt as acting prefect.[8]

Therefore we know that by June of 224 Ulpian had already been dead for some time. In fact, he was most likely murdered during the summer of 223.[9] One must imagine that, for the sake of decorum, Epagathus was kept at his post as prefect of Egypt for at least a few months before being removed to his fate in Crete, which means that, since his prefecture terminated before the end of 224, he must have arrived in Egypt at least a few months prior to the May/June 224 date of P. Oxy. 2565. As a matter of fact, some time after his dispatch to Egypt will have been required to secretly arrange his removal to Crete and to transmit the order to Egypt. Under the circumstances, it will have been extremely important to present his powerful friends in Rome with a fait accompli, in order to prevent further trouble from developing there. Dio says as much (80.2.4). For reasons of security, then, a successor for Epagathus will not have been appointed at the time the secret orders for his transfer to Crete were dispatched. Also, a few weeks or months will have been required after the death of Ulpian to successfully arrange for the transfer of such a dangerous and powerful man as Epagathus out of Rome to Egypt. Thus the murder of Ulpian could not have occurred later than the summer of 223 and may well have occurred even earlier.

This evidence requires a reexamination of Dio’s entire narrative of these events. First of all, it should be noted that P. Oxy. 2565 and Dio obviously support each other concerning the role of Epagathus in the conspiracy against Ulpian and his subsequent fate. Dio states that Epagathus, who was believed to be the chief conspirator, was assigned the prefecture of Egypt in order to isolate him from his supporters in Rome and was later taken from Egypt to Crete and executed. P. Oxy. 2565 records the fact that Epagathus was indeed serving as prefect of Egypt in May/June 224 and was replaced in that office, under unusual circumstances, by another man before the year was over.

But what about Dio’s statement that “the Praetorians complained of me to Ulpian, because I ruled the soldiers in Pannonia with a strong hand” (Dio, 80.4.2)? Since the time of Lenain de Tillemont, most historians had assumed this statement to mean that Ulpian was still alive in 228. But even before the publication of P. Oxy. 2565, a few scholars recognized that Dio’s treatment of Severus Alexander’s reign, as it appears in the epitome of Xiphilinus, was not chronologically reliable.[10] Fergus Millar, for example, observed that “Dio’s abbreviated text can hardly help towards a solution of the problems which surround the chronology of Ulpian’s prefecture.”[11]

Yet, since it is impossible, as Reinmuth argued[12] that Dio successively held posts in Asia, Africa, Dalmatia and Pannonia between March 222 and the summer of 223, why does the epitome imply that the praetorians complained to Ulpian in 228 concerning Dio’s strong rule in Pannonia? For an answer we need to examine the text itself very carefully. What motive could the praetorians have had for complaining to Ulpian, their own commander, concerning Dio’s unreasonable discipline in Pannonia? The epitome says that they feared being subjected to similar discipline themselves, but what does this really mean? Did they fear the appointment of Dio to a new imperial office that would bring them under his control? What appointment could possibly produce such a consequence? The consulship, which Dio did in fact hold for the year 229, had no command authority over the praetorian cohorts. Did the soldiers fear that Dio himself was about to be appointed praetorian prefect? Not at all likely. Although there are isolated examples of senators becoming prefects,[13] and although the distinction between the senatorial and equestrian orders was breaking down during this period,[14] it is inconceivable that whoever was administering the government in the name of the young emperor at this time would have considered the possibility of Dio’s appointment to the praetorian prefecture at the end of his brilliant senatorial career, or that Dio himself would have sought the office. Even if the soldiers did fear this extremely unlikely possibility, why would they have complained to Ulpian, the incumbent praetorian prefect? Did they believe that Ulpian was supporting Dio’s candidacy as his own replacement? The idea is absurd. There must be another explanation for this muddled passage.

The confusion and disorder, which are so evident in these passages of the usually reliable Dio, can most logically be explained, not as a shortcoming of the author himself, but rather as a distortion produced in his text by the hazardous method by which it has been transmitted to us. In fact, we do not possess Dio’s texts for books 61 through 80 of his history at all, but merely an abridgement made by an eleventh century Byzantine monk, Lonnes Xiphilinus. Unfortunately, the result of Xiphilinus’ efforts, in the words of Fergus Millar, “is not so much a précis of Dio as a rather erratic selection from his material, substantially, but not invariably, in Dio’s order. . . the epitome provides only a spasmodic and often barely intelligible narrative.”[15]

The danger lies not in the fact that he [Artaxerxes, king of the Persians] seems to be of any particular consequence in himself, but rather in the fact that our armies are in such a state that some of the troops are actually joining him and others are refusing to defend themselves (Dio, 80.4.1).

The reason that the next passage, which offers supporting evidence for this statement, has been so misunderstood is that Xiphilinus, when he condensed what must have seemed to him a rather long and rhetorical argument in Dio’s original text (after all, this section was part of the summation of his entire history of Rome), deleted several phrases important to the understanding of the sentence, but quoted the remainder verbatim, thereby distorting the original meaning. The last phrase, concerning the fears of the praetorians, must have been added by Xiphiinus at the end of his clumsily condensed passage, as an afterthought, to give a semblance of cohesion to a very confusing sentence. Writing in the eleventh century, he was not aware of the absurdity of the possibility of Dio’s appointment to the praetorian prefecture and his revised passage did not seem unreasonable to him. In the original text, however, the praetorians must either have relayed a grievance from their fellow soldiers in Pannonia (which really does not make much sense either), or more likely, the complaint against Dio must have come not from the praetorians themselves, but from the legionary soldiers in Pannonia, against Dio while he was still their commander. Emboldened, perhaps by the recent example of the praetorians ridding themselves of Ulpian, the Pannonian troops “demanded my surrender.”

It seems probable, then, that even though the epitome makes it sound as though both complaints came from the praetorians, Dio’s original text in fact compared three separate but very similar incidents in which soldiers in widely separated areas of the empire had exhibited gross insubordination and breach of discipline: (1) the soldiers of Mesopotamia mutinied and murdered their commander, Flavius Heracleo; (2) the soldiers of the praetorian guard in Rome conspired against Ulpian and murdered him; (3) and Dio’s own soldiers in Pannonia complained against his effort to reinstate traditional Roman discipline and demanded his surrender. The only difference between his own case and the other two is that he managed to suppress the mutiny without being killed. Indeed, Dio tells us, he was rewarded by the emperor for his handling of the situation:

Alexander, however, paid no heed to them, but on the contrary, honored me in various ways, especially by appointing me to be consul for the second time, as his colleague, and taking upon himself personally the responsibility of meeting the expenditures of my office (Dio, 80.5.lc).

Now that we know that Ulpian’s death occurred in the summer of 223 at the latest, this rather radical revision, or reinterpretation, of Dio’s text seems not only logical but compelling. Even more importantly, a new perspective of the entire period must be developed. Ulpian’s tenure of the praetorian prefecture was not, as heretofore assumed, an extended period of regency in which the famous jurisconsult presided over a golden age of reform and enlightened government, but was in fact a very brief period of intense tumult and devastating violence, which very nearly marked the end of the Severan Dynasty. And concerning the problem of who actually administered the government of the Roman Empire during the thirteen years of Severus Alexander’s reign, Ulpian can no longer be assigned an important role. One must look elsewhere.

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