Severus Alexander

Severus Alexander became Roman emperor in AD 222 after the murder of his cousin Elagabalus. Still young, he governed with strong influence from his mother Julia Mamaea and a council of senators and jurists.

His reign attempted to restore conventional administration but faced a renewed Persian threat and German invasion. Soldiers resented negotiation, discipline and pay policies, and murdered Alexander and his mother in 235, bringing Maximinus Thrax to power. Severus Alexander was born in Tell Arqa and died in Mogontiacum.

Robert Low’s Beasts from the Dark places a conspiracy in Rhaetia within the court politics of Severus Alexander and his mother Julia Mamaea, showing how provincial adventurers can be manipulated by ambitions reaching back to Rome. Harry Sidebottom’s Iron and Rust opens with Alexander’s murder by soldiers on the Rhine in 235, making his death the rupture that elevates Maximinus Thrax and begins the Crisis of the Third Century. Jacquie Rogers’s The Carnelian Phoenix keeps the young emperor alive and vulnerable in 224, when Quintus Valerius uncovers a plot shaped by resentment of Mamaea, Ulpian and the Severan court. The Red Serpent sets another intrigue on the Syrian frontier under Alexander’s rule. Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome ends its long study of imperial power with the age of Severus Alexander, using his reign to examine the households, soldiers and rituals on which Roman autocracy depended.