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 appears in fiction about the final Severan court and the opening of the third-century crisis, including the historical world surrounding Alfred Duggan’s Family Favourites and Harry Sidebottom’s Throne of the Caesars. He is often portrayed as educated and well intentioned but dominated by his mother. The hostile military tradition may exaggerate weakness to justify the coup.

In Harry Sidebottom’s Iron and Rust, in AD 235 the emperor Severus Alexander and his mother, Julia Mamaea, are murdered by soldiers on the Rhine. In Jacquie Rogers’s The Carnelian Phoenix, in Rome, Quintus finds that old loyalties have shifted around the young emperor Severus Alexander, his mother Julia Mamaea and the jurist Ulpian.

In non-fiction, Severus Alexander is discussed in Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome. In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome, Emperor of Rome examines the rulers of the Roman world from Julius Caesar and Augustus to Severus Alexander, but it is not a sequence of conventional imperial biographies.