Julia Mamaea

Julia Mamaea was a Syrian-Roman noblewoman, the daughter of Julia Maesa and mother of the emperor Severus Alexander. After the overthrow of Elagabalus in AD 222, she exercised great influence over her young son’s government, surrounding him with advisers and attempting to restore conventional public morality. Military dissatisfaction grew during campaigns against Persia and Germanic invaders. In 235 soldiers murdered both mother and son, ending the Severan dynasty and beginning a period of rapid imperial crisis.

Julia Mamaea appears in historical fiction about Elagabalus, Severus Alexander and the opening of the third-century crisis. Alfred Duggan’s Family Favourites establishes the family politics from which her son’s regime emerged, while later imperial novels often treat her as a dominating regent. Ancient authors blamed her influence and economy for military resentment, but their hostility towards powerful imperial women requires careful handling.

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.